My husband was walking down the aisle to marry another woman—and she had invited me to watch.

"Christian!" Marcus yelled, dodging the shattering lamp, his shoes skidding across the slick terracotta tiles.

I didn't yell. I didn't hesitate.

I bolted through the terrace doors, my boots hitting the wet travertine patio. The tropical night was thick with humidity, the air smelling of ozone and stagnant saltwater. Ahead of me, Christian’s white tuxedo shirt was a pale, frantic blur sprinting across the manicured lawn toward the private dock.

At the end of the dock, moored to the pilings, was his thirty-two-foot mahogany runabout, the engine hatch already unlocked. He had staged the boat days ago. This hadn't been an improvisation; it was a contingency plan he had prepped the moment he realized I was due back from Bogota.

"Stop!" I commanded, closing the distance.

He didn't stop. He vaulted over the low safety line onto the teak deck of the boat, hit the key ignition, and the twin inboard engines roared to life with a throaty, guttural growl that shattered the quiet Palm Beach night.

I hit the dock at a dead sprint, wood planks rattling beneath my feet.

Christian reached down to slam the throttle forward. If he cleared the slip into the main channel, tracking him through the maze of canals and barrier islands in the dead of night would require a Coast Guard cutter and a helicopter.

I didn't reach for my firearm. I lunged forward, grabbed the thick nylon mooring line still looped around the stern cleat, and threw my entire weight against the wooden piling, jamming the rope into the cleat’s pinch-lock.

The engines screamed. The stern of the boat surged forward, but the taut nylon line caught with a sound like a rifle shot.

The boat jerked violently backward. Christian was thrown off-balance, his chest slamming against the polished mahogany steering wheel. The throttle slipped back to neutral, the engines coughing, and the boat drifted sideways, slamming against the pilings.

Before he could recover, I stepped onto the gunwale, grabbed him by the collar of his ruined shirt, and dragged him backward onto the wooden dock.

He hit the planks hard, gasping for air, clutching his ribs.

I stood over him, my chest heaving, the night wind whipping strands of dark hair across my eyes.

"Get up," I said.

Christian looked up at me from the wet wood. The charm was dead. The swagger of the brilliant young developer who had wooed me in Georgetown five years ago was entirely gone. In his eyes was only the raw, animal terror of a man who realized the cage was finally closing.

"Camille," he gasped, blood trickling from a split lip where he had struck the wheel. "You don't understand... Vance was never the top of the food chain. He wasn't the one squeezing me."

Marcus arrived at the end of the dock, his weapon drawn and pointed directly at Christian’s chest. "Hands behind your back! Do it now!"

"Listen to me!" Christian cried out, his voice cracking as he looked back and forth between us. "The Sycamore Syndicate! The offshore shell that bought the Biscayne municipal bonds—it wasn't Arthur Vance! It was a European holding firm! They used Vance Capital as a front! They’re the ones who told me to forge the divorce papers! They told me if I didn't marry Giselle and roll Vance's municipal port authority assets into DuPont Crest, they would liquidate my family!"

Marcus glanced at me over his sights, his eyebrows knitting together. "The Sycamore Syndicate?"

I felt a sudden, icy chill drop straight into my stomach.

The Sycamore Syndicate was not a corporate tax shelter. In the classified briefings I had reviewed two weeks ago at the agency’s Bogota station, Sycamore was a primary target—a transnational shadow network specializing in laundering state-sponsored capital through municipal American infrastructure projects.

"Who approached you, Christian?" I asked, kneeling beside him, my voice dangerously calm. "Give me the name."

Christian looked toward the house.

From the terrace, Arthur Vance was walking slowly toward the dock. He wasn't running anymore. He wasn't shouting. He was holding a glass of scotch he had apparently poured himself from my living room bar, his face unreadable in the dim amber landscape lighting.

Behind him, Giselle stood by the glass doors, clutching her arms around herself, watching her father with eyes wide with dread.

"He knows," Christian whispered, his teeth chattering despite the eighty-degree heat. "Arthur Vance isn't the victim here, Camille. He’s their domestic handler. He set this whole thing up. He offered Giselle to me as bait to keep me on the hook."

"You're lying," I said, though my gut was already screaming that the puzzle pieces were fitting together far too cleanly.

Why had a seasoned, predatory billionaire like Arthur Vance failed to verify a divorce decree from a county court? Why had his corporate attorneys allowed Christian to pledge secondary assets without an exhaustive forensic audit?

Because Vance didn't care if the marriage was legal.

He only needed the public spectacle. He needed the social cover of a family merger to move hundreds of millions of laundered European bond capital into the Biscayne Port development project before the Treasury Department launched its scheduled Q3 audit.

"I have the offshore ledger," Christian whispered frantically, reaching for my hand. "It’s not in the briefcase. The real drive is inside the green watch, Camille. Under the movement. The jeweler who serviced it last month installed a micro-SD chip beneath the caseback. Everything is on it. The account routing numbers, Vance’s signatures, the wire receipts from Zurich. Take it. Take it and get me out of here before Vance’s people kill me!"

I looked down at the vintage watch on his wrist.

The green dial gleamed under the dock lights. The watch I had spent ten months hunting down in Geneva as an engagement gift. The watch he had worn while standing beside me at the courthouse four years ago, swearing he would love me until death.

He had turned my wedding gift into a dead-drop for treason.

"Camille," Marcus said quietly, his eyes fixed on Arthur Vance, who had reached the foot of the dock and was standing twenty feet away, sipping his scotch.

"Mr. Vance," I called out, rising slowly to my feet. "I suggest you return to the house and sit down. This is now an active federal counter-espionage perimeter."

Arthur Vance took a slow sip of his drink. He didn't look angry anymore. He looked like an executive reviewing an unfortunate production error.

"Agent Vance-Dupont," the old man said smoothly, the ice cubes clinking in his glass. "You are a very capable woman. Your father, God rest his soul, had the same stubborn, inconvenient integrity. It’s what ruined him, of course. It’s what made him die with nothing."

"My father died with an clean conscience," I said, step by step moving between Christian and Vance. "Which is something nobody with your last name will ever possess."

Arthur smiled a thin, cruel smile. "A clean conscience doesn't pay the dock fees, Camille. Your husband is a thief, a liar, and an idiot. But he’s correct about one thing: that watch belongs to DuPont Crest Holdings. And DuPont Crest is currently subject to a commercial receivership lien filed by Vance Capital forty-five minutes ago."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ringing smartphone.

"That will be the United States Attorney for the Southern District," Arthur Vance said calmly. "A very close personal friend of mine. I believe he’s about to inform your supervisor, Agent Cole, that DuPont Crest and all related corporate property are part of an ongoing state-level civil injunction. Any federal interference without a Title III warrant will be considered an unconstitutional overreach."

Arthur held the phone out toward Marcus.