Read Chapter 12: A Narrow Escape

The launch chute swallowed him whole.

Jack hit the tin slope feet-first and let gravity do the rest, his coat tearing against a rivet as the world tipped vertical. Above, the henchman’s boots thundered on the companionway—closer, then farther, then lost entirely in the groan of pipework. The chute had been a gamble: a service drop meant for linens and soiled tablecloths, not for fleeing men with stolen notebooks burning against their ribs.

He rode it blind for three heartbeats, then four, his palms scraping raw as he braked against the walls. The air turned hot. Oily. The kind of heat that crawled up your sleeves and settled in your lungs.

The chute spat him out onto a metal grate with a clang that echoed like a gunshot.

Jack rolled, came up in a crouch, and froze.

Engine room. Third class could never afford this view—the boilers ran in neat iron ranks as far as he could see, each one belching steam and light, pistons pounding a rhythm you could feel in your teeth. Men moved between them like ants in hell, shovels swinging, faces lit orange. The *Titanic*’s heart, naked and roaring.

He pressed himself into the shadow of a condensate pipe and caught his breath.

No footsteps. No shouts. The henchman hadn’t followed—or had guessed wrong about where the chute led. Either way, Jack had bought himself a minute. Maybe two.

That was when he saw Vance.

Not the dinner-table Vance, all diamonds and charm and whiskey-toasted toasts to the White Star Line’s incomparable engineering. This Vance stood in a maintenance alcove off the main gallery, half-hidden behind a steam valve the size of a church bell, and he was not smiling.

He was handing a crewman a stack of banknotes.

Jack’s blood went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the North Atlantic.

He couldn’t hear the words, but he could read the shapes of them: Vance’s hand moving flat and low—*calm down, nothing to worry about*—and the crewman’s eyes going wide, shaking his head, one hand raised in refusal. The notes pressed forward again. The crewman glanced left and right, found no witnesses, and took them.

Vance clapped him once on the shoulder. Friendly. A man who had just bought a silence.

The crewman nodded and hurried off toward the forward bulkhead. Vance straightened his cuffs, checked his watch, and walked the other way—toward the stairwell that led back up to the passenger decks.

Jack stayed pressed to the pipe until his heart stopped trying to claw its way out of his throat.

Forward hold. The crewman had been heading for the forward hold, and whatever he was heading there to bury, Vance had just paid to make sure it stayed buried.

He thought of the ledger’s decoded list. Diamonds, yes—but diamonds were just stones until someone moved them. A buyer, a courier, a place to stash the goods until the heat died down. He’d assumed the list was *his* prize, the thing everyone wanted.

But Vance wasn’t chasing the list.

Vance had already moved the stash.

Jack crept along the gallery, keeping low, tracing the crewman’s path. The noise here was a blessing—the thrum of the engines swallowed footsteps and voices alike, made a man invisible if he stayed close to the iron. He passed a ladder leading down to a catwalk strung with warning placards, then a door marked in block letters: *CREW ONLY*.

The crewman was gone. But the forward hold wasn’t far now. If Jack could just get a look, just a single look, he’d know whether the empty space on the list matched a real hole in the ship—

A hand clamped over his mouth.

Jack twisted, instincts screaming, and found himself staring into the wild eyes of a stoker with a coal-smeared face and a pipe wrench raised over his head.

“Quiet,” the stoker hissed. “You ain’t supposed to be down here.”

Jack went still. The stoker’s grip stank of coal dust and cheap tobacco. His thumb pressed against Jack’s jaw like a vise.

“I’m not a passenger,” Jack said, his voice muffled against the man’s palm. “I’m just looking for my brother. He’s in the boiler gang. He didn’t show up for his shift.”

The stoker’s eyes narrowed. “Brother? What’s his name?”

Jack pulled a name from the air. “Callahan. Danny Callahan. Got the scar over his eyebrow.”

It was a guess—but a good one. Stokers worked in gangs, and gang members got hurt, and hurt men got scars. The stoker’s grip loosened a fraction.

“No Callahan on my shift,” he said. “You got no business here. Get back to steerage before I report you.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Jack ducked his head, shuffled two steps toward the ladder, then pointed a trembling finger at the forward bulkhead. “Is that where they keep the overflow? Danny said if he got transferred to the forward hold crew, he’d be down near the mail room.”

The stoker followed his finger. Spat. “Nah, that’s third class baggage. Some cargo in the lower hold, just below the waterline. Used to be empty, now it’s all locked up tight. Bunch of crates came aboard at Southampton with no manifest.”

A flag went up in Jack’s chest.

“No manifest?”

“Yeah, you know—‘private goods.’ Paid a premium for the space.” The stoker shrugged. “Rich folks on this boat got more secrets than the bank of England. You brother’s not down there. He’s not down here. So shove off, and don’t make me repeat myself.”

Jack didn’t need to be told twice.

He climbed the ladder two rungs at a time, his mind racing faster than his legs. Crates without a manifest. Southampton. The same port where Anna Jackson had boarded, carrying a key she never got to deliver.

Vance wasn’t just the buyer.

Vance was the destination.

He emerged onto a crew corridor near the mail sorting room, heart hammering, when the door at the far end swung open. Jack flattened himself into a recessed doorway just as a familiar silhouette stepped through.

Moran.

The man looked tired—the kind of tired that came from a long night of threats and no results—but his eyes were sharp, scanning the corridor with professional precision. Behind him, the henchman from steerage, still out of breath, was shaking his head.

“Lost him in the laundry,” the henchman said.

“You lost a pickpocket.” Moran’s voice was flat. “A one-handed pickpocket who runs like a girl, and you lost him.”

“He went down a chute, alright? The thing spits you out in the engine room. I wasn’t going down there without a mask and a prayer.”

Moran turned his head, and Jack saw his profile lit by the corridor’s dim bulbs. He was thinking. Weighing options. A man who solved problems the way other people solved arithmetic.

“Fine,” Moran said. “He’ll surface. He can’t swim to the bottom of the ship and stay there. Get the steward watch posted outside the dining saloon. When Vance makes his little toast with table eight, our man will be there, playing dress-up.” He paused. “And if he’s not, we tell the captain what we’ve got on him. The theft of a first-class passenger’s property is a hanging matter on this line. I’d rather kill him myself, but I’m not above letting the law do it.”

The henchman nodded. They moved off down the corridor, their footsteps fading into the hum of the ship.

Jack stayed in the doorway until his breath was steady.

The dining saloon. Vance’s dinner. He’d thought the key was the only thing on the table tonight, the only currency that mattered. But Vance had crates in the forward hold worth more than the key. And Moran didn’t know about them.

Jack could use that.

He reached into his coat pocket, felt the folded notebook from Anna’s cabin, and made a decision. He wasn’t just hiding from Moran anymore. He was hunting Vance.

And he’d need Margaret for this one.