Saved by Him, Claimed by Him
Kai Tanaka is Seattle’s best rescue swimmer, the man they send into black water when the storm decides to take a life. He’s built for cold, built for chaos, built to bring people back.
Until one rescue goes wrong.
A body disappears. The footage goes missing. And Kai becomes the quiet scapegoat the Coast Guard can sacrifice to keep the institution clean. Suspended and watched, he’s barely holding on when Luca Reyes drags his name into the light.
Luca is a true-crime podcaster chasing the truth behind that same night, because his younger brother was on the boat that never came home. Luca thinks Kai is hiding something. Kai thinks Luca is feeding off tragedy. Their first meeting is sharp and ugly.
Then Luca is nearly killed for asking the right questions.
Kai pulls him from the wreckage and realizes this isn’t internet noise. Someone is laundering bodies through the sea, and they’re using Kai as the fall guy. The only way to keep Luca alive is to disappear with him to an off-grid cabin on the San Juan Islands, where the wind never stops and secrets sound louder.
Forced proximity turns into hunger. Suspicion turns into heat. And the closer they get to the truth, the more they realize the storm isn’t the worst thing chasing them.
Basahin
Chapter: Chapter 3: The Man With the MicKai Tanaka wakes up tasting salt.Not the clean kind you put on food. This is old salt. Sea salt. The kind that dries on your lips and sticks there, stubborn as a bad memory.He sits up in bed and the room tilts slightly. His muscles ache like he took hits. His shoulders feel bruised. His hands are still raw, knuckles cracked from scrubbing.He flexes his fingers once. Twice.The skin pulls. Stings.His apartment is quiet in that too-clean way. No music. No TV. No life. Just the hum of the heater and the far-off hiss of rain on the window.Seattle rain again. Soft and steady. Like the city never fully exhales.His phone is on the nightstand. Face down.Kai stares at it for a beat.He does not want to touch it. That’s the truth. Touching it means pulling the world back onto his chest. Touching it means headlines, comments, questions, accusations. Touching it means someone else telling his story like they were there in the water with him.He picks it up anyway.There are twelve missed c
Huling Na-update: 2026-01-06
Chapter: Chapter 2: The EpisodeLuca Reyes keeps the volume low, like the truth might shatter if he plays it loud.His “studio” is a spare room in a rented townhouse in Ballard, two streets from the water. Foam panels cling to the walls in uneven squares. A couple are peeling at the corners. He put them up fast, hands shaking, the week Mateo went missing. He told himself sound mattered. He told himself he needed a job to do. Anything but sitting in silence with his brother’s hoodie on his lap.The room smells like warm electronics and coffee that’s been reheated too many times. A rain jacket drips from the back of his chair. Tap. Tap. Tap. Outside, Seattle stays gray and damp, like the sky never fully commits to day.On his screen, a waveform stretches across the timeline. His voice, steady. Another voice, distorted. The small dead spaces where he stopped talking because grief got too close to the mic.He drags the playhead back and hits play.“So here’s what we know,” his recorded voice says. “A charter goes down i
Huling Na-update: 2026-01-06
Chapter: Chapter 1: Black WaterThe first thing the sea takes is your breath.It punches it out of you, steals it, forces your lungs to remember what panic feels like.Kai Tanaka hits the water and the cold crawls through his wetsuit like it knows his name. The shock is instant. It clamps around his ribs, bites down on his muscles, tries to make him seize up. He lets it. For half a second. He lets his body register it, then he tells it no.Not tonight.The wind slaps spray into his face. Salt stings his eyes. The surface chops and tilts, a restless skin stretched over something deeper and meaner. Above him, the helicopter hovers, rotors screaming, spotlight cutting a pale tunnel through the storm.“Swimmer in the water,” comes the voice in his ear. “You have eyes on target?”Kai turns, head low, scanning through rain that feels like needles. His mouth is full of it. Salt and diesel and that sharp metallic taste that rides on fear.“There,” he says, and his voice comes out rough through the mic. “I see him.”A life j
Huling Na-update: 2026-01-06
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