Chapter 34
The cold hit first—metal against Ivy’s cheek, so frigid it burned. Pain flamed from her temple down her neck. Then the smell. Rust and oil and something so acidic it made her throat close. Her head felt split open, pressure building behind her eyes until even the darkness hurt.
She was on the floor.
Agony pulsed through her shoulders, radiating down her spine. She opened her eyes, blinking against absolute blackness.
Where—
The floor lurched. Not a sudden drop, but a slow, sickening tilt that made her stomach revolt. She pressed her palms flat. Where am I?
She’d gone down Leg C looking for Jack. The man coming toward her, relentless. Jack crumpled, bloody—
“Jack?”
Her voice came out frayed. No answer except the groan of metal under stress, vibrating through the floor and into her bones.
Ivy pushed up to sit, swallowing against rising nausea.
She touched her temple with careful fingers.
A lump. Size of a hen’s egg and tender enough to make her vision dim when she pressed.
She probed carefully along her collarbone, down her ribs.
Everything hurt, but nothing felt broken.
The worst was between her shoulder blades, where the bruising felt bone deep.
She’d been dumped here. Like cargo.
“Jack?” Louder this time.
A groan. Human, not structural.
Ivy crawled toward the sound, hands outstretched in the dark. Her palm hit something soft—fabric, fingers. She felt along an arm until she found a shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“Jack. Can you hear me?”
Another groan, then a sharp intake of breath. “Fuck.”
Ivy’s head dropped. Thank God. She’s alive.
She kept her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Tell me where it hurts.”
“Where doesn’t it hurt?” Jack’s voice was thick, slurred at the edges. “Head’s ringing like a bell. Ribs? Christ, feels like I got hit by a forklift.”
“Can you sit up?”
“Give me a minute.” Jack shifted, pain hissing between her teeth. “Where the hell are we?”
“I don’t know.” Ivy turned, trying to map the space through touch.
Her fingers found a wall—corrugated metal, rivets at regular intervals.
She stood slowly, fighting dizziness, and reached up, fingertips brushing the low ceiling.
Condensation dripped, sliding wet under her sleeve.
Three paces left—wall. Five on her right—another wall. “Some kind of storage container?”
The floor listed again, more pronounced this time. Ivy braced herself against the wall, heard Jack scramble for purchase.
“That’s not normal.” Jack’s voice sharpened, the fog of confusion burning off under adrenaline. “The rig’s moving.”
Henderson’s data. The seafloor instability. The methane hydrates.
“It’s happening,” Ivy whispered. “Right now. The platform’s failing.”
“Fucking fuck.” A shuffling noise. “We need to get the hell out of here.”
“I think this is a door.” Ivy ran her fingers over it, searching for a handle, trying to ignore her racing heart. The dark was disorienting, amplifying her terror.
“It’s locked.” She pressed her hands flat against the surface, feeling for any weakness. “Or jammed. I can’t—”
The rig convulsed around her. A deep, grinding vibration that came from below, from the legs driven into the seafloor. Ivy spread her feet wider as the floor pitched another degree. Adrenaline flooded her blood like liquid ice, leaving her short of breath.
“There are equipment storage containers in the legs,” Jack muttered. “I think that’s where we are. There’s an entire section of them bolted to the interior support structure.”
Ivy closed her eyes, forced herself to breathe through the panic threatening to close her throat.
Think.
She forced her eyes wide to the same darkness, but her mind was clearer. “Your tool belt. Do you still have it?”
A pause. The sound of hands patting pockets, fabric rustling. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got it.”
“What have you got?”
Metal clinked. “Adjustable wrench. Wire cutters. Voltage tester. And this big bastard of a screwdriver I keep meaning to replace with something smaller.”
“The screwdriver. Let me have it.”
Jack pressed it into her hand—solid weight, the grip worn smooth from years of use. Ivy turned back to the door, running her fingers along the seam where the two doors met. There. A gap, maybe a quarter inch. She wedged the screwdriver tip into it, gripped with both hands, and gave it a wiggle.
Nothing.
She adjusted her stance, planted her feet, and threw her weight into it. The screwdriver slipped, the warped metal edge of the door catching her palm. Pain lanced hot and immediate, blood making her hands slick.
