Read Chapter 24: The Price of Wealth

The words were already leaving his mouth before Mack fully understood what he was doing. "I'm sinking it. All of it."

Rosa stepped toward him, salt-crusted hair whipping across her face. "Mack, that's—"

"I know what it is." He pulled the coat tighter around his shoulders, felt the strange warmth of it pressing against his chest like a second heartbeat. The ghost crew on the deck of the *Santa Catalina* had gone still, their hollow eyes fixed on him. Even the air seemed to hold its breath. "This curse started because a man wanted gold more than he wanted his own soul. I'm not making that trade."

Jake stood at the rail of the *Sea Serpent*, arms crossed, jaw tight. "You sure about this? We didn't come all this way—"

"We came all this way to break a curse. Not to get rich." Mack turned to face his crew, the confession still raw in his throat from earlier. "I've already lost one partner to my bad calls. I'm not losing any of you to my greed."

The trench loomed below them, a dark gash in the ocean floor where the *Santa Catalina* had finally settled after two centuries of wandering. Mack had mapped it on his first dive, marked the drop-off where the reef gave way to nothing but black water. That's where the chest would go. Where it belonged.

He stripped down to his dive gear without another word. The coat he folded carefully and set on the deck beside Rosa's feet. "Keep it safe. If I don't come back—"

"You'll come back." She said it flat, like a fact. Her hand brushed his arm, brief and warm. "You've got debts to pay, Donovan."

He managed a thin smile. "That I do."

The water closed over his head with its familiar cold embrace. Mack kicked downward, following the anchor line that had been set earlier. The chest was still strapped to the salvage sled where they'd left it, gleaming faintly in the beam of his dive light. Gold coins spilled from a crack in the lid—more money than he'd seen in his entire life. Enough to clear every debt, buy back his reputation, set up Rosa and Jake and the others for years.

*Just one handful*, whispered a voice in his head that sounded disturbingly like his own. *One handful and you could—*

He pushed the thought away. Unstrapped the chest and let it drift toward the trench edge. For a moment it hung there, suspended in the green half-light, as if the ocean itself was deciding whether to accept what he was offering.

Mack made the choice for it. He shoved hard, felt the chest tip over the edge, watched it tumble into darkness where his light couldn't follow. The gold was gone.

Something shifted in the water around him. A pressure change, a subtle hum that vibrated through his bones. Mack looked up and saw them—dozens of shapes circling above, barely visible, their outlines shimmering like heat haze. The crew of the *Santa Catalina*, here in the water with him, watching their curse sink into the abyss.

He surfaced with a gasp. The air was different. Cleaner. The heavy, haunted feeling that had clung to the island since their arrival had thinned, like fog burning off with the morning sun. On the deck of the ghost ship, Blackwood's specter stood at the helm, and for the first time, his face held something like peace.

Rosa hauled him over the rail of the *Sea Serpent*. "You did it."

"Not yet." Mack turned to look at the ghost ship, saw the crew fading at the edges, their forms becoming less solid with each passing moment. "But it's working. It's actually—"

The shot cracked across the cove like thunder.

Mack spun. A small motorboat was cutting toward the *Santa Catalina*, bow riding high, spray exploding from the hull. Cruz stood at the helm, rifle in one hand, teeth bared in a grin that belonged on a man who'd just seen his fortune sail past.

"The chest!" Jake shouted, pointing. Cruz's boat was angling for the trench marker, where a coil of rope floated on a buoy—the line Mack had tied to the salvage sled before cutting the chest loose.

Mack's blood went cold. "He can't—the curse—"

"He doesn't care about the curse," Rosa said. "He never did."

They watched helplessly as Cruz's men hauled the line. The sled came up first, empty, and Cruz screamed something Mack couldn't hear. Then one of the men dove, came back up with a second line in his hand—the one attached to the chest itself. Mack had tied both lines. He'd been careful, methodical, wanting to retrieve the chest at a safe distance if something went wrong.

He'd made it too easy.

The chest broke the surface, streaming water, catching the dying light. Cruz threw his head back and laughed. Even from half a mile away, Mack could see the greed distorting his face, turning him into something barely human.

"Stupid bastard," Mack muttered. "He doesn't know what he's just done."

The sky answered.

The clouds came from nowhere, boiling up from the horizon like ink spilled in water. The wind shrieked across the cove, whipping the sea into white-capped fury. Mack grabbed the rail as the *Sea Serpent* pitched hard. In the space of a heartbeat, the day had gone dark as dusk.

"What the hell—" Jake shouted, fighting the wheel.

"Not us," Rosa said, her voice strange. She was staring at the ghost ship. "Them."

The crew of the *Santa Catalina* had stopped fading. They stood rigid on the deck, every one of them facing Cruz's boat, their spectral forms twisted with rage. Blackwood's hands gripped the helm so hard his knuckles showed through his translucent skin. His mouth moved, and though Mack couldn't hear the words, he felt them:

*No one takes what was paid for in blood.*

Lightning split the sky. It struck the water twenty yards from Cruz's boat, sending a pillar of steam into the air. Cruz's men scrambled, shouting, pointing. They tried to turn the boat toward open water, but the waves were already too high. A wall of water rose before them—impossibly tall, black as pitch—and crashed down with the weight of a mountain.

The boat went over.

Mack saw it happen in fragments: Cruz thrown clear, arms flailing, the chest spinning free in the air. One of the men screaming as the hull came down on him. The gold scattering across the churning water, coins glinting like fallen stars before the sea swallowed them whole.

Then the boat was gone. The men were gone. Only Cruz remained, bobbing in the chaos, and a single wave—larger than the rest, deliberate as a judgment—rose up and slammed him under. He didn't resurface.

The storm died as quickly as it had come. The clouds unraveled, the wind dropped, and the sea smoothed itself like a sheet being straightened. Only the bobbing debris of Cruz's boat remained, along with a few boards and a single oar drifting in the current.

No bodies. No chest. The trench had taken back what belonged to it.

"Jesus," Jake breathed. "Jesus Christ."

Mack couldn't find words. He stood at the rail, gripping it until his knuckles went white, watching the spot where Cruz had disappeared. The man had tried to steal a cursed treasure. He'd gotten exactly what he'd paid for.

*And you tried to give it back*, a voice whispered. *That's the only difference between you and him.*

He turned away. The ghost crew was fading again, their shapes becoming thinner, less defined. Blackwood raised one hand in a gesture that might have been a salute. Then the *Santa Catalina* itself began to dissolve, planks losing their form, rigging unspooling into mist.

"Get us into the lee of the island," Mack said quietly. "We'll wait out the night there."

"The wreck?" Rosa asked. "We're going back inside?"

"We're staying safe." He met her eyes. "Whatever storm's coming next, I don't want us caught in the open."

They anchored the *Sea Serpent* in the shallow water beside the half-sunken hull of the original ship, close enough that the broken masts offered some shelter from the lingering swell. The crew moved quietly, subdued, no one speaking of what they'd witnessed. Cruz had been a piece of work, a smuggler and a thief, but watching a man die that way left a weight on the soul.

Mack sat apart from the others, the coat draped over his shoulders. He could still feel its warmth, though fainter now, like a coal burning down. The ghost crew was gone from the wreck, he realized. No pale faces at the portholes. No whispers in the current.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the handful of coins he'd taken on his earliest dives—before he understood what they were, before the curse had fully claimed him. They sat heavy in his palm, gleaming gold in the last light of the fading day.

He should have thrown them in the trench with the rest. But he hadn't. When he'd released the chest, a small part of him—the part that still flinched at the thought of drowning in debt—had kept these back, hidden away like a secret shame.

The warmth of the coat pressed against his chest, and beneath it, he felt the ghost of a pulse he hadn't earned. The curse wasn't broken after all.

It was waiting.