My sister ripped my blouse open in front of 20 Navy officers to expose the scars I’d hidden for five years, and my own father looked away—but when a four-star admiral saw my back, she did something that left the entire room speechless…

The lower deck was a nightmare of twisted steel, rising water, and blistering heat.

Elena descended into the belly of the *Resolute*, the water already sloshing around her knees as she reached Deck Four. The concussive blast from Reyes’s demolition had cracked the outer hull seams, and the freezing North Pacific was pouring into the bilges, mingling with hydraulic fluid and oil into a slick, foul-smelling soup.

She forced her way through the narrow, buckled passage that led to Auxiliary Engine Room Two.

The heat hit her first—a thick, suffocating wave of thermal energy radiating from the overloaded auxiliary steam generators. The sound of high-pressure steam escaping from fractured relief valves screamed through the darkness, an exact, auditory replica of the night her life had changed.

Her chest constricted. Her breath came in short, panicked gasps against the rubber of her breathing mask. For a fraction of a second, the darkness flickered, and she wasn't thirty-two years old in tactical gear; she was twenty-seven, in a burning blue service uniform, watching the skin of her hands blister while her sailors screamed her name through the smoke.

*Focus, Alden.*

She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek until the sharp, metallic taste of blood cleared the fog from her mind.

She waded through the waist-deep, freezing water toward the back of the compartment. The manual flood valve wheel was there, painted bright red, bolted directly into the keel plating. It was locked in place with a heavy steel chain and padlock—Mercer’s insurance that no rogue crewmember would sabotage their asset.

Elena raised her rifle, placed the muzzle directly against the shackle of the lock, and fired.

The lead slug sheared through the cheap brass tumblers. She tore the chain away, grabbed the cold iron wheel with both hands, and threw all her body weight into the turn.

*Clang.*

The wheel groaned, rusted in place by years of neglect.

"Move!" she screamed at the metal, her boots slipping on the oily deck. She braced her back against an overhead structural beam.

The pressure against her spine was agonizing. The thick, fibrous scar tissue that stretched from her neck to her lower waist burned as if the steam had returned, the jagged seams of her skin straining against the load. But this time, she wasn't running from the fire. This time, she was the one bringing the ocean.

With a deafening, metallic shriek, the valve broke free.

Elena spun the wheel violently, six full rotations, until the threads slammed into their stops.

Deep beneath her feet, the bottom sea-chests opened. A wall of freezing, green ocean water erupted from the bilges with the force of a hydraulic cannon. It slammed into Elena’s chest, knocking her backward into the flooded deck.

The water rose with terrifying speed—to her chest, to her shoulders, cold and merciless. Above her, the ship’s primary electrical bus shrieked as thousands of gallons of salt water crashed into the high-voltage capacitor banks. A blinding cascade of blue electrical arcs illuminated the flooded chamber, followed by the deep, dying thud of the ship's main power grid collapsing completely.

The screaming missiles on the tactical displays upstairs went silent. The launch sequence was dead.

Elena kicked toward the surface of the rising water, her helmet light cutting through the murky, oily depths. The emergency exit hatch was three feet above her, the water already pressing against the rim. She lunged, caught the lip of the coaming with her fingertips, and hauled herself upward against the suction of the drowning ship.

She tumbled out onto the higher deck, coughing violently, tearing the breathing mask from her face as the water surged behind her, sealing Auxiliary Engine Room Two beneath thirty feet of ocean.