The crowd laughed and applauded again, eager to stroke the ego of the up-and-coming maritime CEO. My mother was beaming in the front row, completely unbothered that her eldest daughter and granddaughter were freezing on a dirty dock.
I looked down at my phone.
Damian: “I have your GPS beacon. One minute. Close your eyes, my love.”
I didn’t have to wait one minute.
Suddenly, a deafening, bone-rattling blast of a ship’s air horn cut through the smooth jazz music of the reception. It was a sound so deep, so immensely powerful, that the glass on the Ocean’s Pearl visibly vibrated in its frames.
The guests stopped laughing. They turned their heads toward the mouth of the marina.
Eclipsing the moonlight, a towering, unimaginable leviathan of the sea entered the harbor. It was a 300-foot, custom-built, matte-black Megayacht. It dwarfed every single vessel in the marina, making Preston’s rented luxury yacht look like a pathetic, plastic bath toy.
The Megayacht didn’t come alone. Flanking its massive hull were four sleek, military-grade black speedboats, their heavy engines roaring with aggressive, tactical precision.
The speedboats broke formation, accelerating rapidly across the water. They didn’t dock at the public slips; they aggressively swarmed the Ocean’s Pearl, cutting off its bow and stern, effectively blockading the engagement party in a coordinated, hostile maneuver.
The crowd of wealthy guests fell into a terrified, breathless silence. The music stopped.
The massive Megayacht dropped its anchor with a heavy, metallic crash that echoed like a gunshot. The hydraulic boarding ramp lowered with a mechanical hiss directly onto the dock, less than twenty feet from where I was shivering with Mia.
A dozen massive men in identical black tactical suits and earpieces swarmed down the ramp. They didn’t look like standard private security; they moved with terrifying military precision. Four of them immediately moved to block the main exits of the marina dock, while the others formed a protective perimeter around the base of the ramp.
From the shadows of the Megayacht’s lower deck, a figure emerged.
Damian stepped into the harbor lights.
He was breathtakingly intimidating. He wore a perfectly tailored, midnight-blue Italian suit that accentuated his broad, powerful frame. His face, usually sculpted into an expression of calm, calculated authority, was currently twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated, terrifying rage. His dark eyes scanned the dock like a predator looking for blood.
He looked toward the lamppost and saw me.
He saw my soaking wet hair, the mud clinging to my legs, and his four-year-old daughter shivering violently in my arms.
