Blue everywhere. The particular blue of tropical water—not the steel gray of military training dives, not the murky green of harbors and rivers, but something luminous. Alive. Light filtering down from above, particles drifting like lazy snow, and below?—
The reef.
It materialized out of the blue like an underwater city. Coral in every shape and color—purple sea fans swaying in the current, orange plate formations stacked like impossible architecture, brain coral in browns and greens, staghorn reaching up like skeletal fingers toward the light. Soft corals pulsed with the water’s movement. Anemones waved their tentacles, clownfish darting in and out like bright orange punctuation marks.
Jayden stayed beside him, moving through the water with the easy grace of someone completely at home. She pointed—a sea turtle glided past with ancient patience, flippers beating slow and steady. A moray eel peered from a crevice, mouth opening and closing in that perpetual gape that looked threatening but wasn’t. A cloud of bright-blue tangs swirled around a coral head like living confetti.
Maybe he should be watching her for signs of training, for the particular movements of someone who’d learned to dive for operational reasons rather than recreational ones. For any tell that would confirm or deny his suspicions that she was more than she said.
Instead, he was watching her point at a parrotfish—impossibly green, impossibly pink—and seeing her eyes crinkle with delight behind her mask.
Instead, he was letting her lead, following her deeper, trusting her judgment about where to go and what to see.
Instead, he was forgetting.
The rifle components. The mission. Ham waiting in Sydney. The questions he still couldn’t answer. All of it fading into the blue, replaced by this—the reef, the fish, the woman beside him, the sound of his own breathing, steady and slow.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, Dakota stopped analyzing.
He just . . . was.
Present. Here. Alive in a way he’d forgotten he could be.
Jayden caught his eye through the water. Gave him an okay sign. He returned it, and something passed between them—not words, not even a real communication, just a shared recognition that this was extraordinary. That they were lucky to be here. That whatever else might be complicated between them, this moment was simple and good.
They drifted along the reef face, following a coral-cleaning spot where small fish picked parasites off larger ones. Watched a spotted ray ripple past, wings undulating. Found a giant clam with lips of impossible blue.
And then the angelfish came.
A school of them rising from deeper water. Silver and black, disc-shaped bodies, dorsal fins trailing like elegant scarves. Dozens of them. Maybe a hundred. Moving in perfect synchronization, flowing around Dakota and Jayden like a living current.
Dakota stopped swimming. Hung suspended in the water as they passed—above him, around him, close enough to touch if he reached out. The light filtering through their bodies. Their movement impossibly coordinated. The silence of it broken only by the rhythm of his own breath.
Like swimming with something from heaven.
He wasn’t a man who thought in metaphors. Wasn’t a man who found the spiritual in the physical. But here, now, surrounded by silver wings and filtered light, he felt something shift inside him.
Jayden had tilted back, arms spread slightly, watching the fish flow overhead. Even through her mask, he could see her smile. Pure, unguarded joy.
She was beautiful.
Not just attractive—he’d known that since Hawaii. But beautiful in the way that mattered. Present. Real. Fully alive in this moment.
He needed to learn to live like her.
The angelfish flowed past, disappearing into the blue, and Dakota realized he’d stopped breathing. He took a slow breath through his regulator, equalizing, grounding himself.
Jayden caught his eye. Made a small explosion gesture with her hands.
Wow.
Yeah. He repeated it. Wow.
They finished the dive, ascending slowly, making their safety stop at fifteen feet while the boat’s shadow loomed above them. When they broke the surface, the sun was blinding and the air was warm and Dakota felt like he’d been gone for hours instead of forty-five minutes.
He spit the regulator from his mouth. “That was incredible.”
She did the same. “I know.” She laughed, bright and genuine. “I’ve done a lot of dives. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
