'I need to live and tell the management that the earthquake caused severe damage here!' Kristina thought as she swam. 

With Kristina's life depending on it, the moment her fingers touched the edge of the shelf, her willingness to fight for her life doubled. At this second, with the shark closing in, her fingers slipped.

The edges of the uppermost part of the shelves were too smooth that with Kristina's wet fingers, slipping was the next big possibility. But with a twelve-foot great white shark in two, which was also out for her flesh and blood, Kristina knew that the moment she fell back to the waters, she would be good as dead.

A couple of moments ago, Kristina did not want to die because she was a coward who was plainly afraid of facing her sister; now, the game changed. She was indeed a coward, but she was not irresponsible. She was one of the underwater patrol team that was in-charged of security, and the twelve-foot great white shark was a perfect example of a security breach for her.

'The hell will I die!' Kristina gritted her teeth as she screamed those words in her mind. 

The moment her right hand slipped from the shelf, her left hand made its way to compromise from the lack of support from her right hand. With a pounding heart that muted the alarming sound of Lucas's yells of warning at the back of her mind, veins protruded from Kristina's neck and forehead as she lifted her legs from the cold touch of water.

"Fucking raise your legs, you idiot!" 

Lucas, who was leaning at the edges of the crate with his knees down and palms hitting the water in an attempt to draw the shark's attention, screamed his lungs out when the twelve-foot great white shark closed the distance to the flailing woman.

The shelves shook from the weight that Kristina added from the other side. Under the water, the shelves' base trembled, eliciting a screeching sound due to the friction of the metal shelves' base against the tiled floor. Lucas saw the shaking of the frames, which Kristina failed to see. He knew that one nudge from the gigantic fish would flip the freaking shelves that she was hanging on!

"Are you a fucking worm, woman?" Lucas tugged his wet hair upon seeing the shelves waver. 

"Jesus! Stop moving your goddamn ass, or I swear I'll spank the living daylights out of you!" His fingertips barely touched the water as his left hand held his body in balance on the crate he was situated while his right hand splashed the water, a failing attempt to draw the attention of the twelve-foot shark away from Kristina.

Kristina was too focused on staying alive upon Lucas's frantic sound. She failed to see the ashen face of the man she dubbed as the devil incarnate in her mind ever since she met him and his minions.

She needed not to look behind her to know that the gigantic human-eating fish was out to strike her legs off. The sound from the quick parting of the seawater was a telltale sign for Kristina that the freaking fish was closing the distance between them.

"Ugh!" Kristina's face reddened when she raised her right arm and anchored her right arm to the other side of the shelves' edge to balance the swaying array of frames she was holding on to as if she was some Koala.

"Watch out!"

Lucas's yell made Kristina flinch as she raised both of her legs.

"Aaah!"

Kristina could not help but scream when she looked down and witnessed what had happened a few inches below her. The moment both of her feet escaped the clutches of the chilling water, the razor-like teeth of the enormous fish missed her feet by only a hairbreadth away; this scene elicited a gasp of horror from her. 

Every nerve of her body rushed backward, or so she thought she felt the moment she witnessed the death-defying scene of her legs from the death trap of a gigantic white-tipped shark commonly known as a great white shark.

Kristina clutched the edges of the shelves as if her life depended on it – in a way, it certainly did. She clenched her jaws to stop her teeth from clattering, not from cold nor from fear to be eaten most painfully but from the fact that with her death, she would be unable to do her job, which was to protect Poseidon Hotel from the horrors of the waters. Technically, a shark was a part of the 'water' part of the contract, so she needed to live and kill the damn fish.

'But how?' Kristina thought painstakingly. 'Certainly not from my position right now.'

"It's leaving."

The voice of Lucas snapped Kristina from her reverie; a thought suddenly hit the back of her head. Though the flow of ideas was not the only thing that seeped through her mind, she remembered the heat and the veil of comfort that washed her the moment that she almost lost her breath in ruins. She would not have expected that Lucas, a Russian mob leader, would save her of all people! 

That Lucas!

His crooked nose and his pair of sharp-looking black eyes would seemingly make her feel whenever he looked at her as if she was an infant in front of a battlefield, stripping her off from all the defenses that she thought she had.

Lucas's tattoos that peeked around his nape and arms, which hid scars that had seen worse days, his raven locks that complement his perfectly carved bushy brows that always wrinkled every time he found something was detesting from his men's works, all of these came flooding inside her restless mind along with the fact that an apex predator was swimming luxuriously around the room.

With the doors opened, one could tell that they came from the hatch and got washed up with them. Kristina remembered what Rogelio said when they were still at the ruins, he had said frantically that he saw some shadows, which she dismissed as Rodolph the Mako shark or just a figment of imagination.

How wrong she was. Kristina could only hope that Rogelio, Bernardo, and Sebastian were able to stir clear from the twelve-foot great white shark whose fin still encircled the room Kristina and Lucas were trapped in.

'Wait. No one says that we should not kill the freaking man-eating fish! It means that...'

On cue, Kristina looked back carefully so she could maintain her balance. "You still have the harpoon gun, right?"