Shit. She dropped the screwdriver with a clatter and pressed her hand to her mouth, probing with her tongue. A gash, maybe an inch.
“Here. Give me your hand.” Jack’s breath brushed her ear as she pressed the screwdriver back into Ivy’s palm and wrapped her grip around Ivy’s. Together they wiggled the blade back into the gap. “On three. One, two—”
They worked together. Ivy’s shoulders shrieked and her cut hand throbbed. The door buckled as the gap widened.
“Come on, you fucker,” Jack grunted.
Ivy lifted a foot to the frame for leverage.
Gritted her teeth.
Pulled.
Something gave way with a crack like gunfire.
Ivy fell backward, Jack landing beside her.
For a heartbeat, they lay there, stunned, the silence enormous.
Then Jack started to laugh—a breathless, pained sound that bordered on hysteria. “Thirty years in this industry and I’m still opening doors the fucking hard way.”
Ivy turned to face her. “I know the feeling.”
Then she was laughing too, helpless wheezing giggles that hurt her bruised ribs and made tears stream down her face—hot and real and proof she was still breathing. For thirty seconds or so, she laughed in the darkness with a woman she barely knew, both of them alive when they should be dead.
“We have to move, Jack.” She wiped her face with her sleeve and clambered to her hands and knees. “Come on.”
They staggered out of the container into the same area where the man had attacked them. Emergency lighting threw everything into sickly yellow relief—the tilted floor, water pooling in corners, Jack’s blood still dark on the metal a few feet away.
“Shit.” Jack’s face was gray with pain, blood matting her hair on one side.
“Can you walk?”
“Can I sit here and die instead?” But Jack took a step, one arm wrapped around her ribs. “That was rhetorical. Let’s go.”
Ivy caught her before she careened into the wall. “Lean on me.”
They lurched forward together, Ivy taking most of Jack’s weight.
On her wrist, the watch face was a spider web of cracks, but the hands still moved.
Seven thirty. She’d been unconscious for—how long?
It hurt to think. Long enough for the sun to set, for the weather to turn, for whatever was happening to the rig to progress to the point where the floor felt like the deck of a ship in a storm.
They reached the stairwell, too narrow for them to progress side by side. Ivy went first, Jack following with audible effort. Every few steps, Ivy waited and let Jack catch her breath. She left bloody handprints on the rails, the metal so cold it made her skin sting.
Where is everyone?
The question beat against her skull with every step. An emergency evacuation would be chaos—alarms, announcements, crew scrambling to muster points. But the rig was silent except for its dying moans.
No voices. No footsteps. No helicopter rotors overhead.
Water seeped through a crack in the welding above them, a steady drip that became a stream that their boots splashed through.
The Vega juddered. A sharp veer that threw them both sideways. Ivy hit the wall and her knees caught the sharp edge of the step.
Hell—
Jack went down hard with a cry of pain. “I’m okay,” she panted, clinging to the rail, face pasty. “Keep moving.”
Ivy got an arm around her waist and hauled, ignoring the shearing pain in her shoulders.
Thirty steps. Fifty. Ivy’s hands cramped, her legs were fire. She marked their progress in bloody handprints—red on yellow. A trail anyone could follow—if anyone was left.
But no one was coming. The certainty settled deeper with each step.
The door to the main deck was closed but unlocked. Ivy shouldered through it, Jack swaying after her, and—
Nothing.
The deck stretched empty in every direction. Running lights glowed at intervals, illuminating a space that should have held dozens of workers. The offices were dark. The crane sat dormant. Even the flare stack was cold.
Wind howled ferociously across the deck forcing them to keep hold of the railings.
“Bastards evacuated and left us.” Jack swayed, one hand pressed to her ribs as she surveyed their isolation. “They’re all gone.”
“What? How?” Ivy checked all around, sure if she looked hard enough she would see someone. “Don’t they have a muster check?”
Jack shook her head, raising her voice over the storm’s bellow. “Not much of an extra step to falsify paperwork if you’ve already stuffed two people in a storage unit to die.”
Spray blasted over the railing, seawater mixing with sleet, penetrating Ivy’s coat in seconds.
This can’t be happening.
No lights on the horizon.
No Aurora Cove glow in the distance.
Just black water and boiling whitecaps snarling far below.
