The captain’s voice cut through the rising roar of the engines: five minutes to the site. Instantly, the boat deck transformed into organized chaos as divers yanked on neoprene and clipped weight belts. While a few stole a last bite of granola, Braden remained at the bow, conferring with Karma and the captain in hushed tones. Then he turned, moving with an economy that made the others look clumsy, pulling on his own gear in a few seamless, purposeful motions.

I slipped aft, my heart still pounding from the chill of the last dive. Planting myself against the stern rail, I let the wind knife through my hood and vest until the salt sting was a pure, raw sensation. Out here, there was no pretense. The spray hit my face unfiltered; my thoughts belonged only to me. It was the first place the boat’s wake claimed and the last place anyone came seeking conversation. I watched the water churn into a violent white seam, slicing through the endless sheet of bruised blue.

My mind kept replaying the coin. His gloved fingers sweeping the silt with a surgeon’s precision—not searching, but confirming. The coin itself was an impossibility, centuries older than the German U-boat it came from. That, and the way he’d recited the wreck’s coordinates from memory, as if he’d been here a hundred times before. I touched the BCD pocket where I’d stashed it. A hard, silent weight against my hip that pulsed with unanswered questions. I stared at the horizon as the shoreline dissolved, trying to file the feeling away with all the other things I wasn’t ready to face.

The wind veered sharper, whipping my hair into salt-stiff strands. Then came the captain’s terse call: “Here.” Braden rolled overboard to set up the lines for our safety stop, disappearing into the churn. I turned my attention to my wetsuit, squirming into the tight neoprene, each shimmy a painful tug. Lost in the struggle, I didn’t hear him surface. A gentle yank at my pigtail braid made me jump, and I spun around.

He reached behind me, fastened the little clacker to the velcro patch on my back. “Maybe I will let you,” he murmured, voice low enough to send a shiver straight through my chest. “Did you even have time to set up the lines?” I questioned.

He gave me a mock salute. “Of course.” Then he leaned in, lips brushing my ear: “Now it’s our turn. Let’s get wet.” He helped me strap on my BCD with long, deliberate fingers, and suddenly the edge of the deck loomed above us. One—two—three—and we slipped into the cold embrace of the ocean.

Sinking into the blue felt like entering another world. Most dive photos capture the side view, a blurred cross-section of bubbles and fins. But descending headfirst on a wreck—watching its bulk swell, rising up from the blackness like a leviathan—was something else entirely. This hull, miraculously intact, felt less like steel and more like bones of a great whale, a giant carcass preserved on the ocean floor.

We reached the hatch: a narrow oval, barely wide enough for a person’s shoulders. Braden dropped his BCD and, with a practiced twist, slipped inside as though stepping through an invisible door.

I followed, regulator clamped so tight my jaw ached, my own BCD scraping against the rusted metal frame. “This thing is not getting yanked out,” I muttered to myself.

Inside, the wreck was a tunnel of shadow. My light carved a trembling circle across bulkheads filmed with marine growth. Braden hovered at a seam in the wall, tracing the rivets. I drifted closer—and then I saw it. A ribcage, bleached bone-white in his beam, wedged beneath a collapsed plate. Unmistakably human. My lungs seized, a sudden hiss of bubbles escaping my regulator. A grave. We were in a grave. Braden’s light held steady on the remains for a long moment, a silent acknowledgment, before he finally moved on.

Braden didn’t flinch. He continued upstream, past crates of corroded metal, until he paused again. He paused where the floor was covered in silt and waved his hand to clear it.

It revealed the glint of metal. I wasn’t close enough to see exactly what it was, but as he reached down, I caught a glimpse of something long and delicate—maybe a necklace—before he let it slip into his pocket.

My wrist light blinked: six minutes at depth. My head pulsed with cold and adrenaline. Time to go. I rapped the handle of my dive knife against my tank, the sharp ping cutting through the water. I flicked my torch in his direction. In the murky light, his golden hair fanned around his mask like living kelp. He looked otherworldly—part diver, part wraith, his eyes catching the beam with an unnerving intensity.

I blinked. The world felt surreal, vertigo narrowing to a single point: get us out. I tapped my watch, pointed toward the exit. Since there wasn’t space for him to get by me, he motioned for me to lead the way back, yet I sensed him a beat behind, a shadow following me.

The metal grave spat us out into a soft, undulating cloud of silt, and for a moment we hovered like astronauts, weightless in the aftermath.

Braden’s outline glowed in the beam of his wrist light, broad shoulders dusted in salt and rust, the splay of his fin tips brushing the sand below. The noise of our breathing drowned out the world; I felt each thud of my heart as a vibration in my mask.

He looked at me. Then, slowly, he reached out—hesitant, utterly at odds with the way he’d commanded the wreck only moments before—and touched my wrist, then my fingers, lacing them with his. The gloves should have made it impersonal, but I felt every quiver of his hand through the latex and the current.

He paused like that, unmoving, his gaze fixed on the hatch we’d just exited as if daring it to spit out some unquiet ghost. Then, in a move that nearly stopped my heart, he pulled out his regulator and leaned close. I watched the bubbles flare upward, irrational panic clawing at the edges of my vision—who the fuck took out their reg at 130 feet?—but he just grinned, wicked and slow, and pressed his lips to the side of my ear. It was the barest contact, a weightless hush of pressure against my ear, but it sent a live wire jolt all the way down my spine.

In a seamless moment, the regulator was back, clamped between his teeth, that impish glint in his eyes never flickering.

I stared like an idiot, dumbfounded, momentarily forgetting to check my air, my depth, the hundred rules drilled into my bones since my first diving class. All that existed was the wild thrum of need and the pounding certainty that, if he’d asked, I’d have followed him to the bottom of the damn ocean. Braden didn’t let go of my hand. Instead, he squeezed it once, then began to slowly inflate his BCD. His other hand found the small of my back, guiding me upright with a gentle insistence that brooked no argument.

Our ascent wasn’t the textbook horizontal rise from training; it was a slow, vertical dance toward the light. His grip on me was unyielding, his control absolute. Every few feet, he’d check my gauges, his eyes flicking from my readout to my face, as if searching for a sign I’d bolt or black out. We were so close I could feel the ripple of his exhale across my cheek. Far above, the surface shimmered, fractured by waves into a thousand diamonds.

At the safety stop, suspended twenty feet down, he pulled me back against his chest. There was nothing between us but the thrum of adrenaline. His arms wrapped loosely around my ribs, and I felt one hand trace a slow path over my side. Neither of us looked up; we stared straight ahead into the blue, poised in the same direction.

We surfaced as one, our heads breaking through the skin of the ocean in perfect sync, and when I ripped my mask off I gasped, half from lack of air, half from something else entirely.

He floated beside me, mask pushed to his forehead, and for a moment he didn’t say anything. His hair clung to his brow in salt-damp curls. The world was all wind and whitecaps and the raucous shouts of gulls overhead, but in the space between us there was only silence—a silence that felt loaded, immense.

I treaded water, my voice rough. “What was that back there? Are you crazy?”

He grinned, teeth bright, and for the first time since I’d met him I saw him not as a legend or a mystery but as a man—reckless, vulnerable, and completely alive in the moment. “Only a little,” he replied. His voice was raw, stripped of bravado. “Worth it, though.”

My lungs burned as my eyes searched his face. His were alight with something fierce and unknowable. Mine brimmed with questions I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask.