Read Chapter 15: The Package

The storm had passed by the time the Sea Serpent limped into the lee of a low, scrub-covered key. Cruz’s boat—what was left of it—listed against a sandbar a quarter mile off, its mast snapped and hull stove in. Mack killed the engines and let the anchor chain run out with a groan. The deck was quiet except for the hiss of waves against the hull and the slow drip of water from the rigging.

He stood at the rail, Jake’s knife heavy on his belt, and watched the wreck. No movement. No lights. Cruz was either dead or gone inland, and neither option made Mack feel any better.

“Rosa, get the tender ready,” he said without turning. “Abigail, you’re with me.”

Rosa paused at the hatch, her face half in shadow. She didn’t argue. She hadn’t argued much since the betrayal—she just did what he asked, and that silence cut deeper than any shouting match could have.

The tender carried them across the chop in under five minutes. Mack beached it on the narrow strip of sand and waded ashore, Abigail close behind with the waterproof case slung over her shoulder. The island was little more than rock and thorn brush, but at its center, wedged between two limestone outcrops, lay the wreck of Cruz’s stolen boat. She had grounded hard going in. The hull was split wide, and the cabin was open to the sky.

Mack climbed aboard. The deck was slick with seawater and something darker. He found two bodies below—Cruz’s men, both dead. Their eyes were wide, mouths open, as if they’d seen something that had peeled the sanity out of them. No wounds. No blood. Just the look.

Mack had seen that look before. On Liam’s face before he’d gone over the rail. On the faces of Cruz’s crew back on the rock where they’d found the package, before the ghosts had taken them in earnest.

“He’s not here,” Abigail said, stepping over a coil of loose line. She moved toward the quarterdeck, where Cruz’s sea chest sat cracked open and empty. “The package?”

“Gone with him.” Mack spat over the side. “He’s running on foot. Can’t have gotten far.”

“Can’t swim far, either.” She looked past him toward the open water. “Unless he had another boat.”

Mack’s jaw tightened. “Let’s check the other side of the island.”

They found Cruz’s tracks in the mud—boot prints, stumbling, heading inland. Then they found the satellite phone, crushed under a rock. Then they found the second set of footprints, smaller, booted, heading back toward a cove on the far side. A skiff sat beached there, engine still warm.

“Alvarado,” Mack said. “The lieutenant ran out on Cruz before the ghosts hit. Must have circled back.”

“And Cruz?”

Mack scanned the cove. A faint trail of blood led from the waterline to the skiff, smeared on the hull like a handprint. “He made it. Or someone dragged him aboard.”

Abigail knelt by the sand, studying a third set of tracks—bare feet, long strides. “He wasn’t alone.”

The crawl of unease moved up Mack’s spine. He pulled the satellite phone from his pocket but found only static. The storm had chewed the sky, and whatever signal this godforsaken rock had ever had was gone.

“The package,” he said. “Cruz took it to sell. Alvarado took it to hide. Either way, it’s moving north.”

They left the island twenty minutes later. Back on the Sea Serpent, Mack unlocked the cabin and emptied the contents of the sealed package onto the table for the first time—the one they’d pulled from the wreck of the Santa Catalina, the one Cruz had carried off and then somehow lost in his mad flight across the island.

Abigail stared at him. “You had it?”

“Found it in Cruz’s abandoned chest,” Mack said. “He must have stashed it before the ghosts came for his crew. The man never let go of anything he thought was valuable.” He pushed the canvas-wrapped bundle across the table. “And neither am I.”

Abigail sat down, her fingers trembling as she unwrapped it. Inside was a leather-bound logbook, copper inkwell-dried and cracked with age, and a brass sextant case lined with green felt. Nestled beside them lay a folded set of naval charts, marked with latitude and longitude notations in a precise hand.

“Admiral John Pimm,” she read, flipping to the first page. “Royal Navy, West Indies Squadron, 1782.”

“The captain Blackwood betrayed,” Rosa said from the doorway. She leaned against the frame, arms crossed, not quite meeting Mack’s eye. “The log mentions him.”

Abigail nodded slowly. “There are annotations in the margins about a delivery to Pimm. Blackwood was ferrying these instruments and his journals north. He was meant to hand them over to Pimm at a rendezvous—to prove that another officer, someone inside the Admiralty, had sold out the convoy routes to the Spanish.” She flipped further. “The delivery was never made. The Santa Catalina went down before Blackwood could get here.”

“Here where?” Mack asked.

She traced the chart with her finger. “Bermuda. There was a naval outpost there, Dockyard. Pimm’s last known posting.” She looked up. “If Blackwood never completed the delivery, the curse has no closure. No judgment. No proof of who betrayed him or who he had to become to survive it.”

“So the curse lifts only if someone finishes the job,” Mack said slowly. “Deliver this to a dead admiral’s outpost. Three hundred years after the fact.”

“That’s what the journal implies.” Abigail closed the cover. “And who’s the courier?”

The question hung in the air. Mack felt the weight of Jake’s knife against his hip, the ghost of his partner beside him every time he turned his head too fast.

“That’s the thing about curses,” he said. “They never pick the one who’s ready.”

Rosa stepped into the light. Her voice was low, careful. “Bermuda’s a thousand miles northwest. The tide window’s three days out. We push hard, we might make it.”

Mack didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. Not yet.

“We’re not chasing Cruz anymore,” he said. “We’re finishing Blackwood’s errand.”

He lifted the brass sextant from its case. It was heavier than it should have been, colder too. When he tilted it toward the lamp, something moved in the polished glass—a silhouette, maybe, standing behind him in the reflection with its hand on his shoulder.

He set the instrument down quickly. His hand was shaking.

Abigail watched him with quiet concern. “Mack?”

“I’m fine.” He wasn’t. “Plot the course to Bermuda. Full speed.”

The Sea Serpent gathered way at dusk, leaving the wreck behind as the sky turned bruised and violet. Mack stood at the helm, the wind salted and cold across his face. In the cabin below, the logbook sat open on the table, its final page marked with a single, repeated word written in the admiral’s own hand, pressed so hard the ink had torn the paper:

*Delivered.*

Not yet, Mack thought. Not yet.

But the gold was in the hold, the ghosts were in the wind, and somewhere behind him in the wheelhouse glass, a figure in an old coat stood watching the horizon with eyes that had been patient for three hundred years.