Chapter 12: The Rail
I kicked before I could think.
My heel caught a shin. The hand released my ankle, and a man grunted close beside me.
“Claire—stay down!”
Ellis.
I hated the relief that moved through me. It came anyway, sharp and humiliating, before I could remind myself whose hands had opened the way for Flynn and whose body had blocked me from the alarm.
Ellis grabbed my coat and hauled me away from the rail. The deck bucked under us. I slid on my side, palms scraping over wet planks, then caught the toe of a metal fitting.
“Let go of me.”
“I’m trying to get you out of his reach.”
“Now you’re trying?”
A shadow surged toward us.
Flynn hit Ellis hard enough to drive him into the deck. The impact cracked through the storm. Ellis’s shoulder struck first; Flynn came down over him, one fist raised.
I scrambled for the rail.
Flynn caught the back of my coat and dragged me toward him. The fabric tightened across my throat. I twisted, grabbed his wrist, and felt his fingers clamp around my arm.
“Stop fighting,” he shouted.
The storm tore half the words away. His face appeared and vanished in the darkness, lit only by the brief, bruised flicker of lightning behind the clouds.
“You’ve had enough chances to stop,” I said.
His grip tightened. “You don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“I understand exactly what you’re doing.”
The yacht rolled. Flynn stumbled into me, and my shoulder slammed against the rail. I locked both hands around the cold metal. It bit into my palms. Beyond it, the ocean was not a view but a sound—an immense, furious roar rising and falling in the black.
Flynn seized my coat again.
“Let go,” he said. “The water will erase all of it.”
I looked at him through the rain. I had once believed the softness in his voice meant I was safe. Now I could hear what it had always hidden: impatience, possession, the certainty that I would eventually do as he wanted.
“The recording won’t,” I said.
For a moment, he didn’t move.
Then the shock on his face hardened into rage.
“You don’t have the phone.”
“No. But Captain Reyes does.”
I didn’t know if that was entirely true—not about the phone, anyway. Flynn had taken it. But I knew Reyes had copied the recording. I knew there was a witness beyond his reach. And for the first time since the lights went out, Flynn’s certainty had somewhere to crack.
He lunged.
I braced one hand on the rail and drove my elbow into his chest. He swore and struck my shoulder with the heel of his hand. Pain flashed down my arm. My fingers slipped a fraction, then closed again.
Behind him, Ellis groaned.
Flynn glanced over his shoulder, distracted for no more than a breath. Ellis pushed up from the deck and caught the back of Flynn’s jacket.
“Get away from her!”
Flynn swung around and hit him across the face. Ellis fell back, but his hand stayed knotted in Flynn’s sleeve. The two of them staggered against the rail, bodies and limbs colliding in the dark.
I could have run.
The thought came with the next heave of the yacht, simple as a door opening. The aft door was somewhere behind them. If I let go and crawled, if I stopped looking at Flynn, I might reach it.
But Ellis was on the deck, and Flynn was between me and the passage. The rail was the only thing keeping me upright.
I held on.
“I’m not going over,” I told Flynn.
He turned back toward me, breathing hard. Rain ran down his forehead and into his eyes.
“Not because you want me alive,” I said. “Because you want me quiet.”
His mouth tightened. “You have no idea what this family has sacrificed.”
“You mean what you stole.”
“I mean everything I was promised.”
The words landed harder than his blow. There it was, stripped of the husband’s gentle voice and the daily pills: he had never mistaken my trust for love. He had mistaken it for permission.
A low alarm began to pulse somewhere behind us, muffled beneath the wind. Red light blinked once near the aft door, then vanished again as the yacht shuddered. The deck seemed to pitch under my feet. My hands ached around the rail.
Flynn pulled at my arm.
“Let go!”
I tightened my grip. “No.”
A voice broke through the alarm, crackling from a speaker overhead.
“Claire, this is Captain Reyes. The recording has been preserved. Help is responding ashore. Can you hear me?”
The words reached me in fragments, then settled inside me.
Preserved. Responding.
Not a promise that my parents were safe. Not proof that anyone had reached them. But the conspiracy had not swallowed every witness, every warning, every chance.
Flynn heard it too. His face turned toward the speaker.
“Reyes!” he shouted. “Shut that off!”
The alarm continued, steady and impersonal. Somewhere beyond the aft door, people were calling to one another. I couldn’t make out the words, only the sudden presence of movement—crew no longer frozen in the dark, no longer waiting to see who would win.
Ellis dragged in a breath. “Claire, hold on!”
“I am.”
I hated that it was his voice telling me what to do. I hated that some part of me still wanted to believe him. But I understood the difference now: accepting his help did not mean forgiving what he had done. My fingers could take his warning without giving him back my trust.
Flynn yanked at my wrist again.
I dug my shoes against the deck and kept my weight low. The rail shuddered under my hands. Its metal was slick with rain, the bolts beneath it hidden in shadow.
“Let go, Claire!” Flynn shouted.
I stared at him. “You first.”
May you like
His hand slipped from my coat. For one impossible instant, he was the one reaching for me, fingers clawing at my sleeve as the yacht rolled beneath us.
Then his grip gave way—and the rail wrenched loose beneath my hands.
