Chapter 50
Tia Cameron
Call sign: Thimble
Tia wasn’t alone in the hallway. For half a second, she thought what she was seeing was a ghost, pale white and dripping wet,
but it was Lila. Her robe was soaked to the bone, giving her silhouette an eerie skeletal shape, and she was watching the
door to the twins’ cabin so intently she hardly noticed when Tia emerged from it.
“Mom?”
Was she humming? What the hell? Tia approached her and shook her by the shoulders. “Mom! What’s going on? Why are you wet?”
Lila touched Tia’s face with cold fingers, and the water droplets that rolled down Tia’s cheek made her shudder. She could
hear running water faintly inside her parents’ room. Tia pushed past her mother.
Has she been doing this every night when Dad’s on watch? Is this why the hall floor has been wet?
The bath was running, pouring over the side, and Tia slammed the handle to turn it off.
She ran back to the hallway, glancing behind her at the bed to make sure she hadn’t woken her father.
Only he wasn’t there.
Wasn’t it Alejandro’s watch? Where was Francis?
Lila was still standing in front of the twins’ cabin door. Tia slipped past her and peered into the crew’s cabin.
Every bed lay empty.
What the hell . . .
Tia backed away just as her mother murmured, almost to herself.
“Your brother is still asleep?”
“Don’t wake him,” Tia said. Something was very, very wrong.
“I would never.” Lila had one hand clasped over her heart. She seemed to stare at the door to her children’s room forever.
“Go back to bed,” Tia tried to urge her, but Lila didn’t seem to have heard.
Tia stepped closer. She still had Lila’s lipstick in her pocket, and she took it out and pressed it into her palm. “Here.
I borrowed this. Sorry.”
Lila looked down at her for the first time. “My beautiful daughter,” she breathed.
Tia felt a strange, sudden urge to say goodbye to her, to this woman who existed a million miles away but had somehow brought
Tia into the world. But Lila wasn’t in her right mind. Maybe she was overmedicated to hide her anxiety. Maybe she was drunk.
Her eyes looked unfocused. She held the tube of lipstick to her heart.
It takes a certain commitment to ruin a thing, don’t you think, lovey? Takes nothing at all to leave it behind.
Lila was wrong about that. It did take something for Tia leave her family behind.
Tia turned and left her there.
All the men must be up on deck or in the chart house.
Red crept into Tia’s peripheral vision. Her hand levitated over the handle to the chart house. She had no idea who she’d become when she burst through the door.
She turned the handle.
The space looked empty. Tia turned on the lights and jumped a little. Pirate was perched in the middle of the floor, viridian
eyes watching her as his tail flicked back and forth. It wasn’t the cat that had startled her, however. It was what he sat
on.
The black duffel bag had been placed in the center of the chart house, its zipper partially undone to reveal a hint of its
contents.
“Pirate, get off that!” Tia scooped the cat from the bag, holding her breath as she half expected the room to spontaneously
combust. It didn’t, of course. The bomb would need to be lit. But who had taken it out of the bilge? Alejandro?
Tia took Pirate to the salon couch where he’d be more comfortable, then headed back to the chart house and lifted the duffel
bag, cringing at her proximity to what could so easily explode. She climbed the companionway with it awkwardly. It didn’t
help that the storm kept sending The Old Eileen tailspinning through towering waves.
How the hell was she going to get the life raft ready in these conditions? Maybe all she needed to do was throw the duffel
into the sea. Then she could wait till the water was calm again to escape. If she could afford to wait.
Tia tossed the duffel bag up onto the deck and heaved herself after. She got to her feet, only raising her head when she had
steadied herself on the railing near the cockpit.
The storm had masked the sounds of the chaos that unfolded before her. Francis was at the helm, one hand locked around the
metal, the other clenched around Nico’s shirt collar. The two were arguing, shouting into each other’s faces, but rain poured
around them and dampened the sound.
What the hell? Tia forgot everything else.
“Dad! Nico!”
Nico glanced her way momentarily, and when he did, Francis seized his opportunity. He released the wheel of the ship and punched
Nico full in the face. Tia felt the blow as if it had been her who was hit. Because it had been her before. A wave slammed
into The Old Eileen’s portside, and Tia buckled. Her chest caught on the railing, and she looked down at the seething sea. She should have put
on her life jacket.
