Chapter 10 #2
At the bottom, she didn’t wait. She launched herself toward the ship’s hull and grabbed the lowest rung of another ladder that led up into the shadow of the open cargo bay.
Her hands shook from cold and adrenaline and fatigue. She climbed anyway.
By the time she hauled herself over the edge, her arms shook. She rolled onto the deck and lay there for half a second, breath coming in shallow bursts.
The smell hit her next—oil, burned metal, salt. The faint tang of something else: blood.
“Blake?” she whispered.
No answer. Just the wind shrieking through broken vents and the hollow clang of something swinging loose below.
She crouched low and moved forward. The floodlights above flickered erratically, cutting the deck into stripes of light and shadow.
Her boots slipped once on the slick metal, sending a small splash echoing through the corridor. She froze, pulse in her throat.
Footsteps answered. Heavy ones.
Vivian ducked behind a supply drum, gripping the pistol tight. A flashlight beam swept across the walkway, catching rain in its cone. Two men in dark gear crossed in front of her, rifles slung, voices low under the storm.
“…still searching the lower decks. The engine room’s flooded.”
“Only mixers down there. Someone probably screwed up. Team’s here to move products out before too much attention.
She waited until their footsteps faded toward the bow, then slipped out from behind the drum and ran.
The hatch to the lower decks had been blown off its hinges, bent like foil. Inside, smoke curled thick, making her eyes sting.
She crouched, covering her mouth with her sleeve, and descended.
The stairwell reeked of ammonia; she pulled up her shirt over her nose and mouth to reduce any contaminants.
Her eyes burned, but with so much wind and water, the distance to whatever chemicals they were mixing allowed her to breathe.
The steps were slick. Somewhere deeper, machinery still groaned under pressure, the sound of a wounded heart refusing to stop beating.
She followed the sound.
“Blake?” she whispered again, voice barely audible.
For a long moment, nothing. Then—faint, muffled—something that wasn’t machinery. A rhythmic pounding. Two beats. Pause. Two beats.
Her heart lurched.
She quickened her pace, slipping once, catching herself on a pipe. “Hold on,” she whispered, not sure if she was talking to him or someone else or herself.
The passage narrowed, forcing her to squeeze sideways between twisted panels. The air grew hotter the farther she went, the smoke thicker, bitter with melted plastic.
She turned a corner—and stopped dead.
The floor had collapsed ahead. A gaping hole yawned where the walkway should’ve been, the deck below visible through the jagged tear. Firelight glowed from somewhere under the wreckage, flickering up the steel.
And there—on the far side of the breach—something moved.
A shape slumped against the bulkhead, head bowed, one arm dragging along the wall. Even through the smoke, she knew that silhouette.
“Blake,” she breathed.
He lifted his head weakly, disoriented. His face caught the light—blood smeared across his temple, eyes unfocused but alive.
Relief hit her so hard her knees wobbled.
“I’m here,” she whispered, stepping forward before realizing the truth: there was no way across. The gap stretched six, maybe seven feet wide. The metal edges gleamed wet, razor-sharp. Below, seawater churned, rising fast.
Blake turned his head, confusion twisting his features as he spotted her. “Viv?” His voice was hoarse, half-swallowed by the moans of the ship.
“Don’t move! The deck’s unstable,” she called out.
He tried anyway, bracing one hand on the wall. The metal groaned beneath him.
Vivian’s pulse thundered. She scanned the edges—no bridge, no railing, nothing stable enough to cross. Behind her, the fire crackled, a low, hungry growl.
She spotted a coil of cable, grabbed it, secured it, looped it around her waist—
And the deck exploded.
The blast wasn’t fire this time but pressure—something collapsing beneath the surface. A shockwave of sound and wind slammed into her, hurling her backward. She hit the wall, air torn from her lungs, vision shattering into white, then black.
When the roar faded, half the walkway was gone.
Smoke rolled through the breach, swallowing everything.
“Blake!”
Her scream ripped out of her—raw, untrained, nothing like the controlled agent she was meant to be. She scrambled to the edge, fingers digging into twisted metal as if she could claw the world back into place.
No silhouette. No movement. No answering cough. Just the groan of dying steel and the surge of water devouring the space where he had been.
A cold, tearing panic punched through her chest. She’d let herself hope. She’d seen him alive—reaching for her. And now the world had swallowed him without mercy.
“No,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “No. I’m not losing you.”
The fear didn’t freeze her—it ignited her.
She pushed forward into the smoke.
