He Called My Blood a Lie

Cathy held up a smashed GPS tracker and a severed communication cable for everyone to see.

She pointed at me, her voice shrill with accusation. "It was her! She destroyed all the communication equipment, trying to trap us all here to die! She caused the company tens of millions of dollars in losses and put all of us in danger! She's a lunatic!"

Hearing this, Damon, who had been sitting on the ground, shot to his feet. He roughly pushed aside the doctors and nurses who were treating me.

He lunged forward and grabbed my collar. "I brought you here out of the kindness of my heart, and this is how you repay me?" he hissed. "This retreat was critical for the merger! You sabotaged it! You don't deserve a helicopter; you deserve a prison cell!"

As he spoke, he ignored the IV lines in my arms and began dragging me out by my collar.

Dragging me along, he yelled to the police on the perimeter, "Officer, I've found the saboteur! Arrest her! Send her to prison! Get me Legal! Where's the head of our legal department? Draft the lawsuit. I'm going to make this vicious woman pay for everything!"

Under Damon's rough handling, my collar tightened, cutting off my windpipe. I could barely breathe, my face turning a dusky purple.

Maya Jones, my best friend and a senior partner at the company, had seen enough. She surged forward, prying Damon's fingers from my throat and allowing me to breathe.

My face was purple from suffocation. Once I could get air, I coughed violently, spitting up bloody foam.

Maya held me protectively, her face streaked with tears of heartache. "Ava, how... how did it come to this..."

Damon's face darkened. "Maya," his voice was dangerously low. "You work for me. Are you choosing her side? Say one more word for her, and you're finished on Wall Street. I'll personally see to it that you never work in this town again."

A chilling silence fell over the onlookers. No one dared to move, unwilling to risk their careers by stepping into the CEO's family warzone.

I pushed at Maya, trying to tell her to go, not to ruin her future for me. But she refused.

She drew herself up and turned on Damon. "Mr. Hawthorne, a broken tracker proves nothing. You're the CEO of this company. Can't you show a shred of common sense or fair judgment?"

Damon snorted dismissively. "She's a suspense novelist. She studies criminal methods all day, and she was messing with high-tech devices for no reason. Isn't that suspicious? And after the avalanche, the whole resort lost contact, yet she just happened to have a satellite phone. If she's not the saboteur, why was she so prepared?"

Maya's voice was hoarse with indignation. "She's your wife! What's wrong with her having your spare satellite phone?"

"And destroying a base station and communication equipment requires professional knowledge. Ava's a writer! She finds setting up a router too complicated. How could she possibly know how to do any of this?"

"As for that equipment, you put Cathy in charge of it. You should be asking her where it was and how it got damaged!"

Damon's expression flickered. "Nonsense!" he said sharply. "Cathy would never..."

Cathy began to tremble, waving her hands defensively. "Damon, I didn't! I never touched those things! Ava is framing me!"

Cathy's denial only made Damon's face grow darker.

Maya looked down at my blood-soaked lower body, and fresh tears welled in her eyes. She sobbed, "Ava, the baby... is the baby gone?"

Damon stiffened. "Baby? What baby? What is she talking about?"

I shook my head, gripping Maya's hand, signaling her not to say another word about the child to this cold-hearted man.

Damon seemed to realize something. He started toward me, desperate for an answer, but just then, FBI agents arrived on the scene.

The lead agent flashed his badge. "We received a report that someone here deliberately sabotaged a communication base station. Who is the suspect?"