"No," Cal said. "It wasn't."
A beat of quiet. Twelve years of working with a man who said what he meant and nothing extra.
"Watch your six down there," Cal said. "Rhea flagged movement on the shell company's marina slip. Could be nothing. Could be a last play before the feds lock it down."
"Copy."
"And Shark." He paused. "Whatever's going on between you two—fix it after the dive."
I almost smiled. "Copy that too."
* * *
The water was clear down to forty feet. Below that, visibility thinned to fifteen, the green deepening, particles drifting in the current. Familiar terrain now. The sand ridge, the debris field, the dark mass of the hull emerging from sediment.
Marley moved ahead of me toward the wreck. Her fins cut clean strokes, her body angled with a diver's economy, no wasted motion. She carried the documentation rig: underwater camera, measurement tools, the GPS transmitter tethered to Reckoning's surface unit. I carried the dive light and the training that said keep your eyes open, keep her in sight, keep yourself between her and anything that doesn't belong.
We'd built this rhythm over weeks. She led. I covered. Two taps on the tank for attention. No words needed down here.
She worked the wreck with an intensity that tightened my throat. Photographing the hull section from multiple angles. Measuring the exposed keel line. Documenting the cargo hold where barrels and crates sat in the same positions they'd held fora hundred and sixty years. Her hands were steady. Every frame she captured was evidence: not just of the Lady Defiance, but of what she'd built toward for longer than she'd known me.
I held perimeter and watched her work and let myself feel what I'd been circling for days. That I would do anything to protect her, and the work, and the life she was building back from wreckage that someone else had caused.
The thought arrived without tactical framing. No mission parameters. No threat assessment. Just the simple, devastating fact of a man watching a woman do the thing she was born to do and knowing, with absolute certainty, that he was done pretending he could walk away from it.
Movement at the edge of my light's reach. Sixty feet out, coming from the south.
A diver. Single. Dark wetsuit, no research gear. Moving with purpose toward the cargo hold.
I signaled Marley. Two taps. She looked up. I pointed. She went still, hovering above her work, camera clutched to her chest.
I moved between them. Slow, controlled, closing the distance. Underwater confrontation was geometry: position, sightlines, the physics of who was between whom and what that communicated. I'd spent twelve years learning that geometry in water darker and deeper than this.
The diver stopped at thirty feet. Assessed me. I kept my light on him, steady, and let my positioning say what it needed to say.
He wasn't getting closer. Not to the wreck. Not to her.
Ten seconds. He turned and kicked south, disappearing into the green the same direction he'd come.
I circled back. Marley was still hovering, eyes bright behind her mask. She gave me a thumbs-up. I returned it. She went back to work.
I stayed close. Kept my light wide. The water moved around us, indifferent to everything but current and tide.
* * *
We surfaced into mid-morning sun that turned the ocean to white gold. The heat hit immediately, June arriving in earnest, the sky a hard ceramic blue from horizon to horizon.
Marley pushed her mask up. Water streamed down her face, caught in the loose strands escaping her ponytail. She gripped the dive ladder and looked at me, and her expression wasn't the professional distance she'd been holding since yesterday.
Soft. Open in a way I hadn't seen all morning.
"It's done," she said. "Full documentation. Transmitted to the surface unit. GPS-tagged, photographed, measured. The Lady Defiance is on the record."
"Under your name."
She swallowed. Nodded. The compass at her throat caught the sun, silver against salt-wet skin.
"Under my name," she said.
