Chapter Fifteen
Ivy
“Cole! Tilt the damn lens up! Cole, do you copy?”
Nothing.
The deck is absolute mayhem.
Ropes slide through cleats. Metal shrieks overhead as the ship’s crane swings into position, lines snapping taut. The ocean slams the hull hard enough I feel it in my knees. The pup’s high, frantic bark cuts through everything like a siren that won’t shut off.
I watch Sienna command the crew with effortless authority. She shimmies into her wetsuit like she was born for this exact moment.
Everything is moving. Everyone is vibrating at a hundred miles an hour.
But Cole is a statue.
“Hartwell.” I try the mic one more time. “Shot on Sienna. Now! What are you doing?”
Still nothing.
I rip the headset off hard enough that the plastic cracks against my ear. “Are you kidding me?” I mutter as I sprint to him.
The man who spent the last forty-eight hours playing with my sanity, who literally stopped breathing but came back like nothing could touch him, is now frozen. His camera is aimed at a patch of empty, churning gray water.
I grab Cole’s arm. “Did you hear what—”
He turns.
Whatever I was about to say evaporates.
Because he looks… wrong.
Not cocky. Not performing. A hollowed-out void.
Oh, God. This is bad.
I snatch the camera from his hands and shove it into Blaze’s chest. “Keep filming. Tell the Live what’s happening. Don’t you dare drop the feed.”
For once in his chaotic, sunburned life, Blaze doesn’t quip back. He seizes the rig and spins toward the deck.
“Okay, fam, listen up. Shit just got real.” His voice is serious, focused, and present in a way I didn’t think he had in him.
“Saltwater Saviors are working, but this is code red. Dr. O just dropped a bomb. Sea lions can only hold their breath ten to twenty minutes, and we have no idea how long our girl’s been down there.
I’m moving closer to the action. Stay locked, squad! ”
Processing Blaze Tate acting like a competent human will have to wait.
Right now—
“Hey.” I grab Cole again, softer this time. Pulling him into me and forcing eye contact. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” He exhales, and the sound is jagged. “I—I’m going to make the wrong move.”
“What does that mean?”
“All I do is fuck things up. The ATV. The foam cannon. The ghost net—” He cuts himself off, rubbing his face. “Half a fucking million dollars, Ivy. That’s the cost of my ‘brilliant ideas.’”
“You are not solely responsible. It was a group effort.”
“Aren’t I?” He gives a hollow laugh. “I spent the weekend making messes. You cleaned them up. That’s been the system.”
“Well, not the whole weekend,” I tease, trying to lighten the moment. “There was that solid eight-hour window where you made a pretty strong case for your skills. Five times, if I remember correctly.”
A heavy smile tugs at his mouth.
Time isn’t just ticking, it’s roaring in my veins. There’s no room for this, not when a life hangs in the balance. I need the Cole who moves before his brain can talk him out of it.
I glance sideways. Sienna zips up her wetsuit, and Orson is on comms with the crane operator. The pup is still barking its one-note emergency at the surface.
My stomach drops.
“I need you,” I whisper, lacing my fingers through his. “I have no protocol for this. Right now it’s only you, me, and whatever that reckless instinct of yours is urging you to do.” My pulse races as I search his face. “What’s the move, Hartwell?”
His gaze snaps to mine.
A flicker. A spark of something untamed, something dangerous.
There it is.
“My gut’s screaming at me to get in the water,” he says, eyes fixed on the churning waves.
“Film the rescue from the inside. No barriers, no bullshit. But the second we’re under?
” His jaw flexes. “We are at the ocean’s mercy.
Visibility’s trash, the current’s a bitch, and the signal could bail on us at any second. ”
He lifts our clasped hands, pressing them to the rough warmth of his cheek, and holds them there with a ferocity that steals the air from my chest.
“I’ll give you everything I’ve got, Stopwatch. But I can’t promise it’ll be enough.”
Is he talking about the rescue? Or us?
There’s no time to find out.
“Move, Hartwell. Suit up or we miss this.”
His fingers slip away, and he lunges into motion—only to wheel around. “What if the feed cuts out?”
I cross my arms, smirking. “Then I’ll fix it. Like I always do.”
Cole cuts across the deck as if his body wrote the plan and his brain’s playing catch-up. Layers fall away. Jacket gone. Shirt gone. Both discarded without a second thought.
He strides toward Sienna, shoulders rolling, muscles flexing, and my pulse stutters. His body moves like it was built for this. For action. For purpose.
He yanks up the neoprene of his wetsuit and—
Nuh-uh.
No time for the way my stomach drops. No room to remember what those hands did to me. And to the breath that just caught without my permission… Go away.
