Read Chapter 12: Wrecked

The chapel roof had surrendered to the wind years ago, leaving only a stone ribcage against the grey sky. Salt-crusted lichen crawled up the walls, and somewhere in the shadows a gull cried out, mournful and sharp. Isabelle pressed her back against the cold pillar, her wet coat clinging to her skin like a second, reproachful layer.

Yann had not spoken since they dragged themselves up the shingle beach. He stood at the broken archway, scanning the horizon the way sailors do, reading weather in the turn of the clouds. Water dripped from his beard. His hands were raw from hauling her out of the surf.

"We need fire," he said, finally. "There's wreckage on the beach. Driftwood will burn if we can find something dry enough."

Isabelle nodded, but she could not make herself move. Her fingers found the locket beneath her soaked shirt, and it was warm. Not the warmth of her own skin—something deeper, a pulse like a second heartbeat. She had felt it before, but never this strong.

The storm had come from nowhere. That was the thing she could not reconcile. One moment the sea was flat as a mirror, the moon a perfect silver coin, and the next the wind had teeth. She had seen storms before, out on charters with clients, but this one had turned the sky to ink in less than a minute. And the waves—they had not broken like ordinary waves. They had lifted the boat as if hands were cupping it from below.

Yann came back with an armful of pale driftwood. He knelt in the driest corner of the chapel, where a fallen slab of stone made a rough shelf, and worked at a fire with flint and steel he must have kept in his oilskin. Isabelle watched the first spark catch, then bloom into amber light.

"Your grandfather taught me that," Yann said, not looking up. "When I was a boy. He said a man who cannot make fire is no good to anyone at sea."

"You miss him."

Yann fed the fire carefully, coaxing it. "Every day." He paused. "I thought—when I saw the skeleton—I thought maybe that was him. That he hadn't drowned off the Raz but washed up in that cave, that I would finally know." He shook his head, feeding another piece of wood. "But it wasn't him. I knew the bones would be his before we opened that hollow, and they weren't."

Isabelle wrapped her arms around her knees. The firelight painted gold on the chapel walls, revealing faded carvings beneath the centuries of grime. "I'm sorry."

"He wasn't a sailor," Yann said quietly. "My grandfather was afraid of the sea. Knew it too well to trust it. And she took him anyway." He finally looked at her, and she saw something she had not seen in him before—not the captain's confidence or the easy charm, but a rawness, a weariness that made him look older. "That's what I wanted to protect you from, Isabelle. Not the idea of a curse. The certainty of it."

She should have listened. She thought it, and the shame of it burned hotter than the fire. She had been so certain, so arrogantly certain, that all of it was superstition and story. That the Marchand women had simply been unlucky, or frightened, or—

The vision came back to her: the woman sinking into green water, hair fanned out like dark silk, arms open as if welcoming the cold embrace. She had thought it was a dream. She had told herself the cave's darkness and the pressure of the day had conjured it. But now, soaked and shivering in a ruined chapel on an island that did not appear on any chart Yann owned, she knew.

"Yann," she said. "The curse is real."

He did not argue. He did not try to comfort her with platitudes. He only nodded, slow and grave, and fed the fire another branch. "I know," he said. "I've known since I was a boy. The sea doesn't lie, and it doesn't forget."

A wind keened through the broken roof, sending a spiral of sparks spinning up toward the grey sky. Isabelle rose, crossing to the far wall where the carvings were thickest. She ran her fingers over them—letters, names, dates eroded by salt and time. Her breath caught.

*Adèle Marchand. 1962–1988.*

She traced the name with a trembling finger. She had known, of course—her mother had told her about Adèle, about the twin who had gone into the sea. But seeing it here, carved into stone, made it concrete in a way no story ever could.

"There are more," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Yann came to stand beside her. Below Adèle's name, another row of inscriptions: *Amélie Marchand, 1934–1976. Jeanne Marchand, 1901–1929. Cécile Marchand, 1877–1898.*

Each one younger than the last. Each one dead before forty.

Isabelle's finger moved up the stone, and then stopped. The name was still legible, but the date had been scratched out, gouged by something sharp. *Yvonne Marchand.* And beneath it, in smaller letters: *The sea keeps what it loves.*

"Yvonne died at sea," Isabelle said. "But there's no date. Someone removed it."

Yann ran his hand over the gouges. "They wanted to forget. Or they wanted to remember in their own way." He turned to her, and his face was serious in the firelight. "Isabelle, you shouldn't be here. Not tomorrow. Not when the tide is lowest and you go down into that water. Whatever's down there—whatever Amélie hid—it will want you to take it."

She turned to face him fully. "You're asking me to stop."

"I'm asking you to let me go instead."

The words hung in the air between them. The fire crackled. Somewhere beyond the chapel walls, the sea breathed against the rocks.

"That's not possible," she said. "The keys are keyed to the Marchand bloodline. Father Marcel said—"

"Father Marcel reads old books." Yann stepped closer. "I read water. I read wind. And I read danger, Isabelle, the way you read blueprints. I can see the shape of this thing, and I can see that it is going to kill you."

"And what? Let it kill you instead?"

Yann's jaw tightened. "If it comes to that. Yes."

Isabelle shook her head, but she could not find the words for the grief that rose in her throat. "I won't lose anyone else to this," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word. "I won't watch another person I care about go into the sea and not come back."

She had not meant to say it. The words had come out on their own, raw and unsanded, and she saw the shock pass across Yann's face before he understood.

"Isabelle—"

"Don't." She held up a hand. "I can't—"

"Let me speak." His voice was gentle, but it carried weight. "I've spent five years watching you from a distance. Watching you walk the cliffs at dawn. Watching you argue with the mayor about the lighthouse restoration. Watching you disappear into that castle like you were looking for something you couldn't name." He took her hand, and his palm was warm and calloused and steady. "I'm not afraid of the water, Isabelle. I'm afraid of a life without you in it."

The fire burned low between them. The wind had died, and the chapel was suddenly very quiet.

"I don't know how to save you from this," Yann said. "But I will. Whatever it costs. I need you to understand that."

Isabelle opened her mouth to answer—to tell him he was a fool, that he could not row out against fate, that the curse had been taking Marchand women for three centuries—

But the locket pulsed against her chest, warm and insistent, and she looked down.

Yann followed her gaze, and his hand tightened around hers.

"The fog," he said.

She raised her head. White tendrils were curling through the broken archway, heavy and silent, moving against the wind. The sea beyond the chapel had gone still—too still, a sheet of dark glass under the noon sun.

Isabelle stepped back from the archway. The fog came on, not fast, but inexorably, muffling the world until the chapel might have been the only place left on earth. And in the deep of it, she heard something.

A woman's voice. Distant, harmonious, calling a name she did not yet recognize as her own.

Yann pulled her close. His arm was iron around her shoulders. "Stay with me," he said. "Whatever you see, whatever you hear—stay with me."

Isabelle pressed her face into his shoulder and held on. The fog wrapped around the chapel like a shroud, and the voice grew closer, and somewhere beneath her feet, deep in the stone, she felt the island itself shudder—as if something down there had turned over in its sleep.

The locket pulsed once more. Then it went still and cold, and the full weight of the curse settled over her shoulders like a wet coat.