The Petrel’s deck felt smaller than I remembered, crowded with emergency blankets, blinking consoles, and the people who had chosen me without a single share of Delgado stock to bind them. Mara’s hands shook as she checked my pupils; Captain Halvorsen’s jaw worked as he replayed the footage on his tablet, frame by damning frame. On one screen, my body vanished into the sea; on another, my family relaxed into the performance of grief they’d been perfecting for years. “They signed their own warrants,” Halvorsen muttered, zooming in on my mother’s calm instructions, my father’s joke about “finally solving the succession problem,” Chloe’s impatient, “Just push him, Mom.” The Axiom steamed toward Malta, its guests laughing under a sky full of hidden microphones, while the Petrel turned too, a ghost ship carrying receipts. Somewhere between the taste of salt in my throat and Rosa’s voice crackling over the satphone—“Mi niño, you come home now”—the obsession that had devoured three decades of my life simply to… Continues…