Page 104 of No One Aboard
“The feds?” Tia heard herself say. “Why would she...?”
Francis and Alejandro were running from something. She’d assumed they had business enemies, rivals who were jealous of their company’s success. Bad guys who wanted to hurt them.
But didn’t this make so much more sense? If they were running from the federal government, that meant they’d committed a crime. Or many crimes. It meant that the people they were trying toprotect, like Alejandro said, were just themselves from consequences. But consequences of what exactly?
Dad, what did you do?
“And you knew?” The rain was faster now, louder too. “You knew that MJ was trying to get your uncle caught? You knew, and then three days into our trip, she ends up dead?”
Alejandro had handed Tia MJ’s tank. MJ and Nico had spoken minutes before the dive.
“What did she say to you before she died?” Tia stepped forward. Nico was still holding onto the shroud. With his other hand, he cupped his nose. Blood threaded between his fingers and ran down his arms. “You spoke to her. You were the last one to speak to her. What did she say?”
Nico cringed. “She warned me about my uncle and your dad.”
Tia watched his blood drip onto the deck. “She didn’t know you already knew.”
“Tia—”
“And you went right to Alejandro and told him she was on to them.”
Tia could picture it all. MJ, a woman who had the strongest moral compass of anyone she’d known, discovering the truth about Francis’s business dealings, not being able to keep quiet. Offering her services to the FBI, she was going to ensure he got caught. And then they killed her before she got the chance.
But if the air mixture of the diving tank had been altered, it meant Alejandro meant to kill MJbeforeNico even told him about her warning. Had they found out she’d betrayed them to the police and meant to kill her from the beginning? Is that what happened to someone who tried to double-cross one of Tia’s parents?
MJ was dead. Alejandro was dead. But their bodies...
“What happened to her body? Why isn’t she in the freezer?”
Nico winced and touched his black eye. He was weakening, adrenaline draining out of him while Tia only felt herself grow stronger, her fingertips starting to buzz.
“Your father had me throw her overboard. Just in case.” Nico’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Tia, listen to me.”
Tia barreled ahead. She felt like she was twice her height, the storm a loyal soldier at her back. “So you found her in the water, already drowning. Maybe you held her there.”
What was it Lila had said? She had been dreaming about Nicoflipping MJ’s dead body faceup?
“Or maybe you didn’t even have to kill her yourself. Maybe all you did was not save her.”
Nico lifted a finger at Francis. “He’s trying to turn you against me! My uncle’s dead.” His voice broke on the last word, and he let his hand drop. The blood from his nose flowed freely. “I’m not your enemy.”
He was right. Francis was just as culpable and far more dangerous than Nico. But her father was a threat Tia understood. She’d been raised by him. Hit by him. She didn’t place her faith in Francis because there was nothing in him worth believing in.
But Tia had believed in Nico. She had liked him, had cared about him. She’d told him things that not even Rylan knew.
And he had killed the person she admired most.
The world had gone white-hot at the edges of Tia’s vision. She vaguely felt her nails sink into the palms of her hands. “If you knew from the beginning where we were going, then you knew about the severed radio cord. You knew about the island on the map. You knew when you played sea chanteys to honor MJ that you were part of the reason she was gone. And you put your hands on me and kissed me,knowingyou had lied to me about all of it from the start.”
The whites of Nico’s eyes shone, reflecting lightning. “I don’t have any place to go back to, Tia. You think I want to go home to my mother and work behind a cash register till I die? You think I want to take care of other men’s boats forever and never have my own? I didn’t get the chances you got. I didn’t get fancy schools or a high-school diploma or friends with Bugattis or the option to be anybody. You romanticize my life and think my choices are so simple, but you’ve never scrubbed bird shit off a deck that isn’t yours or opened the fridge to eatfood that isn’t there. Do you know how many people would kill to live on a private island the rest of their lives?”
Tia stared at him, something spreading like rot in her chest. “Seems I know at least three.”
Everybody chose Francis and Lila Cameron in the end. Even Rylan had spilled his guts to them. Who could resist aligning themselves with people who offered them the world?
“I’m sorry,” Nico said in a small voice. He wiped his nose again in a futile effort to stanch the flow. “I didn’t come here intending to hurt anyone, least of all you—”
“Stop,” Tia said.
