The angry sea is an adversary of mine. There's an unspoken agreement between us. When it's howling and tossing my boat around on twenty-foot swells, it's trying to kill me. It's understood. I'm gambling on fate when I come into its house. I'm rolling the dice with my life, wagering that I can steal enough of the sea's treasure before it swallows me whole. I've done it successfully for years, despite watching men on my crew lose their footing and sink below the icy surface, never to be seen again. Yeah, I've battled angry seas successfully until tonight.

This is a new kind of storm—the one inside me for Ursula....