Chapter 4

I didn't reach for the paperwork.

Charles crouched down until we were eye level. The dim moonlight caught the heavy shadows under his eyes. He looked exhausted, but the suppressed rage rolling off him was palpable.

"Lydia went into shock from your little stunt downstairs," he said. "Aiden is sleeping in a chair next to her bed. She has a critical heart condition, Summer. She cannot handle the stress of your psychotic episodes.

"Summer, I am entirely out of patience for your self-destructive games."

He reached down, snatched the file off the floor, and flipped it open, shoving it roughly into my lap.

"This is the deed to a luxury yacht. I had my lawyers transfer the title into your name an hour ago.

"Tomorrow morning, a team will escort you to the marina. You are going to board that ship, sail out into international waters, and stay there to clear your goddamn head.

"When you finally snap out of this delusion and realize how to behave like an adult, you can call us, and we will let you dock."

He framed it as a therapeutic retreat. A "vacation" to help me calm down.

But I wasn't an idiot. It was a prison sentence.

He was using the vast expanse of the ocean as my solitary confinement cell.

I looked at his face. "And what happens if I never 'snap out of it'?" I asked quietly.

The temperature in the room plummeted. His eyes turned to glacial ice.

"Then you will spend the rest of your miserable life floating in the middle of nowhere."

He pulled a pen from his breast pocket and slammed it onto the floor next to a red ink pad.

"Sign the paperwork. Then press your thumbprint."

I picked up the pen with my good hand. Without reading a single clause, I flipped to the back page and aggressively scrawled my signature on the dotted line.

I dropped the pen, pressed my thumb hard into the crimson ink pad, and stamped it violently next to my name.

Charles blinked, genuinely thrown by my immediate compliance.

He slowly gathered the papers, stood up, and looked down at me from his towering height.

"If you had just acted this maturely from the beginning, none of this nightmare would have happened," he muttered.

He turned his back on me and walked out. The heavy door slammed shut, and the lock clicked into place, sealing me in the dark.

I looked down at the deep gash on my palm, and I smiled.

The next morning, I was escorted onto the deck of a luxury private yacht.

Charles deployed a team of four highly trained bodyguards to supervise my recovery.

The yacht idled out of the marina. I stood on the aft deck, watching the towering glass skyscrapers shrink into tiny gray specs until the city was completely swallowed by the horizon line.

Life on the open ocean was agonizingly monotonous and incredibly peaceful.

The bodyguards operated like machines. They hovered constantly, never letting me out of their line of sight for more than a few seconds.

I spent my days sitting on the bow. Staring blankly at the endless blue water, I let the salt spray hit my face, biding my time.

On the night of the third day, the marine radio crackled with a severe weather warning. A massive squall was moving in fast.

Thick clouds rolled across the sky, swallowing the moon. The wind began to howl, and the ocean transformed into a violent nightmare.

The yacht pitched and slammed against the massive swells, the deck tilting at terrifying angles.

The bodyguards scrambled, frantically working to secure the loose deck furniture and lock down the exterior hatches. In the chaos of the storm, their iron-clad supervision over their "prisoner" fractured.

That was my shot.

A massive wave slammed into the port side of the hull. The yacht violently lurched sideways as I sprinted across the slippery teak wood, throwing myself toward the stern railing.

The freezing rain and violent sea spray hit me like a wall of ice, soaking through my clothes instantly.

Their shouts of alarm were swallowed whole by the tempest, as the crescendo of wind and thunder swept everything else away.

I looked back over my shoulder, locking eyes with the panicked guard for one final second. And then, I threw my body over the edge.

The freezing, pitch-black maw of the ocean rushed up and swallowed me whole.