Chapter 3 - Beneath the Black Atlantic Waters
The shock of the freezing water hit Aurora like a wall of solid ice, driving every remaining ounce of air from her lungs in a violent bubble of protest.
The rope around her wrists had been rigged with a quick-release clasp by someone who knew what they were doing—not the masked man running the live feed, but someone else. Someone who had whispered a single command into her ear just before the blindfold went on in the back of the kidnapping van: “When he drops you, don't fight the current. Swim toward the drainage pipe fifty yards left of the pilings. I'll be waiting.”
Even with the warning, the weight of the fall nearly crushed her. The frigid Atlantic tossed her around like a discarded ragdoll against the barnacle-encrusted pilings of the abandoned lighthouse. Saltwater flooded her nose and mouth, burning her throat as she thrashed against the heavy woolen coat she had been forced to wear.
Her unborn child.
The frantic thought pierced through the freezing panic. Aurora curled her body inward, shielding her stomach with her bound hands as a wave slammed her hard against a concrete footing. She couldn't breathe. Her chest screamed for oxygen.
Think, Aurora. Think.
She forced her eyes open beneath the stinging brine. In the dim, moonlit gloom of the underwater shadows, she saw it—a dark, gaping circle of iron grating rusted away from an old storm drainage tunnel. A faint sliver of yellow light flickered from within the pipe.
With a final, desperate burst of strength, she kicked off the submerged rocks, ignoring the sharp pain tearing at her shoulder. Her lungs felt ready to burst. Her vision began to blur at the edges, darkening into a heavy, suffocating purple.
Just as her consciousness began to slip away, strong, calloused hands gripped her heavy coat and hauled her upward into the stale, dry air of the interior tunnel.
Aurora collapsed onto the concrete floor, coughing violently, vomiting up seawater, and gasping raggedly as cold air rushed back into her burning chest.
"Easy now, easy," a gruff, familiar voice muttered beside her.
Aurora blinked the water from her eyelashes, looking up through the dim light at the weathered face of an older man wearing a heavy fisherman’s slicker. It was Thomas, the loyal groundskeeper who had worked for her grandmother at the Brooklyn brownstone before she died—and the man Roman had secretly hired years ago to keep an extra layer of protection around her.
"Thomas..." she choked out, shivering violently as the cold air bit into her wet clothes.
"I've got you, child," Thomas said, quickly cutting the rope from her wrists with a pocketknife and wrapping a thick, heated thermal blanket around her shoulders. "The boat is docked fifty yards up the inlet. We need to move before Vescari’s search teams hit the water."
Aurora clutched the thermal blanket tightly around her shivering frame, her hand coming to rest over her lower abdomen. The baby fluttered—a tiny, resilient pulse of life that defied the freezing death they had just escaped.
A cold, hard fire ignited deep within Aurora’s chest. Roman had made his choice. He had listened to Celeste, he had looked right through the camera lens, and he had thrown her away without a second thought.
"No, Thomas," Aurora whispered, her voice steadying as the adrenaline replaced the shock. "We aren't running away."
Thomas paused, looking down at her with surprise. "Aurora, if Roman’s men find you, or if his enemies realize you survived..."
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"Let them look," she said, her amber eyes hardening into glass. "They think I'm dead at the bottom of the ocean. Let them keep thinking it. While they look for a ghost, I'm going back to find out who really ordered the hit on my baby... and I'm going to use every secret the Vescari family tried to bury to destroy them all."
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