Focus up. The livestream is what matters. Everything else can wait.
I pivot on my heel, sliding into Blaze’s shot as though I own it. “I need the camera. I have an announcement to make.”
He clocks my tone, the urgency, and nods. “YO, YO! HOLD UP, SQUAD! Gonna bring in the brainiac who runs the whole Dare4Change show. This is Ivy.”
I take the rig and stare into the glass eye of the lens. My reflection gazes back, blurred by the wind as it hits me full force, salt stinging my lips. The ship sways under my feet, and I swear it’s trying to throw me off.
Good luck with that, ocean.
“Someone decided the Pacific was a landfill,” I tell the viewers. “They threw a washing machine into the water like it didn’t matter. And now, there’s a mother sea lion down there who might die.”
My throat tightens. I keep talking.
“People like Dr. Alvarez. Dr. Echols. The team you’re watching on screen? They don’t ignore it. They don’t scroll past it or pretend it’s not their problem. They risk their lives to clean up the reckless damage others have left behind.”
I adjust the camera slightly, capturing Sienna, Orson, and the entire Saltwater Saviors rescue crew in motion, working as a well-oiled machine.
“If you wonder where your money goes, this is it. This is what saving something looks like. In a second, the sound will cut out from this stream. The camera can follow Dr. Alvarez underwater. The microphone can’t.”
The pup lets out a jagged, lung-tearing cry that saws through my heart.
I turn and face the lens, making a silent plea to the thousands of faces I can’t see.
“Stay. Please,” I say. “And if we lose the feed, be ready. We’ll go live again. This team needs our support as they fight for one life in a very big ocean. Your donations are every ounce of this fight, every second of hope.”
Blaze rubs the base of his neck. “Yeah. What she said.”
I carry the rig to Cole. He’s fully suited up and ready. Sienna is masked beside him, unafraid, checking her regulator with cold efficiency.
I hold out the camera. Cole takes it.
He checks the housing seal twice and then presses his mask into place, the strap snug against his temples. He pins me with a look. No performance. No angle. Just Cole, the wetsuit molding to his hard frame, the open sea stretching out behind him. Wild and waiting.
“Be careful,” I say.
“Hey, if I drown, you’ll get the promotion,” he quips.
I glare at him. “Still not funny.”
“Don’t worry, Stopwatch. I’m not done losing to you yet,” he says, his smirk cut short as he slots in his mouthpiece. Through his mask, his eyes hold mine for a suspended second.
The dinghy lowers.
He tips back alongside Sienna.
The ocean closes over them, swallowing them into the hush and the blue.
I stand there, breathless, while the crane drops into position with a brutal, metallic grind.
My heart pounds in my ribs as I race to my monitors. The underwater livestream is soundless and static-laced. Sienna’s silhouette descends through the murk.
Nobody on the ship speaks.
No Blaze commentary.
No Orson corrections.
No crew shouting.
Everyone watches.
On phones. Tablets. My studio monitors. Even the crane operator has one eye down as he rides the controls.
The feed is getting darker.
The chat trickles in beside the footage:
please save her
donating again
come on mama
I can’t breathe watching this
The murk thins. A shape materializes—a rusted, jagged tomb that used to be a washing machine. And inside the drum is the sea lion mama.
She’s suspended. Slack. Still.
She isn’t fighting the machine. She’s just hanging there in the water, flippers hanging limp.
“No,” I try to say, but it comes out hollow.
On-screen, Sienna is a flurry of urgency. With lethal precision, one hand steadies the adult sea lion while the other threads the straps around the machine. Her muscles strain under the ocean’s violent tug.
The chat is going crazy. Hundreds of messages stacking and collapsing over each other:
WHY ISN’T SHE MOVING?!
Sienna please
is she breathing underwater??
someone answer
I just sent $250, come on mama
Sienna muscles the harness into place, bubbles streaming from her regulator. The hook finds the rusted frame.
A massive surge hits. The hook slides. Sienna’s arm wrenches sideways with it.
The current slams her into the rocks—shoulder first, then hip.
She pushes off, regroups, clawing her way to the drum. The ocean shoves back harder.
She tries again.
Misses.
Another swell rolls through, and the whole underwater world tilts—the cylinder swinging on its wedge, the mother’s limp body shifting. Cole’s lens lurches. He’s getting knocked around as much as she is. But he corrects, finding Sienna in the frame. Doing his job.
She stops, then turns abruptly, her eyes burning straight into the camera, making a hard, unmistakable gesture.
Come here. Help me.
My brain hits with horrible clarity. She needs hands. Not a witness. Not a videographer.
She needs him.