It took Ahna a few moments to register that Cairn was addressing her. “A tad.” She took a long sip from her thermos of iced tea and blinked drowsily. “I think I just need to close my eyes for a minute.”
In the distance, Cairn spied the silhouette of Demeter Island’s lighthouse. Delphine must have been thinking about last night, too, because she pressed her leg into Cairn’s, a sultry grin spreading across her face. Cairn had spent the last twelve hours wondering when they’d be able to steal their next kiss.
But then Delphine frowned and looked past her to the rear of the boat. “Ahna?”
Cairn turned. Her mother stood on the stern with a small anchor clutched to her chest, hugging it like a child would a teddy bear.
When Cairn traced the line attached to the anchor, she discovered that it was knotted around Ahna’s ankle.
“Mom?” Cairn wasn’t sure what was going on, but she could feel her hackles rising in alarm.
Ahna’s face still had that confused distant pall from earlier, but now her eyes brimmed with tears. When she tightened her grip on the anchor, a rivulet of blood snaked down the iron, dripping from a wound somewhere on her hands. “I have to go back to Adlivun now,” she said. Her blind gaze fell on Cairn. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
Sensing that something was amiss, Emile finally looked back from the cockpit. “Ahna? What are you doing back there?”
His wife didn’t seem to hear him. She climbed onto the transom.
“Mom?” Cairn repeated, this time more urgently.
Without another word, her mother took one step off the back of the boat, still hugging the anchor, and disappeared into the sea.
Cairn was the first to react. She dove in after her mother, entering the choppy water like a dart.
Cairn was disoriented at first. The saltwater stung her eyes and she had to blink several times to adjust. She had landed in the boat’s wake, and it was initially impossible to see more than a few feet in front of her with the propeller churning the water. As the boat drifted farther away, she spotted the dark shape beneath her slowly spiraling into the depths.
Cairn swam frantically downward, arm over arm, kicking with everything she had. The ocean pressed down around her, a suffocating, eerie silence as she descended. Her lungs burned and she wished she’d taken a fuller breath before she’d jumped in.
She was close enough to make out the features of her mother’s face now. Ahna had released the anchor, letting it drag her down, and as she stared dreamily up toward her daughter, Cairn fought through the fatigue in her muscles, ignoring the black spots that peppered her vision, resisting the urge to open her mouth and gasp for oxygen that wasn’t available.
They were four lengths apart, three lengths, two lengths. Cairn wriggled the last few feet and her fingertips hooked onto her mother’s. One last kick and she’d be close enough to grab her by the wrist.
And then the unthinkable happened. Her descent came to an abrupt stop. Her body jerked hard in the water as some unseen force pulled on the waistband of her shorts. Ahna’s fingertips slipped from her grasp.
Against her will, Cairn rose back toward the surface, away from her mother, watching in horror as Ahna’s mouth opened, letting the brine rush into her lungs. The bubbles of her last breath floated past Cairn, who released a muffled, tortured scream into the water, all the while trying to fight her way back to Ahna. Cairn thrashed wildly until her rescuer’s elbow accidentally struck the side of her head, subduing her.
In the stunned vacuum that followed, she stopped screaming and watched her mother vanish into the depths, the whites of Ahna’s unseeing eyes the last thing to be swallowed by the dark.
Cairn breached the surface with Delphine, who hugged her torso with one arm and used the other to paddle hard, keeping them both afloat. She sobbed and drew in a deep breath, preparing to submerge again, but Delphine’s hold on her tightened. “No, Cairn!” she shouted into her waterlogged ears. “I’m sorry. She’s gone.”
“There’s still time,” Cairn pleaded. “There’s still …” But the last word eluded her as she collapsed into anguished tears, her rag-doll body quaking, all the fight drained from her. Her father screamed hysterically as he turned the boat around, but Cairn couldn’t hear him. She hardly noticed the life preserver land in the water next to them.
“I won’t lose you, too,” Delphine said, her voice quivering. Unexpectedly, she began to hum a lullaby to Cairn while her father tugged them both back toward the boat. As shock cascaded in from all sides, as Cairn stared at the now still spot in the water where Ahna vanished into the wake, she thought that her friend was wrong: Delphine had already lost her.
Because the girl they pulled from the water that day was just a wispy, fragile husk of the one who dived in.
The Trafficker
One Night Earlier
As the private elevator rocketed up to the sixtieth-floor penthouse, Sedna adjusted the briefcase cuffed to her wrist. Two burly enforcers flanked her on either side, their holsters peeking out from beneath their suit jackets.
It was a typical Friday night.
Sedna caught one of the linebackers sizing up her reflection in the stainless-steel doors. Maybe he had a librarian fetish and was crushing on her pantsuit and horn-rimmed glasses.
Or maybe he was fantasizing about ways to abscond with the ten-million-dollar painting secured to her arm.
Sedna unpinned the boutonniere from her lapel and cleared her throat. “Well, boys, I’d love to keep you both, but this is my final rose, and unfortunately one of you will be going home tonight.” She turned dramatically to the neckless mercenary on the left. “I’m sorry, I’m just looking for a man who’s a little more … serious.”
Both ogres regarded her emotionlessly. She pivoted to the one on her right. “Quite frankly, I expected you to be more enthusiastic. Now I’m second-guessing my decision.”
Quiet, except for the lethargic melody of saxophone jazz over the speakers.
She was saved from further awkward silence as the elevator chimed, announcing their arrival at the top floor. The doors parted and she stepped into a lavishly decorated antechamber, closely shadowed by her two mountainous escorts. A woman with ramrod posture and tightly braided red hair blocked her path. “Arms out,” she ordered.
Sedna stared blankly at the ceiling while the head of security frisked her, hands invasively patting under her arms, around the waistband of her pants, down the inseam of her leg, and into the ankles of her boots. Meanwhile, one of the male guards waved a metal detector over her limbs. The wand chirped erratically when it passed the briefcase. He narrowed his eyes at her.
“It’s a Rembrandt worth more than this penthouse,” she explained flatly. “Did you expect me to pack it in a plastic lunchbox?”
“That will be enough, Brigid,” a man with an Italian accent ordered from the room beyond. “Let’s show our guest some Venetian hospitality, no?”
Grudgingly, the female mercenary swept her arm toward the door with all the warmth of an iceberg.
Although Sedna had seen blueprints of Boston’s highest, most expensive penthouse before her arrival, she was unprepared for the sense of awe she felt entering the Olympus suite. Floor-to-ceiling windows provided a surreal view of the city, its skyscrapers backlit dramatically against the dusk sky. The graceful blue curve of the Charles River snaked its way out to the harbor and the Atlantic beyond.