Chapter 6: The Long, Cold Dark
He was faster and heavier than I was, but he underestimated the feral, unstoppable rage of a mother defending her child.
When Victor reached out to grab my throat, I didn’t recoil. I drove the heavy heel of my deck boot down onto his instep with all my weight. He roared in pain, stumbling, and I swung the heavy, brass-cornered marine binoculars resting on the aft table straight into the bridge of his nose.
Bone crunched. Blood erupted across his mouth and chin.
“You miserable bitch!” he bellowed, spitting crimson. He lunged again, abandoning all restraint, tackling me violently against the stern lifeline.
The wire cable bit brutally into the small of my back. Sophie screamed, a piercing, shattered sound that tore through the storm: “Daddy, stop! Please, Daddy!”
Victor didn’t even look at her. With cold, calculated brutality, he grabbed my wrists, peeling my fingers off the safety rail.
“She was never part of the future I wanted!” he hissed directly into my face, his breath reeking of blood and bitter wine.
With a massive heave, he shoved us backward.
Gravity vanished. The horizon spun into a gray blur. The icy shock of the Atlantic struck us like a concrete slab.
The water was black. The force of the drop plunged us deep into the freezing, pressurized dark. The cold was instantaneous and agonizing, driving needle-like spikes into my temples, paralyzing my chest. Every instinct screamed to open my mouth and gasp, but I clamped my jaws shut.
Find her. Find her.
My flailing hands brushed against coarse nylon. Sophie. Her arms were thrashing blindly. I locked my fingers into the straps of her life vest, kicking my legs with frantic, agonizing strokes toward the faint, diffuse light above.
We breached the surface, gasping, choking on water and foam.
“Breathe, Sophie! Breathe!” I sputtered, pulling her head up onto my shoulder.
Twenty yards away, the Sea Phantom was already turning. The twin screws churned the dark water into white froth as Victor swung the bow around. For one horrifying second, I thought he was going to run us down. But as the yacht drifted broadside, I saw him standing at the stern rail, wiping the blood from his broken nose with a white handkerchief.
He looked down at us struggling in the violent, five-foot swells.
He didn’t throw a line. He didn’t drop the life raft. He merely pulled his phone from his pocket, made a deliberate gesture of checking the time, and then walked back inside the climate-controlled cabin.
The engines roared. The yacht surged forward, cutting through the chop, its stern wake slamming into us, pushing us further out into the vast, empty Atlantic.
Within two minutes, the white hull was nothing more than a pale ghost in the gathering squall. Within five, we were entirely, terrifyingly alone.
The silence that followed was worse than the roar of the engines. There was only the rhythmic, merciless hiss of the ocean and the sound of my daughter’s ragged, shallow breathing.
“Mommy…” Sophie’s voice was barely a whisper, her lips already turning an alarming shade of lavender. “My fingers… I can’t feel them.”
“Look at me, Sophie. Look at Mommy’s eyes!” I commanded, treading water frantically, pressing her small body against my chest to share every ounce of my fading body heat. The cold was creeping inward, turning my legs into lead, deadening my fingers until I could barely tell if I was still holding her life vest.
“Stay awake, baby. Sing with me. Remember the song from the car?”
“I’m… so sleepy, Mommy…”
“No! No sleeping! ‘Row, row, row your boat…’ Sing it, Sophie! Sing it for Mommy!”
My voice cracked, swallowed by the rising wind. The waves crested over our heads, forcing us under, spitting us back up. My core temperature was plummeting. Hallucinations flickered at the edges of my vision—I thought I saw my father standing on the water, his hand outstretched, telling me to rest.
No. Not yet. Not until that monster pays.
Suddenly, beneath the dark surface of the water, a rhythmic pulse of emerald light flashed from Sophie’s vest.
The waterproof satellite beacon had engaged. The signal was flying upward through the clouds, bouncing off orbital relays, screaming our coordinates to the world.
Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen. My legs were no longer responding; I was merely floating on the buoyancy of my own vest, my chin slipping beneath the foam with every swell. My grip on Sophie was slipping.
Please, I prayed into the howling dark. Not her. Take me, but let her live.
Then, cutting through the thunderous roar of the sea, came a sound that didn’t belong to the ocean: the rhythmic, deafening thwack-thwack-thwack of turbine blades beating the air into submission.
A blinding column of daylight split the darkness from above.
A high-powered searchlight pinned us in a brilliant white circle. Through the stinging spray, I looked up to see the massive, iconic orange-and-white silhouette of a Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter hovering fifty feet above the waves, kicking the sea into a hurricane of mist.
A figure in a black drysuit dropped from the hoist cable, plunging into the ocean twenty feet away, swimming toward us with powerful, dolphin-like strokes.
Strong, gloved arms wrapped securely around Sophie and me.
“I’ve got you! Coast Guard Rescue!” a voice shouted over the rotor wash. “You’re safe, ma’am! I’ve got your baby!”
As the hoist harness lifted us out of the freezing grave Victor had chosen for us, I looked down one last time at the black water below.
The ocean had failed him. And now, the storm was coming for him.
