Before I could taste its edges, the world shifted: Tyler—who had been quiet and watchful—stepped beside me and did the most surprising thing. He thumbed a small object, and a clamp popped from a cleaner’s hand into the lock on the yacht’s security box. The cleaner’s contacts had made good, and Tyler—of all people—had gotten us a door open.
But it’s in plays like this that the mess shows: we got Dominic, yes, but the owner set a camera to stream the whole rescue clip to his private channel as “bonus content,” and someone hit “live” before we’d crossed the threshold to safety. The feed didn’t go viral for a day—it went viral within an hour, splintering into ten thousand feeds and a thousand predators.
We had Dominic. We had a beating in our ribs that felt like survival. We had Tyler’s secr
