Heidi’s pulse was a rapid, primal rhythm in her chest as she slipped through the cold, dim corridors of the yacht. The air felt damp, metallic, tinged with the faintest hint of saltwater. She could hear them —those fucking green-eyed predators—closer now. It was as if she could hear their every heartbeat: the wet, hollow thuds of blood pulsing through their veins, their breath coming in sharp, ragged gasps.
Was this what Giselle meant?
Her mind clawed at the thought.
Were these powers hers now? Or was she becoming one of them?
I will never be one of them
She pressed her back against a door, listening.
Footsteps.
Breathing.
The whisper of movement.
They were near.
She eased the door open.
Silence.
The hallway beyond was empty.
Her breath came in measured bursts as she scanned the gloom. Then she saw it—glass catching faint light. An emergency box. Red lettering screamed:
BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
If there was ever a fucking emergency, now is the time, Heidi.
Inside rested a fire axe.
The gun was still at the helm, near Lila’s body. Jacques’ shotgun was on the far side of the deck. This was it.
She didn’t hesitate.
Her fist shattered the glass in a single blow.
The sound rang sharp and loud—too loud.
A low growl answered from the shadows.
They were coming.
She yanked the axe free, the weight of it solid and real in her hands. Her new strength hummed under her skin—terrifying and intoxicating.
Footsteps slapped against metal. Snarls echoed. She planted her feet.
The first green eye appeared.
Then another.
She raised the axe.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on.”
They charged.
With one brutal, sweeping arc, she swung.
The blade tore through flesh and bone in one devastating motion. Two bodies collapsed at once—heads severed clean, rolling across the deck with wet, hollow thuds. Their eyes still glowed as they stared up at nothing.
No triumph came. Only clarity.
She kicked the heads overboard. The ocean swallowed them whole.
Holy fuck, I didn’t know i could do that…
For a moment, there was only wind and water.
Too quiet.
Her skin prickled.
No retreat. No movement.
One was missing.
She turned—
Too late.
The last one dropped from above, claws raking her shoulder as it slammed into her. Pain exploded. The axe flew from her grasp, skidding across the deck.
This one was different. Leaner. Smarter. Its eyes burned with calculation as it smiled.
It rushed her again.
She ducked, surged forward, and smashed her forehead into its face. Bone cracked. It staggered.
Her hand closed around a rusted deck hook.
She drove it upward beneath its jaw.
The scream cut off into a wet choke.
She twisted.
Snapped.
The body went limp.
She shoved it overboard without ceremony, watching the ocean erase it.
Four.
All of them.
Dead.
Only then did the adrenaline drain away.
Her hands shook. Blood slicked her skin. The night felt too large now—too open.
Lila.
The name cut deep.
She moved toward the helm, feet slipping on blood-smeared metal. The navigation lights flickered, illuminating a small, terrible pile.
Lila’s clothes. But where was Lila’s body?
Where the fuck is Lila?
“Oh God…”
Heidi dropped to her knees. Her fingers closed around cold silk soaked in blood. Tears came hard and fast.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry”
The ocean answered with endless black silence.
She pressed her face into the fabric, grief tearing through her like a second wound.
Heidi screamed, the fibers absorbing her pain.
“I’ll find them,” she promised the dark. “All of them.”
Footsteps scraped behind her.
She whirled, eyes blazing.
And then—
Jacques.
He crawled into view, battered and shaken, disbelief written across his face.
She collapsed against him, grief breaking loose in raw, choking sobs. He held on—hesitant but present—as the yacht drifted, dead in the water.
When she finally pulled back, she told him everything.
The monsters.
The deaths.
Lila.
Silence followed—not the peaceful kind, but the kind that rang in the ears after something terrible had finished screaming.
“We fought,” Heidi said at last. Her voice was raw, scraped thin, but steady. “We survived.”
Jacques nodded slowly, as if the words had weight, as if he had to carry them before he could agree. “We need to get the engine running.”
For the first time since the night began, Heidi let herself believe that maybe—just maybe—it would be enough.
“I think we’ll make it,” she said quietly.
The words had barely settled when the engine coughed.
Once.
Twice.
Then a rattling, uneven churn that vibrated through the hull like a wounded animal forcing itself upright.
Jacques exhaled sharply, half a laugh, half a sob. “She’ll hold,” he said, more prayer than promise. “Not pretty—but she’ll hold.”
And then—
“What the fuck happened?”
A door banged open behind them.
Aiofé stood barefoot on the deck, hair a salt-stiffened wreck, mascara smeared beneath one eye, a silk slip twisted crooked on her body like she’d dressed in the dark. She squinted, clearly expecting annoyance, not carnage.
Aiofé took a step forward, then another, the smile slipping as reality finally punched through whatever pile of powder and drink had carried her through the night.
Her gaze landed on the blood first.
Then the axe.
Then Heidi—bare-legged, streaked red, eyes still faintly glowing.
Then Jacques, shirt torn, knuckles split, face hollowed by shock.
She laughed once, sharp and confused. “What in the bloody fuck happend here?”
No one answered.
She took a step forward. Then another.
“Jacques?” Her voice faltered. “Heidi? Why are you all bleeding?”
Her eyes swept the deck more carefully now—the dark smears dragged toward the rail, the dents in the metal, the way the air itself felt wrong.
“I was waiting,” she said, quieter. “You never came back. I thought you’d passed out or—” She scrubbed her nose absently, leaving a faint white smear she didn’t notice. “Christ. I slept through all of this shit?”
Heidi finally spoke.
“The crew is gone.”
Aiofé frowned. How is the fucking crew gone, they work here?”
