The internet loved the story because the ending seemed obvious:

The interior of the Sirena was a tomb of floating mahogany veneer, shattered crystal stemware, and floating cushions.

The water in the main salon was twelve inches deep, surging in rhythmic, filthy sloshes that smelled of diesel fuel, battery acid, and stagnant harbor mud. Every time a five-foot swell hit the outer breakwater, the yacht groaned through her frames, her fiberglass skin flexing with that hollow, terrifying creak that precedes structural failure.

"Arthur! Let go of the rail!" Ethan shouted, lunging through the sloshing water of the cockpit.

The older man was locked in a state of catatonic shock. His fingers were rigid around the polished stainless steel, his knuckles white, his eyes fixed on the black, churning water rising over the cockpit combing. He had spent forty years believing that money was an impenetrable wall; now, facing a four-million-dollar hull breaking in half beneath his feet, his mind had simply shut down.

Ethan didn't waste time pleading.

He drove his shoulder into Arthur’s chest, using his weight to pry the man’s hands from the tubing, wrapping his left arm around the billionaire’s neck in a cross-chest carry.

"Chloe! Grab my harness!" Ethan barked, his face inches from hers in the driving rain.

Chloe was on her knees in the cockpit, her silk dress ripped at the shoulder, bleeding from a long scrape along her forearm where she had struck a broken cleat. She didn't look like an heiress; she looked like a terrified child. She reached out, her fingers digging desperately into the heavy nylon straps of Ethan’s utility harness, anchoring herself to the boy she had mocked as an unwashed dockhand barely two hours earlier.

"Move!" Ethan commanded.

They hit the water together.

The surge was freezing, laden with diesel oil and sand that stung their eyes. The current between the sinking yacht and the concrete pier was a swirling vortex, pulling toward the dark gap beneath the pilings where the jagged oysters would have shredded their legs.

Ethan kicked with everything he had in his sea boots.

He held Arthur’s head above the scum with his left arm, his right hand clawing at the slick, moss-covered concrete of the pier face. His fingers found a recessed iron ladder rung.

Crunch.

The Sirena’s stern swung back on the swell, slamming into the concrete pier two feet from Ethan’s head. The fiberglass shattered into jagged white splinters, the sound of the impact vibrating through the iron rung directly into Ethan’s forearm.

"Up!" Ethan roared, using his broad shoulders to hoist Chloe out of the water, throwing her bodily onto the flooded concrete of the pier. "Crawl, Chloe! Don't look back! Crawl for the ramp!"

She hit the concrete on her elbows, gasping, coughing up seawater, but she didn't stop. She clawed her way through four inches of rushing foam toward the illuminated cavern of the Caelum’s stern ramp, where two deckhands lunged forward to haul her aboard.

Ethan turned back to Arthur.

The older man had slipped beneath the surface, weighted down by his waterlogged wool trousers and his soaked leather briefcase. Ethan dove under, his fingers catching the collar of Arthur’s shirt, hauling the sputtering, choking executive up to the iron ladder.

"Take him!" Ethan yelled to the deckhands leaning over the pier cap.

Four strong hands clamped onto Arthur’s wrists, dragging the limp, shivering billionaire up onto the stone just as a massive eight-foot wave broke over the harbor wall, completely submerging the pier in a white wall of foam.

Ethan hauled himself over the lip of the concrete, gasping for air, the salt burning his lungs like battery acid.

He didn't look back at the Sirena.

As he scrambled up the non-skid surface of the Caelum’s hydraulic ramp, the yacht behind them gave a final, sickening shudder. Her keel snapped across the submerged piling; her bow rose into the screaming air like a white tombstone, and she slipped backward into thirty feet of black water, leaving only a slick of purple diesel and a floating cushion behind.

The heavy hydraulic doors of the Caelum’s car deck ground shut with the sound of a vault door closing on a bank vault.