Page 91 of Sunburned

“It’s okay,” I replied, nodding to Justine and Marielle. “I trust them.”

“Please don’t leave her alone,”he said to the women, and they nodded.

“Actually, Laurent,” I said—he turned, brows raised—“could you bring me the dress hanging in my closet?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

Once he’d left, Marielle shut the door behind him and gave me a pain reliever, which I washed down with water, then asked me to turn onto my stomach so that she could evaluate the cut in the back of my head. “It is not so deep,” she said. “But I must clean it and put the bandage.”

Justine handed me a palm-size rubber ball to squeeze, tapping my shoulder to distract me as Marielle poured cleaning solution into the wound. I let out a yelp as my scalp burned with the heat of a thousand fires. “Sorry,” she said, patting it dry. She showed me the bottle of derma-glue. “Now I put this to hold it together, and we are finished.”

I gripped the ball as she applied the glue to the cut while Justine held my hair out of the way. “Has anyone checked the cameras?” I asked through clenched teeth as the adhesive dried.

Marielle and Justine exchanged a glance. “I don’t know,” Marielle said.

There was a knock at the door and Laurent’s voice came from behind it. “I have the dress.”

“Come in,” I called.

He pushed open the door and hung the long blue dress from a cabinet, setting the towel he’d brought next to me on the bed. “How do you feel?” he asked.

He looked genuinely concerned, and I again wished I could trust him.

“I’m okay,” I said. “My head hurts, but I’ll live. Have they checked the camera feed?”

He nodded, and I could again see the anger simmering beneath his calm veneer. “The cameras were off,” he said.

I gaped at him. It would be quite a coincidence if the cameras just happened to have shorted out right when someone tried to push me off the boat.

“You mean whoever pushed me disconnected them,” I said, the hairs on my arms standing on end.

“That is what I told them, but the—” He stopped, glancing at Justine’s and Marielle’s backs as they put away the medical supplies. “Anyway, they were not working.”

It would make sense for Allison to have turned off the cameras before sneaking into Samira’s room, and once she realized I was following her, she would have known she could then push me overboard without its being recorded. You’d need some computer savvy to wipe the cameras, but it wasn’t rocket science. I knew she was proficient enough with computers to have done it.

But hell, so was Cody—though he had jumped into the sea to save me—and Laurent would probably have been able to figure it out after watching me earlier today. With her TikTok experience, I didn’t doubt Jennifer knew a thing or two about computers, and while Samira and Gisèle might not work in tech, they were young enough that I was pretty confident they knew their way around an operating system. My bet was on Allison, but until I was sure, I couldn’t rule out any of them.

“Did you guys see anything?” I asked the three of them.

Justine shook her head. “We were in the kitchen, cleaning from dinner.”

“I was on the cabin level, looking for you,” Laurent said.

I nodded. “Give me a second to get changed.”

Once Marielle had closed the door behind them, I peeled off my wet clothes and rinsed the seawater from my skin with fresh water from the sink, drying myself with the towel before pulling on the soft sleeveless dress. Using a rubber band I found in a drawer, I pulled my tangled hair back into a loose ponytail that covered my wound, then wiped off the mascara that had smudged beneath my eyes with the corner of the towel. I’d looked better, but my bedraggled appearance was the least of my concerns right now.

I opened the door to find Laurent waiting outside alone. “Where did Marielle and Justine go?” I asked.

“The captain called them,” he said.

“What were you going to say about the cameras a minute ago?”

“The guy who came in when we—”

I nodded, remembering exactly what we’d been doing when the crew member had unexpectedly entered the control room.

“He said we were responsible for the problem with the cameras.”

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