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Priest stood up, racking the slide on his weapon with a sharp, heavy click.

“Let’s go get our girls,” Priest said.

I looked at the frozen image of Truth and my daughter on the monitor one last time.

I see you, baby, I thought, my heart beating in a hard, steady rhythm. Daddy’s on the way.

Chapter 29

TRUTH

The river smelled like wet iron and rotting cypress, a heavy, suffocating scent that seeped through the sealed glass of the salon windows every time the night air cooled over the water.

It was just past midnight.

Trumai was asleep against my chest, her tiny mouth open against the warm curve of my neck, her soft, rhythmic breaths vibrating against my throat. Beneath the linen shirt I’d worn earlier, the heavy seven-carat stone Amai had cut for me was pressed flat into my skin.

For days, I had kept a calendar in the margins of my mind. Kaisen let me attend the second doctor’s appointment after some convincing. I hoped Amai got my message. This was pure hell. I could barely stomach the fake shit.

Every sunrise, every meal Kaisen served, every lock he turned, every time the generators kicked on to charge the backup batteries. I knew the rhythm of this floating prison better than the men paid to patrol it.

Tonight, the rhythm was off.

It wasn’t something loud. There were no sirens, no shouted commands, no gunfire breaking the quiet of the bayou.

It started with the floorboards.

The heavy, steady vibration of the main engine had shifted ten minutes ago—not shutting down, but dropping into a low, idling hum, like the vessel had settled deep into the mud of a secluded cut off the main channel.

Then came the footsteps outside my door.

Usually, the two men Kaisen kept on night watch—the sullen guy named Miller and the younger one with the scarred neck—sat near the galley stairs playing cards, their muffled laughs drifting down the steel hallway at predictable intervals.

Tonight, there was no laughing.

Through the narrow crack at the bottom of the mahogany door, the shadows were pacing. Quick, restless strides. A heavy boot stopping abruptly outside the frame, lingering, then moving toward the upper deck hatch.

A radio hissed in the corridor—a sharp burst of static, followed by Miller’s voice, hushed and strained: “…told you, the motion sensor on the rear slip tripped twice. Go check the waterline.”

My fingers tightened instinctively around the edge of Tru’s swaddle.

Then the overhead recessed lights flickered. Just a half-second drop in current, the soft yellow glow dipping into amber before humming back to full strength.

To an ordinary person, it would have seemed like a dirty fuel filter or a routine generator surge.

To me, it was a heartbeat.

I stood up from the armchair, stepping soundlessly across the woven rug in my bare feet. I moved toward the forward window, keeping my body tucked into the shadow of the heavy velvet drapery so my silhouette wouldn’t hit the glass.

Outside, the bayou was a wall of black water and tangled willow branches shrouded in low-hanging summer fog. A quarter mile out, where the deep cut met the mouth of the bay, there was nothing but stillness.

Then I saw it.

A break in the treeline.

Not a headlight. Not a spotlight. Just a tiny, momentary interruption of the darkness—a low, infrared sweep that vanished the second it touched the water, moving low and silent along the reed bed.

My breath caught in my throat.