In the cockpit, Nico’s fingers had found Francis’s throat. He drove him backward so Francis’s body hit the wheel. “Tell me,
you son of a bitch!”
Tia barely made out his words through the wind.
“Where is my uncle?”
Francis kneed Nico hard in the groin, dropping the younger man like a weight. Francis punched his face again, and Tia fought
to reach them. She couldn’t let Francis hurt Nico again. The duffel bag skittered across the deck, but it didn’t matter now.
“Stop fighting!” Tia called.
Francis kicked Nico in the throat, and he fell backward. Another wave pummeled them, and the ship bucked. Tia pushed past
her father and took the helm, righting The Old Eileen. She focused on the night sky, which wavered overhead as they rattled around the sea. She couldn’t look at the waves. She’d
lose her nerve in a second, and her hands on the steering wheel were all that was keeping her from flying overboard.
She shot a glance over her shoulder. Nico had gotten to his hands and knees, Francis looming above him.
“Dad!”
He didn’t turn.
“Dad, you have to steer!” she roared, and at last he looked over.
To her surprise, he nodded and changed places with her. Tia reached Nico’s side. He had a bad black eye, and blood streamed from his nose. He struggled to his feet, holding onto one of the metal shrouds for support.
“I can’t find my uncle.” He clamped a hand over his nose.
Tia faced Francis. “Where’s Alejandro? He wasn’t in his room. Why isn’t he on watch?”
Francis rolled his shoulders back, seemingly unconcerned by the way the waves slammed the ship. “Alejandro’s dead.”
Behind Tia, Nico’s breathing sounded choked.
“Dead,” Tia repeated, like she didn’t know the word. If Alejandro was really dead, her father would be overcome. Alejandro
was his best friend. His brother.
“Dead,” Francis confirmed. “Your mother killed him.”
Tia’s T-shirt stuck to her chest. She grew colder with every raindrop on her skin. She saw her mother, wandering belowdecks
like a ghost, staring at something only she could see. “I don’t . . . She . . . What?”
Nico shot out a hand and grabbed the wheel. “Did you watch her do it?” His voice was deeper than Tia had ever heard it, his
chin slanted down as blood poured from his nose. “Did you help?”
Francis’s gaze flicked between Nico and Tia.
Nico’s going to kill him, Tia realized. Wouldn’t be hard to do in a storm like this. He’s not even wearing a life jacket.
“Did you?” Nico shouted, grabbing at Francis wildly, the wheel the only thing between them.
Francis didn’t flinch. He answered Nico while looking directly at Tia.
“I helped Lila kill him as much as you helped your uncle kill MJ.”
What?
The rain slowed around Tia. It spiraled through the air and burst in tiny explosions as it hit the deck. Nico’s eyes rounded, and he whipped to face her.
“Tia, I . . . I’m sorry.”
No.
MJ. The drowning hadn’t been an accident. Nico had never been on her side.
Nico was talking, tripping over his words. He clasped Tia’s hand, Francis behind them both and forgotten.
“I didn’t know ahead of time, I swear. She wasn’t telling you everything either. She wasn’t here just to help with sailing.”
Tia stared up at him, wet hair hiding half her face. A wave hit them hard, and Nico stumbled and held onto one of the metal
shrouds, keeping them both upright. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. Nico kept talking.
“She was working against them this whole time, Tia. She wanted to get your father and my uncle thrown in prison for the rest
of their lives. She was with the fucking feds.”
“The feds?” Tia heard herself say. “Why would she . . . ?”
Francis and Alejandro were running from something. She’d assumed they had business enemies, rivals who were jealous of their
company’s success. Bad guys who wanted to hurt them.
But didn’t this make so much more sense? If they were running from the federal government, that meant they’d committed a crime.
Or many crimes. It meant that the people they were trying to protect, like Alejandro said, were just themselves from consequences. But consequences of what exactly?
Dad, what did you do?
“And you knew?” The rain was faster now, louder too. “You knew that MJ was trying to get your uncle caught? You knew, and
then three days into our trip, she ends up dead?”
Alejandro had handed Tia MJ’s tank. MJ and Nico had spoken minutes before the dive.
“What did she say to you before she died?” Tia stepped forward. Nico was still holding onto the shroud. With his other hand, he cupped his nose. Blood threaded between his fingers and ran down his arms. “You spoke to her. You were the last one to speak to her. What did she say?”
