I'm standing here again — the night the ship starts taking on water. I remember how this day ends: the warning signs were there the whole time — no one listened. This time, I'm getting everyone out before it happens.

"Shoot him," Drake snarled, not even blinking.

The private security guard raised the shotgun, leveling the heavy black barrel squarely at my chest. His finger tightened against the trigger slack.

CLICK.

A sharp, metallic snap echoed from behind the guard’s left ear.

The guard stiffened. Standing directly behind him, her uniform drenched in rain and her face set in lines of absolute, murderous fury, was Third Officer Maya Lin.

Pressed firmly against the base of the guard's skull was a heavy, steel emergency flare gun—a twin-barrel marine signaling pistol loaded with a high-magnesium white phosphorus cartridge capable of burning through an engine block at two thousand degrees.

"Drop the shotgun on the deck, sir," Maya whispered into the storm, her voice as calm and steady as a deep-water anchor. "Or I will paint the side of this wheelhouse with your brains."

The guard looked at Maya’s eyes in the harsh glare of the emergency floodlight. He recognized the look of an officer who had already accepted that she might die tonight.

Slowly, carefully, the guard opened his fingers.

The shotgun clattered against the wet diamond-plate deck, sliding down the twelve-degree list until it hit the scuppers and splashed into the boiling black ocean sixty feet below.

"You're fired, you useless idiot!" Drake screamed, his voice cracking with pure, unadulterated madness.

He lunged for the manual brake release on the lifeboat davit himself, desperate to drop the craft into the sea before anyone could stop him.

I moved with the explosive speed of a man who had already watched twelve hundred people drown.

I crossed the six feet of wet deck in a single stride, caught Drake by the collar of his down parka, and slammed his back against the white steel bulkhead of the wheelhouse with a concussive thud that knocked the breath out of his lungs.

His expensive titanium glasses flew from his face, shattering against the steel deck.

"You like numbers, don't you, Julian?" I hissed, pressing my forearm against his throat, pinning him until his face turned a mottled, suffocation-blue. "Let's do some math. This lifeboat holds seventy-five people. Your two aluminum luggage cases take up the space of four human beings. That's four mothers. Four children. Four souls you were going to trade for your hard drives."

"Mercer... please..." Drake choked out, his manicured hands clawing frantically at my wet sleeves. "I have... fifty million in Zurich... offshore accounts... I'll give you ten million... wire it tonight... just let me on the boat..."

I looked down at the billionaire who had built his empire on the bodies of men who worked in the dark.

"Your money is at the bottom of the Queen Charlotte Sound, Julian," I whispered into his ear. "And tonight, you wait in line like everybody else."

I reached down with my left hand, grabbed the two heavy aluminum luggage cases from the center of the lifeboat, and hurled them over the ship’s railing.

"No!" Drake screamed, reaching out desperately as his corporate servers and fifty million dollars in encrypted financial instruments tumbled sixty feet through the howling dark, striking the churning sea with two clean white splashes before being swallowed by forty fathoms of black water.

"Muster Station One!" I bellowed, turning my back on the weeping billionaire and shouting to the crowd huddled in the doorway. "Children first! Mothers with infants! Move in pairs, keep your heads down, and step into the center of the bench!"

The crowd surged forward, but there was no trampling. There was no riot.

Leo was there, guiding an elderly couple by their elbows. Clara, his sister, was wrapping wool blankets around shivering children, lifting them into the arms of the deckhands stationed inside the boat.

Maya stood at the winch controls, her hands steady, her eyes tracking the surging swells forty feet below the ship’s hull.

"Forty passengers loaded!" Leo called out over the roar of the gale. "Fifty! Sixty! Seventy-two!"

The ship groaned again—a sickening, visceral shudder that made the deck tilt another three degrees to starboard. The list was reaching fifteen degrees.

Below us, deep in the guts of the ship, a violent muffled explosion echoed: the secondary emergency boilers blowing their seals as the freezing ocean hit their superheated casings.

"Nathan!" Maya yelled, her knuckles white on the winch brake. "The stern is settling! We have to launch One now, or the davit cables will foul on the hull plating!"

"Launch them!" I ordered.

The mechanical winch screeched, the heavy steel cables unreeling in a controlled, rhythmic descent. Lifeboat Number One dropped smoothly into the darkness, its twin diesels roaring to life the second the keel kissed the salt swell, cutting through the chop toward the open water where the lights of three Canadian Coast Guard helicopters were already piercing the low storm clouds.

I stood on the wet deck, watching the small boat pull away with seventy-two living souls.

Beside me, curled in a pathetic heap against the bulkhead, Julian Drake was sobbing into his hands, his wet silk shirt plastered to his skin, shivering in the freezing northern rain.

I looked up at the clock on the wheelhouse bulkhead.

11:58 PM.

In my past life, this was the moment the ship rolled onto its beam ends. This was the moment the panic became a slaughter.