She hesitated—eyes locked on his.
Then she pulled the cord. The motor sputtered alive. The boat swung free into darkness.
Blake lifted his hand—blood-streaked, shaking once before it steadied.
Then the swell carried the lifeboat past the arc of the ship’s lights and into rain and shadow.
Silence hit harder than pain.
No Vivian.
No Mara.
Just alarms. Wind. Metal failing under storm and gunfire.
The door shuddered under another coordinated blow.
Blake chambered his last round.
Set his stance.
“Just need to buy them enough time,” he whispered.
And he turned toward the fight.
CHAPTER TEN
Vivian didn’t hearBlake anymore—only the sirens and the sea.
The lifeboat pitched hard off the hull, the motor whining like something wounded. Spray slapped her cheek, salt stinging the cut at her temple. Mara’s fingers clenched white around the gunwale, eyes too big for her face.
“Stay low,” Vivian said, voice steady because it had to be.
They bobbed in the dark trough between floodlights, the ship’s flank a black wall to starboard, the docks a broken skyline of cranes and stacked containers to port. Wind shredded sound into ribbons. Somewhere above, boots hammered steel; somewhere behind, a door took a beating from men who wanted it more than sanity would allow.
Vivian throttled back, let the boat drift on idle, listening past the engine.
Nothing of him. Just alarms. Just water.
Go,he’d mouthed. She’d wanted to sayNo.She’d wanted to drag him in with force and faith and the sheer gravity of not losing another person to the dark.
Instead, here they were.
A narrow service pier jutted out ahead—low, half-rotted planks riding the black water. A ladder hung off its end, ironslick and barnacled. A storage shed hunched behind a fence with a lock that was more rust than metal. Shelter of a sort. Hide long enough to come back.
“Hold on,” she told Mara. She feathered the throttle, spun the bow. The lifeboat slid into the lee of the pier, the wind less a blade and more a breath.
Vivian cut the engine. The silence that slammed down was worse. Her heartbeat sounded like someone else’s boots. She took the emergency whistle and tucked it into her pocket and grabbed the bag Thirteen had given them.
“Okay,” she said, forcing air in, out. “We’re going up.”
“I—I can’t,” Mara whispered, voice breaking on the cold. “I fall.”
“You won’t.” Vivian was already moving, tying a fast bowline around a cleat, testing twice. She crouched and set her hands on Mara’s shoulders, meeting fear with something steadier. “I promised to get you safe. I don’t break promises.”
Mara swallowed and nodded. Trust—terrifying, undeserved, offered anyway. Vivian guided her small hands to the lowest rung, climbed right behind, one arm under the girl’s jacket, pushing when she slowed. The ladder bit ice into her palms. By the time they reached the planks, her hands had gone numb.
She hustled Mara toward a shed tucked away in shadows.