Consciousness came back in fragments—cold metal under Blake’s cheek, the taste of salt and rust in his mouth.
Then pain.
A white-hot streak through his shoulder that pulsed with his heartbeat, turning every inhale into a knife edge.
He groaned and blinked, the dim flicker of an emergency light stuttering across the cargo hold.
Shadows jumped and collapsed with each blink of power, the light barely strong enough to reveal the slick sheen of oil on the floor.
The air was heavy with fumes and seawater and something sour—blood, maybe. His blood.
His hands were bound behind him, wrists raw where the rope bit into skin. The fibers were soaked, either from the humidity or the storm outside—it didn’t matter. Wet rope tightened harder.
Memory flickered—men in black fatigues swarming the corridor, the flash of a rifle butt, the sting of a needle at his neck. Hands dragging him across the deck. Cold pipe at his back, rope cinched tight, and then nothing.
He shifted, testing his weight against the pipe he was tied to.
Metal bit through the fabric of his shirt, cold and merciless, pressing into muscle that was already screaming.
The deck rolled with the rhythm of the storm—each pitch of the hull sent a shiver through the ship’s bones, the sound of water smashing against steel echoing up through his spine.
Somewhere above, boots clattered. The sound was sharp, efficient. Military.
Blake lifted his head an inch, listening.
A radio crackled. “Sweep the aft compartments again for the woman, Maddox’s star agent, and the kid—find them.”
The words came muffled through the deck plates, but they landed like a punch.
The woman. Vivian. Maddox’s star agent. And the kid.
Wait. Was she here? No, he willed it to be a hallucination because she needed to be miles away by now.
He let out a slow, quiet breath. The ache in his ribs deepened, matching the burn in his shoulder. This wasn’t just a retrieval or clean-up op—it was containment. Nobody leaves, nobody talks.
Another voice joined the first, closer this time, maybe on the other side of the bulkhead.
“Word is there’s a tracker. Maddox’s team is inbound because it’s the last locale for those two agents. They need to disappear.”
Blake’s pulse kicked up hard enough to throb in his wound. Tracker. Inbound.
That had to be Vivian’s car—the one she’d left at the lighthouse before they went dark.
Maybe help was coming.
But if that were true… why were these men still here? Why did they sound like they were taking orders from someone else?
Blake shifted, testing the ropes again. The fibers scraped open flesh, and pain flared bright enough to make his stomach twist. He gritted his teeth and forced himself still.
The hull groaned again under the storm’s pressure. One of the guards walked past, his shadow sliding through the faint light leaking in under the bulkhead. Blake caught a glimpse of the man’s uniform—standard black fatigues, soaked at the seams—and no insignia.
They didn’t want to be recognized.
They weren’t Laurel Tide.
He leaned his head back against the pipe, eyes half closed, forcing his mind to stay sharp. He needed to know how many. Needed to find a weapon, a way out, a reason to keep fighting beyond instinct.
He had one.
Vivian.
She wouldn’t leave him. Wouldn’t leave Mara. She’d die before she did. He knew that as sure as he knew the storm outside was turning the ocean into knives.
He flexed his fingers again, feeling for weakness in the knots. The ropes didn’t budge. His wrists were bleeding freely now, slick and useless. He angled his weight, grinding his shoulder against the pipe, letting the pain ground him.
Above, a hatch slammed open. More boots. He counted three, maybe four. Voices again—one of them new, lower, with a commander’s edge that didn’t need to shout.
“Negative on visual. Recheck the hold, then torch.”
His stomach dropped cold.
Whoever was running this ship wasn’t taking prisoners.
He stared at the floor, forcing his mind to line up the facts even as the pain tried to fog everything over. Maddox’s name had been used over the radio. They’d mentioned “the tracker.” On the surface, it sounded like internal chatter—but the tone was wrong. Too rehearsed.
They were baiting someone. Maybe Maddox himself.
If they’d compromised his command line, if they were using the tracker to lure his team…
Blake’s jaw clenched.
Was this all designed by Laurel Tide? Were Maddox and his team driving into an ambush?
He shifted again, careful, working the rope against the jagged edge of a weld seam. Each motion scraped skin rawer, but fibers gave. Tiny threads popped.
He could do this.
He would do this.
A thud echoed above—metal shifting underweight. He froze, every sense reaching outward. The rhythm was different from the boots before—lighter, more deliberate.
Someone was moving slow. Controlled.
Not a patrol.
His pulse jumped.
That wasn’t random movement. That was someone avoiding being heard.