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  Then she heard it, the sound of pounding footsteps approaching at a run, and took a deep breath. But when a crew uniform and a blond head came into view, she almost cried.

  “Thank God!” Tiffany stood, and when Matt reached the side of the boat she offered a hand to help him.

  “No, don’t touch me,” he panted. One arm was in a sling he’d fashioned from what looked like piece of a singed tablecloth. He was banged up pretty badly, bleeding and bruised, and his clothes were torn.

  “Bridget?” Ryan asked, and Matt shook his head.

  “She didn’t make it.” His voice was too loud; he shouted even though he was standing close to Ryan. “I looked as long as I could …”

  “We have to go,” Diana said, and it was the truth. They were out of time.

  “I said I wouldn’t leave without him,” Jenner said, and gripped the side of the lifeboat as she began crawling out.

  Tiffany grabbed her and hauled her back in. “Keep your ass here,” she said sharply. “We don’t have time for this kind of shit.”

  The blast from the sports deck made everyone duck. Diana screamed, and a fireball shot into the air. From the aft end of the deck, there was another explosion that took out the lifeboat station there, as well as the people who were manning it. The heat of the fire reached them in a stinking wave and the lifeboat they were sitting in shook violently. Diana began to lower it.

  “No,” Jenner said, sobbing. “Wait!” Diana looked at her, hesitated for a few precious seconds, then began lowering the boat again. Jenner jumped up, but Ryan grabbed her hand and pulled her back down. He held that hand tight. She didn’t know if that strong hand was meant to keep her in place or offer comfort.

  The lifeboat lowered in slow, jerky movements. Just as it sank below the railing, she saw him, coming at a dead run. “There he is!” she shrieked, and Diana hesitated again. The lifeboat jerked to a stop.

  Cael didn’t hesitate. He literally dove over the rail and into the boat, looking for all the world like some sort of rabid James Bond, tuxedoed, singed, sweating. Jenner grabbed him and held on tight, ducking as low as possible as yet another explosion rocked the upper decks of the ship.

  —

  LARKIN TRIED to suck in air, but there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen. The burning sensation in his arm was bad enough, but his knee, or what had been his knee, was excruciating. He wouldn’t have to endure the pain for much longer, though. Sitting propped up on the floor of the closet, he listened with more satisfaction than pleasure to the first explosion. He’d had to set the timers separately so there would be a few seconds, perhaps even a minute or two, between explosions, but he didn’t have long to wait.

  Another explosion sounded, and he imagined the fire racing across the deck, fed by chemical accelerant, feeding on everything and everyone in its path. He closed his eyes. There was the third explosion, and the fourth, which seemed to be the one in the theater below, as it felt more distant, rumbling from beneath his seat in a kitchen closet. He could feel the heat from encroaching fires, heard the crackle and pop of the burning ship, as well as a scream in the distance, and still the bomb he was all but sitting on hadn’t yet exploded.

  He waited. One moment. Two. And then, in a rage, he moved the boxes under which he’d hidden the bomb. It ticked away, inert, the timer showing an hour yet to go. An hour! He stared at it in disbelief. He couldn’t have set it wrong. Someone had seen him, had come back and changed the time. He didn’t make mistakes like this.

  If he’d stayed in the Fog Bank he’d be dead now, blown up in an instant as he’d planned. He wouldn’t be in this pain. He’d have simply disintegrated, the way he’d planned. Instead he was stuck here, almost vomiting with pain, waiting for a release that hadn’t happened yet. He yanked at the wires on the bomb beneath him, hoping to make it explode. Instead, the timer simply stopped blinking. Nothing happened.

  The heat around him was building to a suffocating level. Cursing, he dragged himself up, tried to stand, but his shattered knee collapsed under him. He howled in pain, rolling on the floor. Finally, panting, he began pulling himself along. He found his gun and stuffed it in a pocket. Searing pain licked at his foot and he looked around in horror to find his shoe on fire. Screaming, he beat at the shoe, then finally took it off and hurled it away. His hands burned, his foot burned. His leg and arm were nothing but agony.

  With furious, single-minded purpose, he dragged himself out of the kitchen and onto the deck, where flames were leaping into the night sky. He managed to reach the railing and looked below, where a large number of lifeboats filled with people floated on the ink-black ocean. Not everyone had made it out, he had that satisfaction, but this was hardly the spectacular event he’d planned.

  Fire raced across the aft deck toward him. He turned, suddenly afraid in the face of that unnatural flame, but fire raced at him from that direction, too.

  The bastards. The fucking bastards. They were going to live! After all his careful plans, they were going to live and instead of going out in a blast he was going to burn. He hated them, he hated them all. Pulling out the pistol, he draped himself against the rail and began firing blindly at the lifeboats, at the water, at anything and everything. The flames reached him again, and he screamed.

  It hurt. It hurt everywhere, worse than he’d ever imagined, and for what seemed like a very long time … he suffered.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  THE NIGHT WAS LIT BY THE RAGING FIRE THAT CONSUMED the listing Silver Mist. Soon it was obvious that no one could possibly be left alive on the ship. No one could’ve survived the blasts and the resulting fire that swept through the boat so quickly.

  Cael sat and watched the red reflections dance on the ocean’s black surface. He was silent, furious … and deeply grateful that he and so many of the others had made it off that damn ship. Jenner sat next to him as the lifeboat rocked gently her head resting on his shoulder, her arm around his waist. They held each other. Tears dripped down her face, tears for Bridget, as Matt explained how he’d looked for her, how he’d stumbled across so many bodies in the areas damaged by the initial blasts.

  Ryan searched the boats for Faith, who was easy to spot, even at a good distance, with the emergency lighting on each boat. She was standing, as Ryan was, searching for him. When she saw her husband Faith waved, blew a kiss, and then sat. Even from a distance Cael saw Faith then drop her head in her hands and sob—in relief, in pain, in sorrow.

  Tiffany and Sanchez were comparing weapons, but he could see that it was a defense mechanism, as they were both strongly affected by all they’d seen but were reluctant to let their feelings show. After telling them about Bridget, usually happy-go-lucky Matt sat alone with his head down, silent.

  A couple of crew members eventually fell asleep in the lifeboat, exhausted.

  Jenner watched them all. She looked around at the people she’d come to know so well. If it hadn’t been for them, the carnage would have been a lot worse. They had found out what Larkin was up to, they’d started the evacuation early, and, ignoring the danger to themselves, they had set about finding and disarming as many of the bombs as possible, as well as tracking Larkin down.

  She’d spent six years trying to blend in with the Palm Beach crowd, but it wasn’t happening—not because of anything they did, but because of something inside herself. She’d been looking for the place where she fit, and Palm Beach wasn’t it. Why else did she change her hair color so often? Subconsciously, maybe, she’d thought that if she changed herself enough she would find the Jenner who belonged.

  Screw that. She wasn’t going back. She knew where she belonged now.

  She looked up at Cael and said, “I want to do what you do.”

  It wasn’t easy to rattle Cael Traylor, but she’d succeeded with that one. His eyebrows went up, then snapped down as he frowned at her. “What? You’re not serious—”

  “I am.” She sat up, her gaze steady in her sooty face. “I took judo lessons awhile back; I’m not ve