Chapter 1 - The Video Under the IceThe sound of the rescue helicopter's rotors cut through the frigid Colorado air, blowing powdery white snow across the tarmac of the emergency medical staging area in Aspen.
I stood paralyzed beside the rear doors of the tracked snow-ambulance, my hand hovering two inches from Clara's gurney. The air was minus fourteen degrees, but the cold inside my chest was absolute.
Clara lay bundled beneath four thermal shock blankets, a clear oxygen mask strapped across her pale, bruised face. Her hazel eyes—the same eyes that used to light up whenever I walked through the door of our home—looked at me with an icy, weightless distance that made my knees tremble beneath my tailored wool coat.
"Please," Clara whispered into her oxygen mask, her trembling fingers tightening around the wrist of Search and Rescue Lead Marcus Vance. "Don't let him see that one."
Marcus Vance was a six-foot-three former Special Forces medic whose severe, stone-carved face bore no sympathy for me. He looked at me, then down at the sealed plastic evidence bag containing Clara's frost-damaged phone, which held a second, unsynced forty-second recording made just before her rescue.
"Mr. Black," Marcus Vance stated, his baritone dropping into a cold, clinical register that dropped the air temperature to absolute zero. "Your wife’s medical team is executing immediate emergency transport to Saint Jude’s Hospital. Step back from the vehicle."
"I am her husband!" I choked out, a raw, frantic rasp tearing from my throat. "I’m taking her in my private medical transport!"
"You were her husband when you turned your phone off in the Maldives four days ago while she was buried under three feet of avalanche debris," Marcus answered smoothly, taking a solid step forward, his broad chest forming an impenetrable wall between me and the gurney. "Right now, you are a legal third party until her attending physician specifies otherwise."
The heavy rear doors of the snow-ambulance slammed shut with a metallic CRACK.
The vehicle roared to life, its rubber treads churning through the packed snow as it sped toward the waiting trauma team, leaving me standing alone in the freezing wind.
My hands shook violently as I pulled my own phone from my coat pocket. My screen was still flooded with headlines, stocks plummeting three hundred points following the news of the missing billionaire's wife, and sixty-two unread text messages from Sophia Lane asking when I was returning to our Manhattan penthouse.
I swiped Sophia's notifications away with a gesture of pure, self-directed disgust.
I opened our shared cloud account, staring at the thumbnail of the second video file that Marcus Vance had secured—the file Clara had begged him to hide from me.
The title read: “The Final Answer.”
My thumb hovered over the play button.
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Four days ago, I had spent $86,000 on a diamond bracelet on a tropical island while the woman who had built my life from a two-bedroom apartment sat in a freezing, dark maintenance shed, bleeding from a head wound, counting the minutes until her heart stopped.
I pressed play.
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