Read Chapter 6: The Second Dive

The water closed over Mack’s head, and the world above vanished into a silver shimmer. The shaft of his dive light cut through the murk as he descended toward the wreck of the *Santa Catalina*, a ghostly silhouette in the trench’s eternal shadow.

His regulator hissed. Cold seeped through his wetsuit, seeping into his bones the way it had since the first coin touched his palm. For a moment, he could almost feel that gold burning against his chest through the dry bag strapped to his harness, as if it had a pulse of its own.

*Don’t be a fool,* he told himself. *It’s just a coin.*

He descended past the broken bowsprit, trailing his gloved hand along the barnacle-crusted hull as he made his way to the main hatch. The wood was rotten, but the iron banding held its shape, a skeletal rib cage of an age gone by. Mack checked his air gauge—plenty—and pulled himself through the gap.

The interior of the *Santa Catalina* was a tomb. Sand drifts climbed the bulkheads like slow tides, swallowing crates and cannonballs alike. A school of silvery fish scattered as his light swept across their path. He didn’t breathe easy until he reached Blackwood’s cabin. A torn and faded flag hung limp above the chart table.

The chest sat exactly where it had been, as if it had been waiting for him.

Colonial-era brass gleamed in the light of his lamp, untarnished despite two centuries underwater. The hinges were clean. Mack paused. That wasn’t right. Everything else on this wreck was a corroded hulk—everything else had surrendered to time.

He knelt before the chest, watching his breath fog the glass of his mask, and ran his fingers along the lid’s edge. The wood was smooth. Warm, almost.

Inside lay what every salvage diver dreamed of: gold. Doubloons, stacked in rows, gleaming like fresh fire. They looked minted yesterday, not minted under Silas Blackwood’s stolen Spanish charter in 1816.

Mack swallowed. His dark voice echoed from the dive computer’s screen: *Air remaining: 142 bar. Time: 18 minutes.*

He reached in and took two coins. The first was smooth, heavy, stamped with the profile of a woman with hair like flame.

The second coin was different. It was old, older still than the others, rough-edged and struck with a matching face on both sides. As his fingers closed around it, something cold ran up his arm—not the water’s chill but something deeper. A thought that wasn’t his own pushed against his mind, a voice like rusted chains: *The count begins.*

Mack yanked his hand back as if burned. The coins clinked together in his palm, and a faint pulse of warmth spread from them, a heartbeat pushing through his glove.

*Stop it,* he told himself. *Stop.*

He shoved the coins into the dry bag, sealed it, and turned. The current had shifted—still, pushing gently through the hull. He rose from the cabin, kicking smoothly toward the break in the deck. One hand on the rim, he launched upward.

His training took over. Light and air bubbles chased each other toward the surface. The wreck fell away beneath him, dissolving into cloud. He checked his depth gauge—decompression was clean for these depths—and kicked steadily, ascending past the last glow of the twisted hull and into the blue.

He broke the surface with a gasp.

The water was choppy, wind coming up from the east. The *Sea Serpent* rolled at anchor, fifty yards off. The sun glinted off her white hull. Tomas at the rail gave him a wave.

Mack spat his regulator, trod water, and waved back.

Then a figure stepped onto the deck from the shadows near the wheelhouse. Tall. Broad-shouldered, wrapped in a cloak of deep, dark cloth. He moved with a stillness that wasn’t human, a jerkiness as if water itself held him, and his face tilted toward the sun.

Black iron key glinting at his belt. A tricorne hat casting a shadow across his eyes.

Silas Blackwood.

Mack’s heart seized. Salt water sloshed into his mouth; he coughed hard, dropped beneath the surface, and came up sputtering. He needed to scream a warning—but the figure was gone.

Tomas still stood by the rail, alone, shading his eyes against the glare. The wheelhouse door swung slowly, just a little, on its hinges. Nothing else moved.

Mack was still choking when strong hands hauled him over the transom.

“Easy, boss.” Pete’s voice was gruff, familiar. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

Mack wiped the water from his eyes. Pete’s weathered face crinkled with concern, then moved aside as someone else approached.

“Marcus?” A woman’s voice. Soft. Familiar.

Mack’s blood went cold.

Pete stepped back, and he saw her. Standing at the rail, bundled in a faded navy coat, blonde hair tucked beneath a beanie. She was older than he remembered—there were lines around her eyes he’d never seen—but that smile was the exact one he’d been searching for for six years.

“Maria?” His voice cracked.

His sister tilted her head and gave him the same look she’d given him when he’d wrecked their father’s truck. The knot in his throat tightened. He reached out—

She flickered. That was the only word for it. A shudder passed through her form, like heat rising off the deck plates on a calm day, and suddenly he was staring at the face of a total stranger. A crew hand he’d hired out of Nassau. The kid was twenty-three, skinny, with a scruff of dark beard. He stared at Mack with wide eyes, then shot a nervous glance at Pete.

“Captain? You okay? You’re… you’re squeezing my arm.”

Mack looked down. His hand was locked around the young man’s forearm with enough force to leave a bruise. He let go like the skin was on fire. “Sorry. I… sorry. Must be the nitrogen.”

“You’re on standard air for this depth,” Pete said, low. “You don’t get narked at sixty feet, Mack.”

*No,* Mack wanted to say. *But you might if you’ve got a ghost riding your spine.*

He turned his back on them, crouched by the deck lockbox, and fumbled with the dry bag. His hands were shaking. He dumped the coins out on the bench—two glints of gold that drew every eye on deck. Pete whistled. Tomas leaned in. The stranger kid looked almost hungry.

Mack’s mind raced. On the wreck, he’d felt the weight of the curse. In the water, he’d seen Blackwood pacing his own deck. And now his sister—his sister—standing there like a promise broken.

The dead didn’t pay. Rosa’s warning bit hard. But Eduardo Reyes was waiting in Nassau. Thirty days. If he paid the debt off now, he’d have breathing room. He could figure out the curse.

But that meant more coins. Maybe a dozen more. Maybe twenty.

He pulled the map case from where he’d stashed it in his dry bag, rolling the chart flat against the rail. His finger traced the route toward the reef’s shallower shelf. There was another hatch—a secondary hold on the port side. If what Abigail had decoded was right, Blackwood had stored a separate cache deeper in the ship’s belly.

He raised his voice. “There’s more. A second cache, below the captain’s quarters. I’m going back down.”

“Mack.” Pete stepped close. “You’re shaking.”

“It’s the cold.” Mack zipped the dry bag shut. “I’ll be fine. Keep the wheel.”

He didn’t meet Pete’s eyes. He couldn’t. Because if Pete looked too close, he’d see it: the secret place in Mack that had started to wonder whether the curse was real, and worse, the part of him that didn’t care anymore.

The part of him that liked the feel of gold in his hand.

He hit the water again without waiting for an answer. The trench swallowed him, and as he kicked downward, the weight of the two coins still lying on the deck of the *Sea Serpent* pulled at his chest like an invisible thread.

But this time, as he neared the hull, he heard it. A chorus of whispers, rising from the sand and the wreck—dozens of voices, all speaking at once.

*Keep taking,* they said. *Take them all.*

Mack’s dive light flickered. Ahead, through the open hatch, he could see the faint glow of the second chest, waiting.