Read Chapter 32: The Last Dive

The stars were going out one by one as Mack rowed the dinghy toward the reef break, the sky paling from black to bruised blue. Behind him, the Sea Serpent's running lights blinked a slow pulse. Rosa would be awake soon. So would Jake. Neither of them knew he'd taken the skiff at four in the morning, leaving only a note tucked under the coffee pot: *One last thing. Back before noon.*

He'd lied. He wasn't coming back at all.

The wreck of the Santa Catalina lay in sixty feet of water, canted hard to port on a limestone shelf. Mack had dived her a hundred times, stripped her of treasure, raised her cannons, mapped her beams until he knew her better than any ship he'd ever served on. But this was the first time he'd approached her without wanting something.

The brass helmet sat in a canvas bag at his feet, heavy and cold. Jake's helmet. His father's helmet. The one that had hung on a peg in the shop for twenty years, gathering dust and questions nobody answered.

Mack shipped the oars, dropped the grapnel, and let the anchor line run through his gloves until the hook bit into coral. He checked his tank pressure twice, then pulled the helmet from the bag. It caught the first true light of dawn, a dull orange flash that felt like a signal.

He rolled backward off the gunwale, the water swallowing the sound of the world.

The descent was a slow fall through green gloom. Thermoclines brushed him like cold fingers. Fish scattered ahead of his fins—a school of chromis, a grouper hugging the sand, a moray that watched him pass with its mouth open in a permanent O. The Catalina materialized out of the murk the way she always did: not as a wreck but as a presence.

Except this time was different.

Last dive, Mack had felt her before he saw her—a pressure behind his sternum, a hum in his teeth, the sense of something watching from every dark opening. He'd told himself it was nitrogen narcosis or nerves or guilt. Now he knew better. Now, descending toward the shattered bow, he felt nothing but the cool weight of the water and the gentle tick of his own heart.

No hum. No pressure. No eyes in the dark.

The wreck had gone quiet.

Mack landed on the main deck near the broken foremast, displacing a cloud of silt that swirled around his fins like smoke. He stood there for a long moment, the helmet under one arm, and listened. The ship creaked the way dead ships do, settling, groaning, shifting. But there was no whisper in the current. No caulked-up breath from below. The ghost of Captain Elias Blackwood, the crew he'd dragged screaming into the deep, the rage that had clung to this vessel like barnacles—all of it was gone.

Empty as a tomb that had finally surrendered its dead.

Mack moved forward, slow and deliberate. He'd planned this dive a dozen ways in his head through the night, trying to decide where the helmet belonged. On the quarterdeck, where Blackwood had died? In the captain's cabin, where the curse began? The plan had felt impossible, like choosing where to scatter ashes. But the moment he reached the shattered mainmast, he knew.

He'd spent his first dive on this wreck huddled behind the mast, shaking, his dive light dying, certain he was about to join the bodies entombed below. It had been the lowest point of his life—worse than the Navy discharge, worse than the debts, worse than the night his father died without a word about where he'd come from.

Every end was a beginning. His father used to say that, back when Mack still believed the man was just talking about tides.

Mack braced his fins on the deck and set the helmet down at the base of the mast, nestling it between two corroded iron rings. The brass gleamed against the rust and growth, an alien artifact in a graveyard. He pressed his gloved hand to the domed crown, holding it there until the cold seeped through the neoprene and made his palm numb.

Then he touched his chest where the gold cross had hung for the past week. He'd found it six feet under the sand on his fourth treasure dive, half-covered by the rib cage of a man who'd never made it off the ship. He'd told himself it was salvage, just another artifact to sell. But he'd never let it go, even when the coin dealer offered him a number that would have cleared his fuel bill for a month.

Now he slipped the chain over his head. The cross spun in the water, catching a shaft of light through the torn decking above.

He swam aft, a slow, deliberate path along the spine of the wreck, and let himself drift down through the shattered quarterdeck into the hold below. The darkness was absolute for a heartbeat, then his dive light carved it open. There, in the corner where the hull had collapsed and crushed everything beneath it, lay the remains of Admiral Pimm.

Mack had never found a name plate or a log to confirm it. But he knew. The way the bones lay at rest where other bones were scattered told him this man had been placed there, not thrown. The remnants of a naval coat, rotted to fibrous brown, clung to the ribs. A shattered spyglass lay beneath the folded arms, still intact enough to catch the light.

Mack settled onto one knee in the silt and laid the cross on the Admiral's chest, where the coat was thickest.

"I don't have your name," he said, aloud, the words buzzing against his regulator. "But you're the reason I'm still alive. The reason this ship is at rest. I wish I could tell your family."

He heard nothing back. The wreck held her silence.

Mack stayed kneeling until his knees ached through the suit, then he pushed himself upright and checked his pressure gauge. He had plenty of air. Plenty of time. But the water around him was starting to feel watchful again, and he couldn't tell if it was his imagination or the wreck stirring at his presence.

He swam up through the shattered quarterdeck, past the mainmast and the helmet he'd left there, past the coral-encrusted bow and the hole where Mendoza had ripped the last of the coins from the hull. When he broke the surface, the sun was fully up, burning the fog off the water in long golden ribbons.

He floated in the glassy morning, treading water, and stared at the Sea Serpent in the distance. Rosa was on deck. He could see her silhouette against the sun.

His note had said he'd be back by noon. He wasn't sure if that was true anymore, but he knew one thing for certain: he wasn't done with the Catalina.

The water around the dinghy was flat calm. The seabed, thirty feet below, was dark and still. Mack climbed aboard, stripped his tank, and sat in the bottom of the boat with his hands shaking.

He'd placed the helmet. He'd made his tribute. He'd left the cross on the dead man's chest and said a prayer he didn't quite believe.

But the dive had changed something in him. Standing in the silent wreck, surrounded by the remains of men who'd been trapped by their own greed, he understood that he could not turn himself in to the Navy and expect the curse to follow him into a courtroom. The curse lived in the water, in the gold, in the depths of the Catalina. He'd walked away from the second treasure. He'd let Mendoza take the coins. But the ruin had not come for Mack Donovan because he'd made his peace with being ruined.

He looked back at the wreck site. The water was clear now, so clear that he could see the dark shape of the hull below, resting at last. And even as he watched, he realized what was missing.

The gold.

Mack froze. He scanned the area where the wreck's scattered treasure had once littered the sand—the hoard he'd hauled up in mesh bags, sold, bartered. Gone. But the dive site itself, the area around the hull...

He'd never noticed before. The sand was clean. Bare. There was no leftover gold on the deck, no glint of coin in the cracked hull, no scattered doubloons buried in the silt. He'd thought he'd simply taken it all in his dives. But now he understood.

The Catalina had never been a wreck full of treasure. The treasure had been bait. The real weight of the ship had always been the curse itself.

And the curse had never been in the gold.

It was in him. His greed. His shame. His hunger to prove that he was more than a washed-up diver with a dead partner and a mountain of debt. He'd walked away from the money. He'd walked away from the map. He'd tried to walk away from everything that had made him drown.

But he hadn't drowned. He'd surfaced.

And as the morning sun burned the last of the mist from the water, Mack Donovan looked down at his hands and saw them steady for the first time in months.

The curse wasn't in him either. Not anymore.

Maybe it never had been. Maybe the curse was just the truth he'd refused to tell himself.

Mack pulled the starter cord on the outboard. The engine coughed, caught, and spat a wake of white water as he turned the dinghy toward the Sea Serpent.

On the deck, Rosa raised her hand to shield her eyes. She was smiling.

Mack smiled back, and for one clear, impossible moment, he let himself believe that everything after this would be different.