Derek’s hand locked around my throat before I could scream. He shoved me backward into the bathtub, and icy water swallowed my face.

“I never wanted this bastard child!” my husband roared.

My eight-month belly struck the porcelain. Pain shot through my spine. I clawed at his wrist, kicked at the drain, tried to lift my head—but Derek leaned harder, using all his weight. My lungs burned. The bathroom light blurred above the water, then narrowed to a pale coin.

Hold on, I ordered myself. Five more seconds. Make sure he says enough.

He yanked me up by my hair. I dragged in a ragged breath, coughing water across his shirt.

Derek laughed. “Look at you. Nobody’s going to believe a word you say. Not after they see those messages between you and Noah.”

The messages I had planted.

He shoved me down once more. This time, terror overruled the plan. I twisted sideways, shielding my stomach as my cheek hit the water. Then his grip vanished.

“Clean yourself up,” he said from the doorway. “We’re going for a drive.”

His footsteps faded down the hall.

I sat up, shaking so violently that water slapped against the tub. The baby kicked once—hard—and relief nearly broke me. I pressed two fingers beneath the faucet, where a waterproof camera no bigger than a shirt button blinked green.

Still recording.

I reached inside the torn lining of my robe and found the silver ring Agent Ortiz had given me. I twisted the stone clockwise. One vibration meant the distress signal had gone out.

Phase one was complete.

Then the green light went dark.

I froze.

In the mirror, behind my dripping reflection, Derek stood in the doorway holding the camera between two fingers.

He smiled and raised a black handgun.

“Were you looking for this, Rachel?”

Rachel believed every risk had been measured, every signal protected, and every escape route covered. But the weapon in Derek’s hand proves he has been watching more closely than anyone realized—and the person who comes through the front door next will turn her entire plan upside down.

The gun followed me as I climbed out of the tub.

“Hands where I can see them,” Derek said.

My soaked robe clung to my stomach. I kept one hand under it, pretending to steady the baby while I twisted the ring again. No vibration. Either the signal had failed, or someone had disabled it.

Derek dropped the tiny camera into the sink and crushed it with the butt of his pistol. “You always were a terrible liar.”

Headlights swept across the bathroom wall.

Hope surged through me. Agent Ortiz had promised a tactical team would be two minutes away.

The front door opened.

“Up here,” Derek called.

A uniformed sheriff’s deputy entered the bathroom. Paul Mercer—Derek’s childhood friend and the officer who had investigated Claire’s death eighteen months earlier.

He glanced at the bruises forming on my neck. “You overdid it.”

“She fought.”

Mercer removed my ring with gloved fingers. The tiny stone had been split open, its transmitter ripped out. “Your federal friend won’t be tracking this.”

My fear must have shown, because he smiled. “Ortiz is alive. For now. We intercepted her car on Route Nine.”

That was the twist Agent Ortiz had warned me about: if Derek had help inside law enforcement, the first officer through the door might not be there to save me. I had prepared for corruption. I had not prepared to recognize the man.

They bound my wrists and marched me to Mercer’s cruiser. Derek sat beside me in the back, pressing the gun beneath my ribs while Mercer drove beyond the suburbs, past the last gas station, and into the wooded hills of western Maryland.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“Somewhere your boyfriend can’t find you,” Derek said. “After tonight, everyone will think you ran away with him.”

The cruiser stopped beside an isolated hunting cabin. A generator hummed behind it. Mercer unlocked the door, and a smell of bleach and damp wood rolled out.

They pushed me inside.

Something moved beyond a chained interior door.

A thin woman stepped into the strip of light. Her hair had been hacked short, but I recognized the face from Derek’s wedding photographs—the wife whose ashes he kept on our mantel.

Claire stared at my belly, then at Derek.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. “You brought her here too.”

Derek slammed the cabin door behind us, and every explanation I had imagined for Claire’s death collapsed at once.

She was alive.

Not healthy, not safe, but alive.

Mercer cuffed me to a support post. “You two can catch up while we prepare the car.”

“What car?” I asked.