The rig groaned violently, the noise emanating from everywhere at once.
“Office.” Jack pointed with her chin, too breathless to waste words. “Radio.”
They fought their way across the deck, clinging to railings when gusts tried to tear them away. The office door banged in the wind, hinges shrieking. Inside was marginally better—out of the sleet, at least.
Ivy grabbed the radio mic with numb fingers and pressed the transmit button. “Mayday, mayday, this is Ivy Lambourne on the Deepwater Vega platform. Can anyone hear me? We need immediate evacuation. Two personnel still on site. Please respond.”
She released the button.
Silence. Not even static.
Despite the cold, she was sweating. The radio should hiss, crackle, something—
She pressed again. “Please—”
Jack’s hand covered hers, gently pulling the mic away. “Ivy.”
“What? Maybe if I—”
Jack pointed to the power cable—or what remained of it. The wires were cut so cleanly the copper gleamed.
“Sabotage,” Jack slumped against the desk, wincing. “Someone cut the power. Radio’s dead.”
“Do you think he’s still here?” Ivy glanced at the dark window but saw only her disheveled face. “The man?”
Jack shook her head. “He’s not stupid. Whatever the fuck this is, he’s not planning to go down with the Vega.”
Probably true. But Ivy’s skin crawled anyway, every shadow suddenly suspect.
No one was coming.
The evacuation had already happened.
Her heart beat too fast and air rasped in and out of her lungs—too hot, too thin, not enough. The floor tipped. She fell, hands splayed on the skin-numbing steel, her vision tunneling.
I am going to die here.
She’d finally found someone who saw her exactly as she was—and she’d wasted so much time pretending she didn’t need that.
Of course it was now, at the end of the world.
I never got to tell him how he makes me feel.
Her eyes stung as she blinked back hot tears. She wiped at them furiously. Crying wouldn’t solve anything.
“Hey.” Jack crouched beside her. “Stay with me. We’re not done yet.”
“I never got to tell him.” Ivy pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The truth crashed over her. Not slowly but all at once.
She loved him.
“Tell who what?” Jack gripped her shoulders.
Ryder, with his careful hands and the way he looked at Ellie like she was the entire sun. And Ellie—God, Ellie with her fierce hugs and sticky fingers that grabbed hold and refused to let go.
“Ryder.” Ivy’s breath hiccuped. “I never told him how I feel, and now…”
The words were broken, scattered between gasping breaths. “When he looks at me. He sees me. Really sees me, just as I am.” She looked at Jack. “His little girl, Ellie. She’s amazing and I—” Her voice fractured. “I love him. I love them both.”
She pressed her fist to her chest, trying to breathe around it.
Jack’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “You love him? And the kid?”
Ivy dragged a hand through her hair—stiff with salt and blood. Her fingers caught in the tangles. She didn’t care. “Yes.”
She was in love with Ryder Meyer. She wanted him and Ellie and breakfast in kitchens that smelled like coffee and sunshine. The whole impossible package.
“I really fucked this up, didn’t I?” Her eyes burned. “We’re going to die out here. I’m going to die before I can tell him.”
Jack wrapped her arms around her and pulled her close, kissing the top of her head. “You, girl, are going to tell him all of that.”
Ivy shook her head. “No one’s coming.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re still going to tell him.” Jack pulled back, hands on Ivy’s shoulders. Lines etched her face but her eyes were clear. “You hear me?”
Ivy looked at her. This woman she’d known only for a matter of days believed they would survive this.
No more hiding. No more waiting.
Get up, Ivy. Get loud.
Fight for what you want.
She’d been invisible her whole life. Taking care of the estate, always putting everyone else’s needs before her own. Maybe that’s why BlackRock thought she’d be an easy target.
Ivy drew in a shaky breath, forcing air past the ache in her chest. “You’re right.” She dried her eyes.
Jack winced as she got to her feet. “Damn straight I’m right.”
Not done yet.
Ivy got back on her feet, mind racing. “The helipad. We light it up, so they can’t miss us.”
“That’s more like it.” Jack’s grin was fierce, teeth bright against blood and grime.
Ivy straightened, wiping blood from her hands onto her ruined coat.
Not invisible anymore.
She started for the door. “Let’s give them a light show they can’t ignore.”