Though Kristina could not look at Lucas's complete picture behind her, she could imagine from the silhouette she was seeing through her peripheral vision that he was sitting on a pile of crates situated much higher than her location.

'Lucky bastard,' Kristina grunted at the back of her mind.

Kristina's question followed a series of muffled profanities and a collective clattering of crates. "I might have lost it when we got sucked by the current." Lucas slumped down, his left arm now placed on his knee as his right arm tugged his hair that reached his nape. "Why? Are you going to use it against your pet fish? So much for being tame, huh."

Kristina rolled her eyes upon hearing the sarcasm that dripped from Lucas's deep voice. 

"That freaking shark is not Rodolph. Rodolph is a mako shark, and that freaking fish has small eyes to the side paired with large fins, not to mention the size difference, which is twice the size of Rodolph. That one is not one of Poseidon Hotel's tamed marine animals." She exhaled. "That is a great white, I believe."

"A fucking what? That fucking sharks in Jaws that eat bodies like a piece of goddamn chewing gum, that kind of shark? How on earth is that here?" Lucas raised his voice. 

His voice vibrated the stale air around the submerged room, eliciting a reaction from the twelve-foot great white shark when it swam around the piles of crates as if it was searching for the source of the sound, aka Lucas.

"That movie is an exaggeration. Great white sharks don't usually attack people. Most surfers swim with sharks regularly. That species is mostly indifferent to humans, unlike the bull sharks or the tiger sharks. Great white stir clear from people."

Lucas scoffed. "Yeah right, says the woman who almost got herself killed by the 'indifferent' shark two times in a row."

Kristina was not that vigilant about sharks at all! Shark and human encounters were much more common than anyone thought.

Sharks feared people. 

It was common knowledge for divers like her. 

During many of her expeditions, Kristina had countless encounters with juvenile white sharks. Even when she was surfing or paddle boarding around the coast of Yucatan, Mexico, Kristina could see shark fins from time to time. Many people were not aware, but sharks would not attack unless triggered for her.

Through years of experience as a diver and a surfer, Kristina knew that sharks only went to shallow waters to hunt for stingrays. She was damn sure that there were no inhabitant stingrays in the ruins, and neither did she bleed. 

Then why did the great white show aggression? What happened that it got inside the lowest level of the Poseidon Hotel?

To know the answers to the questions that rained upon Kristina, Kristina knew that she had to go back and see what the hell happened at the chamber where the hatch was situated. But first, she needed to get the hell out of here and kill the damn shark!

If there was one thing that Kristina was scared of aside from the fear that she would not make it out there alive to warn her co-workers, it was the fact that she was stuck with the mob leader.

"Well, do you have a plan? Because I'm out of here." Kristina nudged her head towards her east. 

"See that leaking door over there? That door is a connecting door to the room where the leaking water is coming from. If the great white doesn't kill us, lack of oxygen will certainly do."

The leaking water was located at Kristina's east, situated west of the door where she concluded they had passed through. The door was the storage area that got access to the room where the hatch was.

"I lost the fucking harpoon gun when I saved your ass. Do you think I will scream like a fucking banshee if I shoot that oversized fish instead? For god's sake, use your fucking brain." Lucas murmured, practically growling at Kristina.

"Thank you," whispered Kristina. The two words barely left her chapped lips as they went past through her parched throat.

"Come again?"

Kristina bit her lower lip, her knuckles turning white. For her, it was quite a good thing that her back was against Lucas's direction. She could not let him see the flustered look on her face. And so, Kristina spoke against her better judgment once more, this time a tad louder than the previous. "Thank you for saving me back there."

Biting her lips, Kristina expected Lucas to scoff or throw insults against her, yet it did not come, which was quite odd. She looked back, her gaze locked on his position. Kristina was about to open her mouth when an ear-shattering noise crashed the leaking door, followed by a massive influx of water from the other side, which caused the door to be forced open.

"Kristina, hold on!" Lucas, situated in a much higher and sturdier place, could only yell words of awareness for Kristina, who was practically hanging on for her dear life onto the shelves.

"Aah!" Kristina's knuckles turned white as she pushed herself against the shelf. She turned her head away from the direction where the flood of water was coming in like a storm surge.

The barrage of water came like a tidal wave. To be hit by such a force in an enclosed place, the crates and the shelves rattled upon the contact of objects brought by the surge underwater.

"You have to climb up!" Lucas coughed when an enormous wave hit the crates below him that elicited a splash that hit him like a slap. 

Not minding the screeching of the pile of crates he was on, his eyes kept on averting from Kristina and the lurking shark inside the room. Profanities spewed from his lips upon seeing the shelf shake when hit by the surge, followed by metallic clanking under the water.

"Fucking climb, woman!" Lucas screamed when he saw the shelves she was holding onto, slowly tipping to the side where the shark was swimming.

Kristina looked back behind her. "Shit! Shit! Shit!"

One word that Kristina could describe her situation as she felt the gush of wind at her back, her body flipped midair with the water at her back, and the shelves falling towards her.