Read Chapter 13: The Chase North

The Sea Serpent’s bow bit into a rolling swell and threw a sheet of spray over the wheelhouse glass. Mack wiped the salt from his eyes with the back of his wrist and held the course, magnetic north by five degrees, the journal’s last legible coordinates burned into his memory like a brand.

Behind him, Rosa stood with her arms crossed, jaw tight, watching the horizon as if it owed her money. Abigail was perched on the chart table, knees drawn up, Blackwood’s journal open in her lap. The pages were water-stained and fragile, but the ink was still dark, still certain.

“You want to tell me why we’re running full throttle into a storm cell?” Rosa said. Her voice was flat. Cold. It had been flat and cold since she’d sold them out, and somehow that made it worse—like she was angry at *him* for surviving her betrayal.

Mack checked the compass again. “Cruz is heading to the same island we are. He doesn’t know the tide window. If we miss it, we wait another month. That’s a month of his men diving the wreck, taking gold, feeding the ghosts more bodies to play with.”

“So we chase him into a squall line.”

“We beat him there.” Mack glanced at Abigail. “What else does the journal say about the approach?”

Abigail turned a page carefully, her finger tracing a cramped handwritten paragraph. “The Siren’s Outcrop. A line of rocks shaped like teeth. He says it’s a graveyard for ships that misjudge the channel.” She looked up. “There’s a note about tides. Lunar. Specific. He says the package must be delivered within an hour of high tide on the night of the full moon, or the ritual won’t hold.”

“When’s the full moon?” Mack asked.

“Three days.”

The silence in the wheelhouse lasted eight seconds. Mack counted them.

“We make it,” he said. “We make it and we stop Cruz before he gets himself killed. He’s carrying the package—the only thing that ends this.”

Rosa finally turned to face him. “And what exactly *is* in that package, Mack? Because I’ve given up my ship for you. I’ve watched a man die. I’ve watched his ghost stand on my deck and speak through his dead mouth. And I still don’t know what we’re hauling to some godforsaken rock.” She stepped closer. “We’ve gone through Cruz, Reyes, Liam’s blood on the boards. But you’ve been holding something back since day one, and I’m done with fragments.”

Mack held her gaze. The hull throbbed beneath their feet. On the aft deck, the remaining crew—four men, two of them newly hired in port—were lashing down gear for the rough water ahead. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded photograph, creased along the middle, the edges soft from years of handling. He handed it to Rosa.

She looked at it. Abigail leaned over to see. It showed two men in wet suits, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning on the deck of an old dive boat. Mack, younger. And beside him, a lean man with sun-bleached hair and a wolfish smile.

“Jake Alvarez,” Mack said. “My partner. We worked salvage together out of Key West for six years. He was better than me. Braver, quicker underwater, could read a wreck like a book.” He paused. “Eight years ago, he took a job off the books. A private salvage operation hunting a Spanish galleon that had gone down in the 1600s. The *Santa Catalina*.”

Rosa’s expression shifted. Not warm, but listening.

“He never came back,” Mack said. “The client claimed his boat capsized in a storm. No body. No wreck. No insurance payout. I spent every dollar I had for two years trying to find him. I pulled markers, called in favors, dove every reef between Cuba and the Caicos. Nothing.”

“And then?” Abigail asked quietly.

Mack turned to the window. The sky ahead was bruising, dark clouds stacked like anvils, the sea starting to show teeth. “And then I found the *Santa Catalina* myself, on a sonar sweep last spring. I went down alone for the first recon dive. And I found something in a silt-filled cabin.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out a chain. On it hung a dive knife in a worn leather sheath. He held it up. “Jake’s knife. His initials are on the grip. I found it in the captain’s quarters, wedged under a floorboard, like someone had hidden it.”

“He dove the wreck,” Rosa said. It wasn’t a question.

“I think he did. Years before I found it. Maybe he found the treasure too. Maybe he took some and thought he could handle the consequences.” Mack’s voice dropped. “Maybe the ghosts took him, and what’s left of him is still down there, watching the boat come and go, waiting for someone to finish what he started.”

Abigail closed the journal. “You think the curse took him.”

“I think if I’d found him, he’d have told me the same thing I’m telling you now.” Mack tucked the knife back under his shirt. “The gold isn’t a find. It’s a net. Blackwood uses it to catch sailors, bind them to his crew, make them sail his ghost ship through time until he can finish his last voyage. If we don’t deliver that package, he doesn’t rest. And neither do we.”

Rosa stared at him for a long moment. The engines growled. A wave slapped the hull and sent a shudder through the wheelhouse. Then she said, “And what was in the package, Mack? What was Jake carrying that got him killed?”

Mack shook his head. “I don’t know. The chest was half-buried in the sand when we found it. Whatever’s inside is sealed in lead and wax. Abigail’s done everything short of cracking it open, but the journal’s clear—it needs to stay sealed until the delivery.”

“So we’re chasing a man across the Atlantic for a box we haven’t opened, to an island we haven’t charted, to save ourselves from ghosts that are already killing our people.” Rosa’s voice was dry. “I’ve had better plans.”

“Me too,” Mack said. “But it’s the only one we’ve got.”

The radar pinged. Abigail looked up from the screen. “Contact. Bearing three-four-zero, about nine miles ahead. Slowing.”

Mack crossed to the radar and leaned over it. A blip sat near the edge of the screen, surrounded by a patch of static that scattered into bands. “That’s the squall line,” he said. “They’re heading straight into it.”

“Why would Cruz run into a storm?” Rosa asked.

“Because he doesn’t know about the tide,” Mack said. “He’s running scared, thinking we’re chasing him. He doesn’t realize the *real* thing chasing him is already aboard his ship.” He straightened. “Or maybe he does. Maybe one of his men took a coin out of the wreck already, and Blackwood’s got a new voice to whisper through.”

Abigail watched the blip fade and flicker in the storm static. “Either way, if he hits those rocks in this weather, he won’t need the ghosts to sink him.”

“Then we beat the storm there,” Mack said. He pushed the throttles forward, and the engines roared in response. The hull lifted and slammed down, sending a shudder through every bolt. Rosa grabbed the rail, bracing herself.

“We could turn south,” Abigail said quietly. “Wait it out, catch Cruz on the far side.”

“We can’t,” Mack said. “Because if Cruz goes down, the package goes down with him. And if the package is lost, we spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders, watching for wet footprints on our decks.” He fixed his eyes on the darkening horizon. “I’m not living like that. Not anymore.”

The squall line loomed ahead, black and swollen, rain falling from its base in gray curtains. The sea rolled underneath them, uneasily, like a sleeping giant turning over. Mack held the wheel as the first winds caught the antenna, making it sing.

Rosa didn’t move from her position. But she didn’t argue either. She just watched the storm swallow the last flicker of Cruz’s boat—and said nothing at all.