“All seventeen,” Heidi said. “Missing. No bodies. Not anywhere. Just—gone.”
A beat.
“And Lila,” Heidi added.
The name landed like a gunshot.
Aiofé’s mouth opened. Closed. She looked around again, slower this time, her bravado draining out of her like a bad high.
“Oh,” she said faintly. “Oh, fuck.”
Jacques turned back to the controls as the yacht shuddered forward, the engine sputtering, coughing, refusing elegance but conceding movement. The bow angled toward land, slow and stubborn.
“We’re going,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”
The engine found its rhythm eventually.
Not a good rhythm. Something halting and wounded, a three-legged thing that got where it was going through stubbornness rather than grace. But it held. Jacques had said it would and it did, which felt like the only promise the night had kept.
Aiofé had disappeared below deck without another word, which for Aiofé was the most eloquent thing she could have done. The grief needed somewhere private and she had found it.
Which left two of them.
Heidi stood at the stern watching the wake disappear into dark water while Jacques came to stand beside her. Not touching. Just present, the way he had always been present — solid, slightly infuriating, reliably there when it mattered.
They stood like that for a long time.
The sky was doing something complicated at the edges. Not dawn yet. The hour before dawn, when the dark had exhausted itself and the light hadn’t committed yet and the world existed in a particular shade of blue that felt provisional. Temporary. Like reality itself was holding its breath.
“How long,” Heidi said.
“To harbor?” Jacques looked toward the horizon. “Four hours. Maybe five.”
Four hours.
Four hours of open water and engine noise and the smell of blood that no amount of salt air was fully cutting through. Four hours of standing on a deck that had seen things she would spend the rest of her life trying to organize into something that made sense.
She looked down at the bathrobe. At the dark stains already setting into the white fabric.
“I need to get clean,” she said.
It wasn’t just about the blood. They both understood that.
Jacques nodded slowly. “There’s a hot tub. Upper deck. Still running — it’s on a separate system from the engine.” A pause. “I checked.”
Of course he had.
Of course Jacques Laurent, battered and hollow-eyed and barely upright, had quietly checked which of the yacht’s systems were still functional. Because that was who he was underneath all the charm and the cigarettes and the carefully maintained mystique. A man who checked.
A man who showed up.
“Come with me,” she said.
It wasn’t an invitation exactly. It wasn’t quite a question. It sat somewhere between the two, in that uncharted territory where trauma and exhaustion and the particular intimacy of having survived something unsurvivable together rewrote the usual rules.
He looked at her for a moment.
Then nodded once.
The upper deck was quiet and cold and the hot tub steamed softly against the night air, a small circle of warmth in all that dark. Heidi dropped the ruined bathrobe without ceremony. Jacques turned away briefly while she stepped in, then turned back, and she realized she didn’t have the energy for modesty tonight. Modesty required a kind of self-consciousness she had temporarily lost somewhere in the corridors below.
He shed his destroyed shirt. The bruising across his ribs was dark and spreading.
He winced getting in.
She didn’t comment on it.
The water was very hot and immediately, mercifully, turned pink around her.
She watched the blood leave her skin in slow dispersing clouds and felt something she couldn’t name loosen in her chest. Not healing. Too soon for that. Just the first degree of distance between herself and what had happened. The water doing what water did — carrying things away.
Jacques sat across from her, forearms on the edge of the tub, eyes closed.
For a long time neither of them spoke.
The engine hummed four decks below. The wake spread out behind them into darkness. The sky continued its slow, reluctant transformation at the edges of the world.
“I thought you were dead,” Jacques said finally. His eyes stayed closed.
“I thought you were dead,” she said back.
“When I found you on the deck—” He stopped.
“Don’t.”
“Heidi—”
“Not yet.” Her voice was quiet but certain. “I can’t hold that yet. I’ll fall apart and I need a few more hours before I can afford to fall apart.”
He opened his eyes then. Looked at her across the steaming water with that expression she had come to recognize as the real Jacques — the one that existed underneath the charm and the cigarettes and the carefully curated mystique. The one that only appeared when he had run out of performance.
Sad. Steady. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly fond of her.
“Okay,” he said softly.
She moved through the water toward him.
Not because desire was the right word for what she felt — it wasn’t, not exactly. Not tonight. Tonight it was something older and more fundamental than desire. The ancient human need to confirm through touch that another person was real. That they were warm. That the blood moving through them was still moving.
That the world still contained them.
His hands found her waist under the water. Careful. Asking.
She answered by closing the remaining distance between them.
What happened between them in that hot tub in the hour before dawn was quiet and slow and entirely without performance. No charm. No wit. No carefully maintained mystique on either side. Just two people who had survived the same unsurvivable night reaching for each other in the only language that didn’t require words.
Grief and relief and something that had been building between them for months finally given space in the dark.
Afterward she rested her head against his chest and listened to his heartbeat and thought about nothing for a little while.
Just the water.
Just the engine.
Just his pulse beneath her ear, steady and human and alive.
Alive.
She pressed her hand flat against his chest.
He covered it with his.
Neither of them slept. But they rested, which was close enough.
When the first true light finally broke across the water — gold and fragile and almost offensive in its beauty given everything — Jacques stirred.
“Heidi.”
She lifted her head.
On the horizon, barely visible, the dark smudge of the island.
Home.
She looked at it for a long time.
Somewhere inside her body, in the deepest cellular dark where biology operated without asking permission, two different nights now existed simultaneously. Two different possibilities. An impossible question that wouldn’t reveal its answer for weeks yet.
She didn’t know that.
She only knew the island was there.
And she was still alive to see it. “Let’s go home”
