“Was he hiding here the entire time?” I ask.

“Maybe he didn’t intend to strike this early, but the house was probably too good of a shelter to pass up. He was as trapped as we are.”

“Do you think he came alone?”

“I don’t know, but at least we’re prepared now,” Anthony replies, the gun in his free hand.

There is nothing to do but wait, nowhere to go. Our fate is resigned to whether or not we can outlast the weather, and so we stay together in the corner, hoping the unknown men who built this house long ago did their job well.

Minutes pass, an hour, more.

I’m nearly asleep when Anthony nudges me awake. “It sounds like it’s over.”

He’s right—it’s quieted down considerably.

I take hold of his free hand, the gun in his other one, the lantern in mine, and we walk out of the bedroom, past the dead man, into the hall. I shine the lantern at the staircase below. Water fills the ground floor. It’s not as deep as I feared, certainly passable, but enough to cause serious damage.

Anthony grimaces. “So much for the rest of the supplies.”

“Something might be salvageable.”

After the loudness of the storm, it’s eerie how quiet and still everything is.

“Did you hear that noise?” Anthony asks.

I strain to listen, the sound distant but audible—a soft swishing.

My heart pounds.

He walks down the rest of the stairs, his foot sinking into the water on the ground floor. It comes up to his knees. “It sounds like it’s coming from the front porch.”

“Please don’t go out there,” I say, closing the distance between us. “The storm might not be over. It could be dangerous.”

“I’m not going outside. I’m going to see if someone’s out there.”

I grab Anthony’s arm to stop him, and he tenses, the expression on his face the one I imagine his enemies see in their final moments. Here is the man they whispered about in Havana, the ruthless criminal who won his fortune through force and cunning. It is both a little frightening and a little comforting to see this other side of the man I married.

“I’ll be cautious,” he replies. “I promise.”

I release him, and he walks over to the window.

I hand him the lantern, and he shines the light in front of the pane.

“The water’s—gone,” he says. “There’s sand where the ocean was.”

I’ve seen this before, know exactly what will happen next.

“It’s going to come back.”

* * *

—

The dead man is upstairs in our bedroom, his blood staining the wood floor, the window of time before the ocean rushes back toward the house narrowing.

“I need to get rid of the body,” Anthony says.

“How?”

He gives me a look that suggests he isn’t a novice at such things.

“What if someone finds him?” I ask.

“We have to make sure they don’t. The storm will help. If we move quickly, hopefully, he’ll disappear. It’s going to be a mess out there.”

“He was shot.”

“And if they never discover the body, that won’t matter,” he replies.

“And if they do?”

“I doubt they’re going to be overly concerned with one more dead body. Especially a man like that. And even if they do investigate his death, there’s nothing tying him to us.”

“Will it be like this everywhere we go?” I ask. “Enemies in every corner? If we’re to be partners in this marriage, then you should trust me in this. I don’t want secrets between us. How many threats are there?”

“There aren’t supposed to be any.”

“But this Frank Morgan person—now we’ve killed someone who worked for him. What will he do to retaliate?”

“He’ll never know. The storm is the perfect cover. Besides, this man was hardly a valuable member of Frank’s organization. More likely a local who could be bought cheaply and was expendable should he fail.

“Which is why we need to act quickly. I’d rather get rid of him now than wait until tomorrow, when it’s light out and there’s a chance of someone finding him,” Anthony says. “Burying him would take too long even if we could locate something to use to dig in the ground, which I doubt we can in this mess. Plus there’s always the risk of an animal unearthing him later.”

He sounds far too familiar with the particulars of concealing a body.

“The sea is unpredictable, and without a boat to row him out in, not ideal, but the storm has likely messed up the tide,” Anthony continues. “Who knows where he’ll end up? And even if it is here, the best we can hope for is that someone will think he was blown off course by the hurricane. When the sun comes up, nothing will appear the way it did before. If only we had a knife or a saw . . .”

My stomach rebels against the image his words conjure up.

Anthony’s gaze darts to the kerosene. “We could use the kerosene, but the last thing we need is a fire taking down our remaining shelter, and with the winds as unpredictable as they are this evening—”

“The sea will have to do,” I say decisively.

I don’t know what marriage and this place have done to me, but I’m behaving as though it is the most natural thing in the world to dispose of a body.

* * *

—

It takes longer than I expected for Anthony to pull the dead man down the stairs in a series of awkward thuds and drag him out the front door to the beach. There’s no way to know when the water will wash back onto the beach, but this is our last, best chance to get rid of him.

“He’s a heavy bastard,” Anthony grunts, leaning against the broken front porch railing. The exterior is in shambles, half the roof torn off the house. Windows are broken, shutters gone, trees pulled from the earth, their massive trunks and roots exposed. It’s too dark to make out the full extent of the damage, but the hint of it illuminated by the lantern and the moon is ominous enough, indeed. Rain lashes the ground, the wind strong even though the storm has moved past us.

“Stay back on the porch,” Anthony calls to me. “It’s windier out here than it seems. Hold on to the railing.”

I grip the wood, my heart sinking at how flimsy it is—parts of it have broken off and disappeared completely. The whole structure appears ready to blow away entirely, the railing wobbling with each gust of breeze.