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I awoke to crushing pain and voices conferring rapidly in French.

Where was I?

My eyes fluttered open to the sight of a light shining so brightly in my eyes that I quickly squeezed them shut again, my head throbbing.

“She’s coming around,” a man shouted in French.

“Give her space,” a woman added.

I coughed, suddenly feeling as if I was drowning as salty water shot out of my mouth and nose, and I rolled onto my side.

“Audrey?” The voice was male, familiar.

I wheezed, my body racked with shivers as water dripped onto the deck, mixing with something darker. Red. Was I bleeding?

“I need you to open your eyes,” the first man said, in English this time.

I obeyed, blinking up at a young man in a navy polo with a name tag that read Evan . The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite make the connection. “The light will be bright for a moment only.”

I cringed as he shone the flashlight into my pupils. I could hardly see him for the red dots burned into my vision as he gave a similarly dressed woman the thumbs-up, seemingly satisfied with whatever he’d found in my eyes.

“Can you tell me, where are you?” Evan asked.

I looked around. I was on a boat. Tyson’s yacht. My head pounded as it all came flooding back. Tyson was dead and I was on his boat. But why was I wet? And why was I lying on the sugar scoop, bleeding onto the teakwood planks?

“ Sea Ray, ” I answered, my voice hoarse. I coughed again. “What happened?”

“I saw you go over, and I jumped in after you,” Cody answered.

I pushed up to my elbows to see Cody sitting on the deck a few feet away, panting and just as drenched as I was, an orange lifebuoy ring and expanse of tangled rope between us.

“I was on the deck below you when you fell, thank God,” he explained, accepting a towel from a crew member.

As the red spots left by the flashlight waned, I could make out all of Tyson’s guests, as well as the captain and what must’ve been the majority of the crew standing around us, their faces etched with concern.

I realized the woman on her knees next to Evan was Marielle as she leaned forward and gently applied a towel to the back of my head.

Pain seared through my skull as the towel made contact.

“Ah!” I cried out. “That really hurts.”

“You hit your head,” she said. “But do not worry, we do not think you have a…” She looked up at Laurent. “Commotion cérébrale?”

“Concussion,” Laurent said, his face dark.

I could see he was angry, his eyes flashing as his glance went to the others, then back to me.

“Wait,” I said, trying to recall. I remembered dinner had been tense. Then I’d left, found cash in Gisèle’s suitcase…and Allison. The envelope. I remembered her storing it in a book and returning it to the shelf. Then…nothing. “How did I fall in the water?”

No one spoke as they exchanged uneasy glances.

“You were pushed,” Laurent finally answered, his voice tense.

My body went cold as I realized the implication of his words.

“We don’t know that,” Allison said diplomatically.

I focused on Allison’s calm countenance. Had she caught me following her and doubled back to push me off the boat? Her dark eyes met mine, ever impenetrable, and I was confident she would have no trouble eliminating me if she thought I was in her way.

“We should call the police,” Laurent insisted.

It seemed this was not the beginning of this argument.

The captain looked from Cody to Samira, unsure who was in control now that Tyson was dead. “What do you want me to do?”

Samira’s face crumpled. “I’m too tired to deal with the police again tonight.”

“None of us want to talk to the police,” Cody agreed. “And we don’t know that she was pushed.”

“If I wasn’t pushed, why is my head bleeding?” I asked.

“You might have hit it on the way down,” Evan chimed in.

“It does appear someone hit her in the head,” Marielle dissented. “And pushed her over.”

“Did anyone check for a weapon on the deck?” Jennifer asked.

“There was nothing,” a crew guy somewhere behind her answered.

I pulled my knees into my chest, suddenly very afraid. One of the people on this boat had tried to kill me. And if not for Cody being in the right place at the right time, they might very well have succeeded.

“Please, take her to the infirmary,” the captain instructed Marielle.

“Can you stand?” Marielle asked me gently.

Evan slipped an arm around my back as I struggled to rise, and Laurent was quickly at my other side, helping me to my feet. My head felt like it had gone through a blender and nausea crested inside me as the edges of my vision darkened. I closed my eyes, trying to steady myself.

“I can carry her,” Laurent said. “Is that okay?” he asked me.

I wanted it to be okay, and while it was far more likely that it had been Allison who had tried to kill me than Laurent, I couldn’t be sure. What if he dropped me now to finish what he’d started?

I shook my head, wincing. “I can walk.”

The crowd parted to allow us through, their faces contorting in sympathy as I passed.

