The Missing Insulin

Chapter 2 The Death Trap on Camera

That smile answered the question I had been too sick to ask.

Yesterday afternoon, a downpour had driven me behind a thicket of banyan trees. Lily was on the other side, speaking into her phone without her usual camera voice. “You don’t understand. I need more time! He’ll break my legs, I swear. Just one more week. That’s all I’m asking!”

The man on the call was a loan shark. Lily Vance had debts, rented clothes and a family name that did not belong to her. Her invitations, car and stories about family estates would collapse under one background check. She also knew I could order that check without asking anyone’s permission.

There were no doctors on the island, and any evacuation would take time. A missing insulin pen could pass for carelessness.

I caught Noah by the ankle. My nails scraped the leather of his boot.

“Noah, please. She’s trying to kill me. Help me.”

He kicked free. “Get off me, Aria. You’re pathetic.”

A year earlier, I had woken in a hospital bed after a bad complication. Noah held my hand and said he had canceled a major press tour to stay with me.

I believed him until two weeks later, when a gossip site posted photos from Lily’s birthday party. Noah had one arm around her while he lit the candles. The press tour had gone ahead. He had left my bedside for her.

I had spent a year making excuses for those photographs. Face-down in the mud, I ran out of excuses.

“Oh, my ankle!” Lily cried. She stumbled straight onto the insulin pen and put her full weight on it.

The plastic cracked.

Blue-and-white pieces pressed deeper into the mud under her shoe.

Black spots covered the camp. My lungs burned, my muscles cramped, and the shaking turned into full convulsions. I knew the sequence from the warnings my doctors had made Noah memorize. Confusion would deepen, then I would lose consciousness. A coma would come next.

My fingers found the black watch Elias had given me. “For emergencies,” my brother had said. “The silent beacon goes straight to my personal security network.”

I pressed the recessed button. Nothing lit up because Elias had designed the emergency signal to stay silent. The watch sent my coordinates and a distress code through a private Sterling satellite to his personal security network. I pressed it again to start the audio recording function. Even if help arrived too late, the file would remain.

The camp noise blurred. Noah touched his earpiece and spoke to the director.

“Keep rolling. Don’t you dare cut the cameras. If she dies today, she brought it on herself.”

His next words reached the watch before I blacked out.

“This is television gold.”