Chapter 1 - The Safety Net
The sensation of falling into absolute darkness was not a slow, cinematic drift; it was a violent, breathtaking plunge that lasted barely two seconds before the impact hit. When Julian shoved me with his full body weight against the stone balustrade of our cliffside terrace, he fully intended for my eight-month-pregnant body to drop two hundred feet down into the jagged, freezing coastal breakers below. His calculations, however, were based on his own arrogant assumption that my home was simply a passive showpiece of wealth. He had no idea that ten days prior, after reading his murder plot on his burner phone, I had instructed my security chief to quietly alter the architecture of the cliffside drop.
Fifteen feet below the lip of the primary terrace, concealed from view by a thick overhang of ornamental ivy and decorative stone outcroppings, my security team had installed a military-grade, high-tensile rescue netting system suspended by heavy steel rigging rods.
I hit the flexible mesh with a heavy, elastic rebound that forced the air out of my lungs in a ragged gasp. The industrial netting stretched beneath my weight, absorbing the lethal kinetic energy of the fall without breaking a single bone. I lay frozen in the hammock of webbing, my hands instantly flying to my swollen abdomen to shield my unborn baby. Above me, through the dense foliage, I could hear the faint, muffled sound of Julian’s voice echoing over the terrace ledge.
“Is she gone?” Chloe’s voice floated down through the chilly night air, sharp and breathless with adrenaline. “Did you see her hit the water, Julian?”
“It’s pitch black down there, but nobody survives a two-hundred-foot drop into coastal rocks, especially not carrying twenty extra pounds of baby,” Julian replied, his tone chillingly casual as his footsteps crunched against the stone flagstones above. “We wait five minutes to make sure there are no screams. Then you go inside, smear some mascara under your eyes, and call 911. Tell them my hysterical wife slipped while leaning over the railing during a mood swing. We play the grieving family until the probate courts clear the estate accounts.”
I bit my lower lip until I tasted copper, suppressing the instinct to scream up at the monsters standing barely twenty feet above my head. Beneath the netting, a small, focused beam of tactical infrared light flashed three times from the lower cliff recess.
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“Boss, hold completely still,” a deep, calm voice whispered from the shadows of the rock face.
It was Marcus—the personal bodyguard Julian had paid fifty thousand dollars in cash three days ago to turn a blind eye to my disappearance. Marcus had taken Julian’s bribe, brought the cash directly to my executive desk, and helped me build the trap. I felt the steady, reassuring grip of his large hands grasping the edge of the rigging, preparing to extract me from the dark.
