Chapter 143

Chapter 143:

While the drama unfolded at sea, Charla sat in the living room of the English Estate watching a live news feed on her tablet. A local station’s helicopter circled high above the marina, broadcasting grainy aerial footage of the chase.

The chyron across the bottom of the screen read: CHAOS AT CITY MARINA — POLICE INVESTIGATING POSSIBLE GANG ACTIVITY.

Vague. Perfect.

Jeraldine Holloway sat in the armchair across from her, watching with the composed satisfaction of someone reviewing a board meeting that was going as planned. “No one knows who is on those boats. As long as it stays that way, you have plausible deniability p>

“It’s not enough,” Charla said, her voice unsteady. She picked up a burner phone and dialed the tip line for a notorious online tabloid. When the line connected, she pitched her voice high and breathless, barely recognizable. “I have an anonymous tip. The woman in that boat with Hilliard Holloway — she’s his stalker. Cailin Morton. She kidnapped that little girl. Hilliard is trying to save her p>

Out on the water, Kegan’s mercenaries were closing the ring.

𝖱𝗲a𝗱 𝗐𝘪t𝘩o𝗎t 𝘪ո𝘵𝖾𝗿r𝘶𝗉tіо𝘯s 𝗼n

Gretchen saw the black boats. She saw the red laser sights dancing across her chest like something inevitable.

She understood what it meant.

“I am not going to jail!” she screamed.

She looked at Hilliard. She looked at the boats. She made her calculation.

She dragged Elia to the railing. “If I go down, she goes down with me p>

“Drop the knife!” a mercenary shouted from the lead boat.

Gretchen pressed Elia against herself, using the child as a human shield. Her eyes were everywhere at once.

Hilliard maneuvered his boat carefully alongside, the two hulls grinding together.

“Gretchen! Look at me!” His voice broke open — the authority stripped away, nothing underneath but raw desperation. “I will get you a lawyer. I will pay you whatever you name. Just give me the girl. Please p>

Gretchen wavered. The offer was real. She could see it in his face.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She glanced down at the screen.

A text from Charla.

Kill her or I kill your family. I know where your son goes to school.

Gretchen read it twice. The color drained from her face. She looked at Elia — and for just a moment, something human flickered behind her eyes. Pity. Brief and genuine.

“Sorry, kid,” Gretchen whispered. “It’s you or my son p>

She lifted Elia up over the railing.

“No!” Cailin scrambled onto the bow, her vision already breaking apart at the edges from the fever and the exertion, her legs barely beneath her.

Gretchen let go.

The splash was swallowed by the waves before it finished.

Cailin didn’t think. She didn’t pause. Her burning lungs screamed in protest as she threw herself from the bow — a final, absolute act of will from a body that was already beginning to shut down.

She hit the water.

Hilliard was in the air a second behind her.

The ocean took them all.

Cold.

A bone-crushing, lung-freezing cold that slammed the air from Cailin’s body the instant she hit the water.