Marielle and Justine, who I recognized as the girl who’d cleaned the dog shit off my foot earlier, trailed behind as Evan and Laurent walked me past the pool and main deck living area and through a door marked Crew at the end of the hall between Allison’s and Cody’s rooms.

On one side of the crew area was the industrial kitchen, on the other was what appeared to be a captain’s office and a small infirmary, with one bed and shelves full of medicines and medical gadgets.

Laurent and Evan sat me on the bed, and Marielle waved them out of the room.

“Okay,” she said. “I can take it from here.”

But Laurent lingered, casting a worried glance my way. “I can stay,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I replied, nodding to Justine and Marielle. “I trust them.”

“Please don’t leave her alone,” he said to the women, and they nodded.

“Actually, Laurent,” I said—he turned, brows raised—“could you bring me the dress hanging in my closet?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

Once he’d left, Marielle shut the door behind him and gave me a pain reliever, which I washed down with water, then asked me to turn onto my stomach so that she could evaluate the cut in the back of my head. “It is not so deep,” she said. “But I must clean it and put the bandage.”

Justine handed me a palm-size rubber ball to squeeze, tapping my shoulder to distract me as Marielle poured cleaning solution into the wound.

I let out a yelp as my scalp burned with the heat of a thousand fires.

“Sorry,” she said, patting it dry. She showed me the bottle of derma-glue.

“Now I put this to hold it together, and we are finished.”

I gripped the ball as she applied the glue to the cut while Justine held my hair out of the way. “Has anyone checked the cameras?” I asked through clenched teeth as the adhesive dried.

Marielle and Justine exchanged a glance. “I don’t know,” Marielle said.

There was a knock at the door and Laurent’s voice came from behind it. “I have the dress.”

“Come in,” I called.

He pushed open the door and hung the long blue dress from a cabinet, setting the towel he’d brought next to me on the bed. “How do you feel?” he asked.

He looked genuinely concerned, and I again wished I could trust him.

“I’m okay,” I said. “My head hurts, but I’ll live. Have they checked the camera feed?”

He nodded, and I could again see the anger simmering beneath his calm veneer. “The cameras were off,” he said.

I gaped at him. It would be quite a coincidence if the cameras just happened to have shorted out right when someone tried to push me off the boat.

“You mean whoever pushed me disconnected them,” I said, the hairs on my arms standing on end.

“That is what I told them, but the—” He stopped, glancing at Justine’s and Marielle’s backs as they put away the medical supplies. “Anyway, they were not working.”

It would make sense for Allison to have turned off the cameras before sneaking into Samira’s room, and once she realized I was following her, she would have known she could then push me overboard without its being recorded.

You’d need some computer savvy to wipe the cameras, but it wasn’t rocket science.

I knew she was proficient enough with computers to have done it.

But hell, so was Cody—though he had jumped into the sea to save me—and Laurent would probably have been able to figure it out after watching me earlier today.

With her TikTok experience, I didn’t doubt Jennifer knew a thing or two about computers, and while Samira and Gisèle might not work in tech, they were young enough that I was pretty confident they knew their way around an operating system.

My bet was on Allison, but until I was sure, I couldn’t rule out any of them.

“Did you guys see anything?” I asked the three of them.

Justine shook her head. “We were in the kitchen, cleaning from dinner.”

“I was on the cabin level, looking for you,” Laurent said.

I nodded. “Give me a second to get changed.”

Once Marielle had closed the door behind them, I peeled off my wet clothes and rinsed the seawater from my skin with fresh water from the sink, drying myself with the towel before pulling on the soft sleeveless dress.

Using a rubber band I found in a drawer, I pulled my tangled hair back into a loose ponytail that covered my wound, then wiped off the mascara that had smudged beneath my eyes with the corner of the towel.

I’d looked better, but my bedraggled appearance was the least of my concerns right now.

I opened the door to find Laurent waiting outside alone. “Where did Marielle and Justine go?” I asked.

“The captain called them,” he said.

“What were you going to say about the cameras a minute ago?”

“The guy who came in when we—”

I nodded, remembering exactly what we’d been doing when the crew member had unexpectedly entered the control room.

“He said we were responsible for the problem with the cameras.”

I frowned. “You and me?”

He nodded.

“But that’s not true,” I protested. “I did nothing to the camera feed, I just created an access point so that I could tap into it.”

“I know,” he said.

“So there’s nothing on the cameras at all after we left there?” I asked.

“The entire feed is wiped.” He laid a hand on my shoulder, his gaze troubled. “They are saying your fall was an accident.”