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I would.
I had to.
I slouched further in my seat, the background screen on my laptop—the sexy-as-sin taillights of Zali’s Mustang—staring at me. I had a maintenance report to write and flight records to update, but my mind was going a million miles a minute. Every time I tried, I got sidetracked and ended up staring off into space. I couldn’t concentrate for shit.
I. Was. Shook.
The night’s events had rattled me to my core. After I’d cleaned up, I’d fallen into my chair and hadn’t moved. My hands were still shaking, and my stomach was flip-flopping around like I was on a rollercoaster.
I needed time to get my feet under me again, to reset my bearings. It was a good thing that the others had stumbled off to Zali’s bedroom and were finally crashed out after hours more moaning and muffled shouts that had tested me to my limits—I’d barely kept the walls I’d built around myself erected, just hearing them. I wasn’t sure if I could if I saw them in my current state.
Even though I was wired up, I was utterly exhausted. Weariness had crept into my bones hours earlier. My body was protesting every move I made. But sleep was out of the question. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw them. Tristan and his blazing green eyes, Zali the temptress, the guilelessFlynn, and pretty-boy Ezra were daring me to go down to them.
The four of them would haunt my dreams if I let them.
Hell, they were already in my head every waking moment.
Scrubbing my hands over my face, I groaned. Coffee, whiskey, or both were needed. Sitting here doing nothing except trying not to focus on them wasn’t working. I might as well do something. At this point it didn’t matter if it was productive as long as I could immerse myself in it.
Like a red-light-district sign—unignorable and in your face but leaving a pit in the bottom of your gut—the USB Zali had given me sat in the back corner of my spotless desk, partly hidden behind my open laptop. I’d been actively ignoring it. I didn’t want to go for a waltz down nightmare lane, but it was the only thing that would give me the distraction I needed.
Sighing, I plugged it in and watched as the folder list opened. Anything marine related from the investigation was on that drive—the coroner’s report, the marine safety officer’s findings on where the yacht was when it went up, where the washed-up wreckage was found, oceanographic maps, her mother’s last diary entries, and everything else she’d dug up were sitting in neatly organized folders on the drive.
Zali had delegated it to me, knowing I had enough knowledge to draw my own conclusions about that part of the investigation.
She wasn’t giving up. She wasn’t letting the threat that Tristan’s podcast posed beat her into submission. She just raised the stakes, staring him dead in the eye as she prepared to call his bluff. Zali was looking at every angle, tearing apart the company’s investment strategy, and now Rosa’s and Ash’s deaths too.
Zali wouldn’t stop until she could prove her mother was innocent. The allegations Tristan had levelled against Rosa before Zali had started unveiling cracks in his theories were serious—negligent mismanagement at best—and his theory around her death being suicide was equally grave. Zali didn’t believe a word of it.
I got it. It was sobering knowing a loved one couldn’t face going on despite how adored they were and how big a hole in their loved ones’ lives they would leave. It was soul shattering knowing money was the root of what pushed them into that spiral of depression and devastation. Survivor’s guilt was as real as it got.
I hated that Zali was in the position at all. Life was a cold-hearted bitch sometimes. I wanted to protect her from anything that could hurt her, but how? If the documents waiting for me to click on them gave me any hint that suicide was possible, rather than the freak accident the coroner had ruled their deaths as, the only option I had was to bury it. But it was like burying a body in a sniffer dog’s training yard. Zali would dig up the information without even needing to try.
I couldn’t help but think about where a possible suicide left Asher. Had he been collateral damage? Was he an inconvenient liability that needed to be neutralized? My stomach bottomed out, nausea fighting its way up my throat. Had my best friend been killed by his mother in some sick murder suicide? Could Zali have suffered the same fate? Fuck, I hoped not. I prayed to every fucking god around that their lives had been taken in an accident.
But there was only one way to find out. Even then, I might not get an answer. I clicked on the first folder containing the coroner’s official findings. I’d heard the details before, but I’d never read the report.
Steeling myself, I began reading.
They set out at 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday. Travelling from the marina where we often moored and straight out the seaway, their yacht would have traversed the very spot where Zali loved to dive—the deep hole.
I shivered, remembering all too well the last time Zali had been in the water there. The bull shark I’d spotted was too close for comfort. But I couldn’t get to her—the ear infection giving me grief had meant that I couldn’t dive. Even weeks after it had healed, flying had been agony, pushing my eardrums almost to their bursting point.
All I could do was watch the water while Zali was down there, moving the yacht so that the current would bring her straight to us when she surfaced. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she brushed off my concerns and strutted around the yacht naked. Zali was an expert at keeping all of us on our toes.
Fuck, that woman tested me.
But I loved her.
That was the day this whole journey had begun—Ezra had talked her into doing Tristan’s subject, she’d met the grumpy professor, she and Flynn had fallen head over heels in love with him, and now they’d brought Ezra into their fold.
Happy times.
I kept reading. Rosa had confirmed with the volunteer marine rescue that she and Asher were headed to Cook Island, just off the New South Wales coast to go diving. She’d checked in with the Point Danger coastguard and advised them that she and Asher would be staying for three nights. Then nothing.
But no one remembered the yacht ever being there.
The island was a hotspot for shark sightings. Dive boats frequented the shark nursery there all the time. Surely they would have remembered seeing it. Surely there would have been someone who had a photo with the yacht in the background. Even when social media wasn’t as prolific as it is today, people still took photos.
