“Your fortune finally belongs to me.”
Richard shoved me out of the helicopter.
One second, my husband’s face was inches from mine. The next, there was nothing beneath my feet but empty air and the California coast, impossibly far below.
I reached for the doorway.
Missed.
Then something beneath my coat snapped tight.
The safety tether caught me so violently that my breath disappeared. I swung beneath the open doorway, my hands clawing at the strap holding me above the water.
Above me, Richard stared down.
I waited for his expression to change.
For surprise. For fear.
For any sign that the man I had married understood what he had just done.
Beneath my coat, our unborn baby kicked.
I pressed one shaking hand against my stomach.
For months, I had suspected my billionaire husband was planning to betray me. I had watched him closely enough to stop trusting the quiet moments.
Especially the quiet moments.
That was why I had worn the harness.
Why I had concealed the tether.
Why I had hired the pilot myself.
Richard had believed he was bringing me somewhere no one could help me. I had stepped aboard believing I had already accounted for that.
Now the helicopter’s wind tore at my coat while I struggled to pull air into my lungs.
I looked up at him.
“Everything’s recorded, Richard.”
My voice came out ragged, nearly swallowed by the rotor noise.
I tightened my grip and forced out the rest.
“You inherit nothing.”
There.
The words I had imagined saying when he finally understood that I wasn’t as helpless as he thought.
I watched his mouth.
His eyes.
The hand resting beside the doorway instead of reaching down for mine.
He didn’t panic.
He laughed.
Not the strained laugh of someone caught.
Not a desperate attempt to pretend he still had control.
He looked almost entertained.
For a moment, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. My fingers tightened around the strap until they hurt.
Richard leaned just close enough for me to hear him.
“Amelia, who recommended that pilot?”
My eyes moved past his shoulder.
Toward the cockpit.
The question was so simple that my mind answered before I could stop it.
My divorce lawyer.
The woman I had trusted while preparing to leave my husband. The person whose recommendation had made hiring this pilot feel like a precaution instead of a gamble.
Static crackled in my earpiece.
I stopped moving.
A voice replaced it.
Hers.
“Richard, you said she wouldn’t be wearing a harness.”
My hand froze against my stomach.
She hadn’t asked whether I was alive.
She hadn’t sounded surprised that I was hanging outside a helicopter.
And she hadn’t spoken to me.
I looked up again, searching the doorway, then the narrow space beyond Richard.
The pilot was moving.
One hand lifted.
Something small caught the light.
A knife.
And suddenly, the question wasn’t whether my husband had planned my death.
It was this: what else had I trusted my lawyer to keep safe?
The knife flashed once, then disappeared behind the pilot’s wrist.