Nico cringed. “She warned me about my uncle and your dad.”
Tia watched his blood drip onto the deck. “She didn’t know you already knew.”
“Tia—”
“And you went right to Alejandro and told him she was on to them.”
Tia could picture it all. MJ, a woman who had the strongest moral compass of anyone she’d known, discovering the truth about
Francis’s business dealings, not being able to keep quiet. Offering her services to the FBI, she was going to ensure he got
caught. And then they killed her before she got the chance.
But if the air mixture of the diving tank had been altered, it meant Alejandro meant to kill MJ before Nico even told him about her warning. Had they found out she’d betrayed them to the police and meant to kill her from the
beginning? Is that what happened to someone who tried to double-cross one of Tia’s parents?
MJ was dead. Alejandro was dead. But their bodies . . .
“What happened to her body? Why isn’t she in the freezer?”
Nico winced and touched his black eye. He was weakening, adrenaline draining out of him while Tia only felt herself grow stronger,
her fingertips starting to buzz.
“Your father had me throw her overboard. Just in case.” Nico’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Tia, listen to me.”
Tia barreled ahead. She felt like she was twice her height, the storm a loyal soldier at her back. “So you found her in the
water, already drowning. Maybe you held her there.”
What was it Lila had said? She had been dreaming about Nico flipping MJ’s dead body faceup?
“Or maybe you didn’t even have to kill her yourself. Maybe all you did was not save her.”
Nico lifted a finger at Francis. “He’s trying to turn you against me! My uncle’s dead.” His voice broke on the last word,
and he let his hand drop. The blood from his nose flowed freely. “I’m not your enemy.”
He was right. Francis was just as culpable and far more dangerous than Nico. But her father was a threat Tia understood. She’d
been raised by him. Hit by him. She didn’t place her faith in Francis because there was nothing in him worth believing in.
But Tia had believed in Nico. She had liked him, had cared about him. She’d told him things that not even Rylan knew.
And he had killed the person she admired most.
The world had gone white-hot at the edges of Tia’s vision. She vaguely felt her nails sink into the palms of her hands. “If
you knew from the beginning where we were going, then you knew about the severed radio cord. You knew about the island on
the map. You knew when you played sea chanteys to honor MJ that you were part of the reason she was gone. And you put your
hands on me and kissed me, knowing you had lied to me about all of it from the start.”
The whites of Nico’s eyes shone, reflecting lightning.
“I don’t have any place to go back to, Tia.
You think I want to go home to my mother and work behind a cash register till I die?
You think I want to take care of other men’s boats forever and never have my own?
I didn’t get the chances you got. I didn’t get fancy schools or a high-school diploma or friends with Bugattis or the option to be anybody.
You romanticize my life and think my choices are so simple, but you’ve never scrubbed bird shit off a deck that isn’t yours or opened the fridge to eat food that isn’t there.
Do you know how many people would kill to live on a private island the rest of their lives? ”
Tia stared at him, something spreading like rot in her chest. “Seems I know at least three.”
Everybody chose Francis and Lila Cameron in the end. Even Rylan had spilled his guts to them. Who could resist aligning themselves
with people who offered them the world?
“I’m sorry,” Nico said in a small voice. He wiped his nose again in a futile effort to stanch the flow. “I didn’t come here
intending to hurt anyone, least of all you—”
“Stop,” Tia said.
He did.
“Tia,” Francis called her name, and she didn’t need to look over to know what he was trying to say.
She watched a drop of Nico’s blood hit the white deck and run away with the rain where just days ago the sailfish’s blood
had spilled. The mallet had weighed heavily in her hands but seemed to soar when she’d let it fall. The hook through the sailfish’s
lip gleamed like the shine of the black eye forming on Nico’s skin.
The ship rolled again, sending them both off-balance. Nico grabbed at the railing, but his bloody hands were slippery against
the smooth wood. He teetered at the edge, arms spread in wild wheel spokes to stop his fall.
“Tia!” he screamed, whether in a plea or an accusation, she would never know.
Was it a mercy? Was the sailfish really damned either way . . . ?
Tia tightened her grip on the shroud and extended an arm toward Nico, her mind made up.
Yes.
Her hand found his chest. She hardly needed to push. And the handsome siren tumbled over the side, swallowed by hungry waves.