Chapter 9

The van smelled of stale cigarettes, damp earth, and the metallic tang of my own fear. It rattled along a dark, deserted coastal highway, taking me somewhere remote, somewhere I would never be found. I was slumped on the cold metal floor, my wrists bound behind me.

One of the men, the one in the passenger seat, was watching something on his phone, the screen's glow illuminating his cruel, leering face. He laughed, a low, guttural sound, and turned the screen toward me, forcing me to watch.

It was a live feed, streamed from a hidden security camera. I recognized the room instantly: Liam's opulent home office. He was on the plush leather sofa, and Seraphina was curled into his side, weeping softly into the fabric of his expensive shirt. On the large, wall-mounted screen in front of them, I could see the interface of my smartwatch's emergency call, my name and vital signs flashing in a stark, urgent red.

I watched, my breath caught in my throat, a silent scream building in my chest, as Seraphina pointed a trembling, perfectly manicured finger at the screen. "Make her stop, Liam," she whimpered, her voice the picture of fragile distress. "She's doing this to torture me. She's always so dramatic. Please, just make her go away. Make it stop."

I watched as Liam, my husband, picked up his own phone from the coffee table, his face a mask of weary, long-suffering resignation. I saw his thumb hover over the screen for a moment, a moment that stretched into an eternity. Then, with a final, decisive tap, he pressed the glowing red button on the screen: "Block this Contact."

The world went white. The roaring in my ears drowned out the sound of the van's engine, the men's coarse laughter, everything. He hadn't just hung up. He hadn't just chosen her. He had actively, consciously, digitally erased me from his world at the moment of my greatest peril.

In that moment of absolute annihilation, as the last vestiges of the woman I was were burned away, something new and hard and cold ignited within me.

Through the van's grimy rear window, I saw the familiar, skeletal expanse of the city's main suspension bridge, its lights twinkling like a cruel joke in the distance. Below us, the dark, churning waters of the bay.

I saw my chance. As the van took a wide, sweeping turn onto the bridge's on-ramp, its speed dropping for a critical few seconds, I gathered every ounce of strength I had left. I threw my entire body weight, a projectile of pure, desperate will, against the van's poorly latched side door.

It burst open with a groan of protesting metal.

Without a second of hesitation, without a single thought for the fall, for the cold, for anything but escape, I leaped out into the screaming wind and plunged into the icy, unforgiving blackness of the sea.

I was found an hour later by a late-night Coast Guard patrol, clinging to a channel marker buoy, half-dead from hypothermia but fiercely, miraculously, and utterly reborn. At the hospital, shivering under a mountain of blankets, I saw a single, coded text message from my father waiting for me. It contained only five words:

"The green light is on."