The Meridian Cross lies on her side in ninety meters of black water. She took three men Mara loved down with her. Now Mara hangs above the torn hull, her own breath bubbling against her helmet, the signed salvage claim folded against her chest. Two hundred meters off, the Vares team's dive lights swing toward her through the dark. They have no claim. They came anyway.

Mara kicks up toward her own boat instead, ready to radio the claim office and the coast authority. If Vares wants a fight, she will make it a legal one, on the record, with witnesses. But her radio answers with nothing but static. Someone has been busy up top.

Mara hauls herself onto her boat and finds the radio wires cut clean. Vares planned this. A second skiff idles nearby, and a woman on its deck calls across the water: "Come aboard. We'll explain. Or you can keep diving alone until this wreck takes you too."

Mara steps onto the skiff. The woman shows her a contract her husband signed, agreeing to sink the ship for an insurance payout, a deal that went wrong and killed everyone aboard. Vares isn't here to rob her. They're his old partners, here to bury the evidence before it surfaces. The man Mara mourned wasn't only a victim. Now she has to decide what to do with that.