NAVY SEAL WAS DYING FROM MULTIPLE GUNSHOT WOUNDS WHILE EVERY DOCTOR WAS AFRAID TO TOUCH HIM—UNTIL A QUIET NEW NURSE STEPPED FORWARD AND CALLED HIM BY A NAME NOBODY IN THE HOSPITAL KNEW!

At 9:27 a.m., three minutes before the first shot, Ivy Callahan made the mistake of believing there was still time to prevent a disaster.

She had returned to the operations room with a tray of used coffee cups, intending to compare the names of the temporary deckhands against the paper crew manifest. The computer was locked. Somebody had removed the clipboard from its hook. Through the thin wall, she could hear a man arguing in the engine compartment, and a second voice answering with the unnerving calm of someone who had already reached a decision.

Then a door opened behind her.

Silas Renner stood in the passage, his immaculate shirt sleeves rolled precisely twice. He looked at the tray in her hands, then at the blank screen.

“You've been busy,” he said.

“I've been working.”

“Not at what you're paid to do.”

Ivy moved to pass him. He blocked the doorway without touching her. She noticed that his right hand was empty, but he was holding his arm at an odd angle, as though conscious of something beneath his jacket.

“The captain said you had concerns,” Silas continued. “I understand you made an incident report.”

“Yes.”

“Delete it.”

“The report is on the company's server.”

“Then you'll explain that you misunderstood.”

She could have lied. She could have told him she would make the correction and tried to slip away. But on the other side of that door was a corridor ending in a narrow flight of stairs. Two unfamiliar men occupied the deck above it. There was no reason to believe that obedience would make her safe.

“I didn't misunderstand the records,” she said.

For the first time that morning, Silas stopped pretending to be polite.

He reached for her phone. Ivy stepped back, tipped the tray toward him, and sent six porcelain cups crashing onto the floor between them. When he recoiled, she ducked under his arm and ran.

She reached the main deck as the first gunshot cracked through the yacht.

The sound did not resemble a movie gunshot. It was a brutally sharp concussion that seemed to strike the metal railing before it reached her ears. Someone screamed. A second shot shattered the glass door of the meeting cabin. Ivy dropped behind a storage chest while a man in a navy jacket stumbled backward through the opening, both hands clamped against his chest.

She saw Garrick Marchetti rise from his chair. Gideon Price lunged between Garrick and the doorway, and another shot struck the table behind them. The two men who were supposed to be temporary deckhands were standing at opposite ends of the passage, their weapons pointed inward.

They were not boarding-party security. They had been placed where no one could leave.

Ivy's thoughts narrowed into a sequence of practical facts. She could not reach the wheelhouse. The interior stairwell was exposed. Three auxiliary boats had no fuel. The fourth, a thirty-foot rescue launch with a deep-blue stripe, hung from the stern davit. If she could get it into the water, she might give somebody a way out.

Somebody shouted her name.

That frightened her more than the gunfire. Silas had told his men who she was.

Ivy crouched and ran along the protected side of the galley, using the low service wall as cover. The youngest server, June Rivera, was curled beside a cupboard, white-faced and trembling. Ivy caught her shoulder.

“Stay below the counter. If the deck clears, get into the water with a life jacket. Don't wait for me.”

“What's happening?”

“A betrayal.”

The answer sounded absurdly simple. It was also the only explanation Ivy had time to offer.

On the stern launching deck, the fourth boat was still in its cradle. Ivy checked the portable fuel gauge and the control pendant. There was enough fuel to run south, but the release system required a key. She remembered seeing the key on a lanyard in a red emergency box near the davit, and she smashed the plastic cover with a metal cleat. Her hands were steady until she found the slot empty.

A shadow fell across the deck.

Garrick stumbled through the stairwell door, one hand pressed beneath his ribs. Blood had soaked the side of his white shirt. Gideon was behind him, firing toward the passage, trying to hold off a man Ivy could not see.

“Get him off this boat!” Gideon shouted.

Garrick caught the railing. His face had gone gray beneath his tan. When he looked at Ivy, surprise flashed through the pain.

“The waitress,” he said.

“The waitress who told you your crew was fake.”

He stared at the empty key slot, then pulled a small brass key from the pocket of his jacket. “Silas gave me this for the emergency locker. Will it work?”

Ivy tried it. The lock clicked.

“Apparently,” she said. “Get in.”

Garrick's mouth opened as if to object. Another round hit the metal rail beside his shoulder, throwing up a spray of sparks. He climbed aboard without speaking.

Gideon moved toward the launch, his left arm hanging uselessly. Ivy saw that he'd been shot too. He shook his head.

“Someone has to keep that door closed.”

“Come with us,” Garrick ordered.

Gideon's expression changed. Not into fear, but into something like grief.

“Not this time, boss.”

He shoved the stairwell door shut and dragged an equipment cart across it. Ivy lowered the boat while Garrick lay against the center console. The davit jerked. Above them, the yacht's engines began to roar. Somebody was turning the Lucrezia toward open water, where there would be fewer witnesses.

As the launch touched the surface, a shot tore through its windshield. Ivy hit the emergency release and the hooks disengaged. She turned the ignition, feeling an old, familiar vibration move through her hands. The engine coughed once and caught.

“Hold on,” she told Garrick.

He attempted a laugh and managed a strained breath. “To what?”

“Anything that doesn't bleed.”

She pushed the throttle forward. The bow rose, and the launch shot away from the yacht just as another volley struck the water behind them.

The first pursuit boat appeared from the port side. A second came from behind a distant marker. A third emerged from beneath the stern of the Lucrezia, small and quick, with two armed men under its windshield. Ivy understood the arrangement instantly. The attack had been designed with an escape route, but not for Garrick. The attackers intended to leave only after confirming that their target was dead.

A bullet punched through the padded seat beside her. Garrick tried to raise himself, then collapsed with a sharp gasp.

“Lie down,” Ivy said.

“I can shoot.”

“You can barely breathe.”

“I know this bay.”

“So do I.”

He glanced at the compass, then at the way she handled the throttle. “You're a yacht server.”

“Today.”

She swung the bow toward the eastern shoals, away from the wide channel. The men pursuing them had faster boats and more horsepower, but they were following the obvious route toward shore. Ivy steered instead for a broken line of channel markers standing in pale-green water. She knew what the color meant: shallows, sandbars, and narrow passages where a vessel drawing too much water could wreck its propeller.

Garrick's blood was spreading across his shirt. His left hand had begun to shake. He needed a hospital, not an adventure through the flats.

“I need your belt,” Ivy told him.

He gave her an incredulous look.

“Not for what you're thinking. I'm going to use it to secure a pressure dressing.”

She pulled a clean towel from a storage hatch, folded it into a thick pad, and pressed it against the wound. Garrick swore, his whole body tightening.

“Good,” she said. “If you can complain, you're still with me.”

“You don't seem impressed.”

“By a man getting shot because he trusted the wrong employee? Not particularly.”

The flatness of her answer silenced him.

She kept pressure on the dressing while steering with her other hand, then made him hold it in place. It was a compromise, not adequate medical care, but the nearest legitimate rescue crew was still miles away. She activated the launch's emergency radio and called a distress message with their approximate position, the nature of Garrick's injury, and the fact that they were under armed pursuit.

A voice crackled in reply. It sounded distant, but real.

“Vessel calling distress, repeat your identification.”

“Auxiliary launch from Lucrezia. Two persons aboard. One gunshot wound. We are being pursued by armed boats.”

Static swallowed the response.

A pursuing vessel surged closer, throwing spray across their wake. Ivy lowered the throttle for half a second, watched the nearest pursuer gain on them, and then cut sharply between two markers. The launch skimmed through water shallow enough to reveal the mottled seabed. The larger boat behind them tried to follow.

Its engine screamed. The hull struck bottom with a terrible scraping impact, and the pursuer lurched sideways.

One down. Two remained.

Ivy had not been on a rescue launch in three years. The last time she'd operated one, she had been looking for her brother among the wreckage of a collapsed port crane. She had held the wheel with the same hands, under a sky that looked almost identical, while believing she might reach Wesley before his life changed forever.

She had never stopped hearing the sound he made when the rescue crew lifted him from the water.

“Why do you know how to do this?” Garrick asked weakly.

“My father ran a marine rescue service,” she said. “I learned to read a channel before I learned to drive a car.”

“Your father?”

“Dead.”

He watched her for a moment. “I'm sorry.”

The words arrived without the practiced sympathy Ivy heard from wealthy people when they needed to seem human. She did not have time to decide what that meant.

The second boat closed from the west. Ivy could see the muzzle of a weapon through the spray. Ahead, a low causeway crossed the water, its concrete columns forming a series of dark openings. She knew a narrow service passage beneath it where the depth changed sharply at the edge of an old dredged channel. Years ago, her father had made her steer through it at low speed until she could do so without looking at the chart.

Now she was approaching much too fast.

“I need you conscious for another five minutes,” she told Garrick.

“That's a very specific request.”

“Can you manage it?”

He looked toward the boats behind them, then back at her.

“For a woman who earns eighty-five dollars a shift,” he said, “you give expensive orders.”

“I'm charging you overtime.”

He almost smiled.

The launch entered the shadow beneath the causeway. Ivy cut the throttle at the last possible moment, turned into a narrow strip of deep water, and let the boat glide under the concrete roof. The second pursuer took the outer opening and vanished on the opposite side. The third followed their wake, but at a speed its pilot could not correct. Ivy heard a violent scrape, followed by shouting.

Then the launch was through, racing toward a cluster of low mangrove islands.

She tried the radio again. A rescue dispatcher answered with clearer instructions: keep moving toward the designated rendezvous and watch for law-enforcement vessels. Ivy gave their position as accurately as she could.

Garrick's eyes fluttered.

“Stay awake,” she ordered.

He caught her wrist with surprising strength.

“Silas,” he whispered. “He knew I would take that launch.”

Ivy glanced down. “What?”

“The key.” Garrick struggled to swallow. “He put it in my jacket himself.”

The revelation landed with the force of another gunshot. A planned escape route, one fueled boat, a key delivered to the intended victim. They had not broken free of the ambush.

They had followed its script.

Ivy looked at the fuel gauge. It was dropping much faster than it should have.