Another wave tries to drive me into the cliff face. I swim harder, muscles already burning from the cold and effort. Eight years of no practice, but my body remembers. Remembers my mother's voice counting strokes. Remembers the rhythm that turns panic into motion.
The current wants me against the rocks. I fight it diagonal, swimming across its pull rather than against it. A riptide lesson from when I was ten, my mother's calm voice explaining how to escape the ocean's grip by working with it, not fighting head-on.
Stroke by stroke, I pull away from the cliff. The shouts above fade. The rocks recede. Still dangerous, still too close when waves surge, but I'm not being driven into them anymore.
The ocean doesn't care about my broken heart. It doesn't care that I've feared it for eight years or that Cesar used that fear as a cage. It just holds me the way my mother promised it would, the way I was too grief-sick to believe.
I swim. Ugly and terrified and alive.
Cesar built his trap out of my own fear, and I walked through it anyway. Whatever comes next—the rocks, the cold, the current—I chose this. I chose the water over the man who thought he knew me.
My mother's daughter. Finally.
28 - Nico
I’ve tracked hostiles through three countries, hunted men across deserts and mountain ranges. Not one second of it prepared me for tracking a woman who doesn’t want to be found because I’m the reason she ran.
The coastal road unfolds like a tactical nightmare. Blind curves, no shoulder, ocean to my right invisible in the darkness. Wind from the southwest at fifteen knots, affects vehicle stability on these turns. My phone sits in the mount, her tracker dot sitting on the edge of the land.
She left this morning and I let her go. Maintained distance, tracked her phone, told myself the surveillance was professional. Not desperate. I watched her dot sit in Little Havana for hours. Then it moved. Fast. A vehicle heading toward the coast.
I called. No answer. Again. Nothing.
That was when I started following her.
The speedometer hits ninety on a straightaway. Distance to target: twelve miles. Time at this speed: eight minutes. Too long. The tracker shows her dot has stopped on the cliffs south of the city. Logan's intel floods my phone: shell company ownership, three layers deep, all tracing back to Cesar Vega's attorney.
Cesar has her.
The property materializes. Gates open, tire tracks fresh in the gravel. I kill the headlights two hundred meters out and approach on foot. My training takes over. Glock drawn, slow breathing, the muscle memory of a hundred breaches. Three targets are visible through windows, likely more inside. Optimalbreach point: kitchen door, blind spot from current positions. The house glows with light. Through windows, I see movement on the terrace. Cesar's muscle, but their body language is wrong. Not calm guards. Men in panic, shouting into phones, gesturing wildly at something.
The cliff.
My blood turns to ice water. My trigger finger twitches. Three targets. Two seconds each. But that's too clean for what they've earned. I'm moving before thought catches up, circling past the panicked men who don't even notice me, straight to the low stone wall at the cliff's edge. Below: darkness. The ocean churning against rocks, white foam visible where waves crash. Thirty feet down, maybe more. Rocks clustered at the base like teeth.
I see it then. Her purse caught on the stone wall, phone still inside, the tracker that led me here. Torn fabric on the rough stone. She went over. Without her phone.
No body on the rocks. No body in the immediate water.
She jumped. Into that.
The cliff doesn’t have a path down, just rock faces and ledges that might hold or might crumble. I find handholds, footholds, descending too fast for safety. The flashlight beam from my phone swings wild between my teeth as I navigate.
The soldier in me tries to impose order. Grid search, methodical coverage. But I can’t think past the image of her body bloated with water.
The beach materializes. A crescent of coarse sand and rock, waves breaking in irregular patterns. I scan left to right. Nothing but driftwood and seaweed. The cold starts in my chest. Not temperature but that other cold, the one from Afghanistan, from stepping through rubble knowing what I'll find. My jaw locks so hard something cracks.
An hour since she jumped, maybe more. The drive here, the descent. Time becomes meaningless when measured against the ocean's patience. In water this temperature, with rocks and current… No.I won't calculate those odds. She's stronger than anyone knows. The ocean was in her blood before grief made her afraid of it.
"MARISOL!"
Then I hear it. Faint, almost lost in the wind. A cough. Weak but unmistakable.
I run toward the sound, slipping on wet rocks, my phone’s flashlight beam wild. My knees hit rock hard enough to split skin. Don't feel it. Can't feel anything except the need to find her. Around a cluster of boulders that jut into the water lies a smaller cove protected from the worst of the current. And there.
She's on the rocks. Half in the water, half out, like the ocean carried her as far as it could before gently setting her down. Her dress is torn where someone grabbed at her. She's shaking violently, coughing up seawater, but she's alive.
She's alive.
