She works the black water alone. At the Compound, two of them take her at once - and for the first time, she lets go of the line.
Cora Vandal is a salvage diver and underwater welder who trusts exactly one thing: her own steady hands, forty meters down in the dark. Hired to raise a sunken container off the Compound's dive station, she finds it welded to the seabed rail - sunk on purpose - and the air line of the diver before her cut clean through. Not a break. A cut. And his dive plan is written in her own handwriting.
Nairn descends beside her, his lamp always next to hers. Jonas works the line and reads her tugs. Halloran counts her stops from topside in a voice that never leaves her ear. They lay the arrangement on the table like a dive plan - her terms, a stop-word, a hand signal - and let her set the depth.
Raising the truth means cutting it loose in a rising storm. Staying means trusting three men to tend her line while she gives up control for the first time in her life.
A scorching, possessive why-choose romance - a woman taken by two at once, negotiated consent, a safe word and aftercare, three devoted men, and a hard-won happily ever after.
Book 3 of The Compound. Standalone. No cliffhanger. All characters 18+.