The Waitress Beatrice Tried to Remove
Chapter 02 - The Waitress Beatrice Tried to Remove
Beatrice recovered quickly.
“Security,” she ordered. “Take the girl below deck.”
Two uniformed guards moved forward.
Adrian stepped between them and Mira.
“No one touches her.”
“This is my family’s private event.”
“It is my yacht.”
The correction landed in front of three hundred guests, several cameras, and half the Vale Maritime board.
Beatrice lowered her voice.
“You do not know what she is.”
Mira forced herself to stand despite the trembling in her legs.
“I am an employee you just struck.”
A few guests looked embarrassed.
Adrian removed his coat and placed it around her shoulders. Up close, he saw a faint scar beneath her left eyebrow. Gabriel had carried the same line after falling from a mast as a boy.
Coincidence, Adrian told himself.
Then Mira noticed the open watch in his hand.
Inside the lower lid was a tiny photograph protected beneath cracked glass. A young man stood beside a dark-haired woman on the deck of an older yacht.
Mira pointed.
“That’s my mother.”
Adrian knew the man.
Gabriel Vale had been twenty-seven when the North Star burned near Greyhaven Point. Officially, an engine explosion killed Gabriel, his fiancée Lydia Shaw, and four crew members. No bodies were recovered intact.
Yet the woman in the photograph had not been identified as Lydia in any family archive.
Beatrice said, “Anyone could have placed that image inside.”
Mira looked at her.
“My mother told me the silver-haired woman would say exactly that.”
The sentence struck harder than the slap.
Adrian asked Mira’s mother’s name.
“Lydia Hart. Before that, Lydia Shaw.”
Beatrice ordered the ship’s captain to return to harbor immediately. Her tone remained controlled, but her hands had begun to shake.
A guest near the railing whispered into his phone. Another sent the video of the slap to a news editor.
Adrian turned to the yacht physician.
“Examine her cheek and knee.”
Mira hesitated.
“I’m not going below with your security.”
“You choose who accompanies you.”
She pointed to Elena Ruiz, the senior stewardess who had hired her six months earlier.
Elena stepped forward.
Beatrice’s stare warned her not to move.
Elena moved anyway.
As Mira left the deck, Adrian studied the watch. The hands had stopped at 11:47. That was the time recorded in the coast guard report as the first explosion aboard the North Star.
Beneath the winding crown, he felt a small irregularity.
The crown pulled outward farther than it should.
A narrow brass key slid from the watch’s stem.
Beatrice saw it.
For the first time, the woman who had ruled Vale Maritime for three decades forgot that powerful people were supposed to hide fear.
“Give me that key,” she said.
May you like
Adrian looked toward the door through which Mira had disappeared.
“What did Gabriel lock away from you?”
