Read Chapter 20: The Confrontation

Isabelle felt the cold before Adèle moved, a sharp drop in the crypt's air that prickled the hairs on her arms. The Heart of Light sat heavy in her palm, its brittle edges slicing against her skin like a warning.

"Give it to me," Adèle said. Her voice had lost its conciliatory warmth. She took a step forward, the lantern light carving deep shadows beneath her eyes.

"No." Isabelle closed her fingers around the diamond. The stone was warmer than it should have been, pulsing with a faint, sickly heartbeat. "You don't want to break the curse. You want to claim its engine."

Adèle laughed, a short, brittle sound that echoed off the crypt walls. "Claim it? Isabelle, darling cousin, I want to give it purpose. Yvonne enslaved herself to a lie. Maëlle drowned herself trying to undo it. But the Heart—" her eyes fixed on Isabelle's fist with hungry intensity "—the Heart is raw power. A promise of the deep. It doesn't have to be a chain. It can be a crown."

"You mean a weapon."

"Mean anything you like." Adèle slid her hand into her coat pocket. When she pulled it out, she was holding a small, curved blade—the kind used for gutting fish, its edge gleaming with care. "I came here prepared to reason. I thought you might understand. We're the same blood, you and I. The forgotten branch and the cursed one."

Isabelle backed toward the statue pedestal, her heels scraping against stone. "We're nothing alike."

"Yvonne's recordings. Did you listen to them?"

"One." Isabelle swallowed. "Enough to know you lied about what she was."

Adèle's lips thinned. "I told you fragments. But you've found the locket. You've found the photograph. You know the truth of the theft. So you know the stone doesn't belong to the Marchand family or the Le Bihans." She took another step, blade low, casual. "It belongs to the sea. And the sea will take it back whether you give it gladly or not. The only choice is who stands at the gate when the tide opens."

"You said you'd help me perform the ritual."

"I said I'd help you walk to the door." Adèle's smile was all teeth. "I didn't say I'd let you walk through it."

Isabelle's shoulder blades hit the statue. The hollow interior where the diamond had hidden was now a dark cavity behind her. She had nowhere left to retreat.

"Please," she said, hating the tremble in her voice. "The curse has already taken enough women."

"You're not cursed, Isabelle." Adèle stepped closer. "You're just unlucky enough to carry the key. Hand me the stone, and you go free. Keep the castle. Marry your captain. Grow old above the waves."

"Is that what you'd do with it? Grow old?"

Adèle's face flickered—something unreadable passing through her expression. Guilt, perhaps. Fear. The same micro-expression Isabelle had seen when Adèle's hands trembled at the kitchen table.

"No," she said softly. "I'd grow young again."

That was all Isabelle needed to hear. She turned to run, but Adèle lunged. Cold fingers closed around Isabelle's wrist, and she felt the blade's flat edge press against her knuckles—not to cut, but to pry. To force her fingers open around the diamond.

Isabelle yanked back. The locket swung from its chain, banging against her sternum. The stone still in her fist, she swung wildly, catching Adèle across the temple with her elbow. Adèle stumbled, cursing in a French so thick with Breton brogue it barely registered.

"Fils de chien!"

She came back, faster than Isabelle expected. The blade flashed. Isabelle dodged, and the edge nicked her forearm, drawing a thin line of blood that beaded and dripped onto the crypt floor.

The diamond in her hand pulsed. No—throbbed. As if it tasted her blood and had been waiting for the moment.

Adèle lunged again. Isabelle threw herself sideways, catching Adèle's arm, using the momentum to slam her against the wall. The blade skittered across the floor, clattering into the darkness. But Adèle did not release. Instead, her fingernails dug into Isabelle's wrist, drawing more blood.

"Give it to me," Adèle hissed, face inches from Isabelle's, breath hot and sour. "You don't know what you're holding. You don't understand what's down there."

Isabelle's grip loosened for a fraction of a second—enough for Adèle's fingers to snatch at the diamond. She pulled. The stone, slick with Isabelle's blood, slid between their fists.

In the scramble, the locket's chain snapped. It hit the floor and cracked open, the two hinged halves falling away.

Isabelle looked down—not at the diamond, but at the floor around her feet.

There was a circular grate cut into the crypt's paving stones, decades old, rusted at the edges. A drain, perhaps. Or an old ventilation shaft. The halves of her grandmother's locket had fallen through the diamond-shaped opening.

And in the struggle, so had the stone.

Isabelle watched it tumble end over end. The Heart of Light, the key to everything—the return, the bargain, the curse—slipped past her reaching fingers and disappeared into the dark slot. She heard it hit water far below. A soft, distant *plink*, as if accepting its fate and falling gratefully into the depths.

Adèle screamed. A raw, primal sound of denial. She scrambled to her knees, trying to wedge her fingers into the grate, tearing her nails on rusted iron.

"No! No—" She twisted to face Isabelle, face contorted with a fury that bordered on madness. "You've destroyed it. You've destroyed everything."

Isabelle couldn't speak. She stared at the grate, at the empty loops of her locket's chain dangling from her unbroken hand.

Adèle stood, wiping blood from her split lip. "I'll find another way," she said, voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "The lowest tide comes tomorrow. And when it does, something will answer the gate—whether you're there to greet it or not."

She turned and fled, footsteps clattering up the crypt stairs, fading into the storm above.

Isabelle stayed on her knees for a long moment. Then she picked up the two broken halves of her grandmother's locket. The photograph of Yvonne and Louis had already been removed; the metal was now just metal. Cold and empty without purpose.

A tremor ran through the castle walls. Not an earthquake. Something deeper. A groan from the foundations themselves, as if the stone were rearranging itself.

The curse no longer had a key.

And it knew.

Isabelle felt it then: a grip inside her chest, tightening like a fist around her lungs. Her heart stuttered, then hammered against her ribs. For a moment, the world swam out of focus, the paintings on the crypt walls seeming to writhe.

She looked down at her hands. They were shaking. Behind her, she could have sworn she heard the grate hiss—the sound of water churning far below, rising.

She had lost the Heart of Light.

And she had no idea what was coming for her next.

But as she staggered toward the stairs, something caught her eye beneath the grate's edge, glinting in the lantern light. Not the diamond—that was gone. Something else, smaller, half-obscured by a lip of corroded iron.

A fragment of her locket's hinge, she thought. Or maybe a piece of the stone's setting.

She reached down, fingers brushing the cold metal, and pulled it free.

It was not a fragment.

It was a ring. A worn gold band, engraved on the inside with two names whose letters were smeared and barely legible.

*Yvonne & Armand.*

Yvonne's wedding ring. The one her grandmother had apparently slid into the exact spot where the diamond would one day fall, waiting for someone to find it.

A hundred questions swarmed Isabelle's mind, but there was no time to answer them. Behind her, the grate shuddered and spat a mist of salt water.

The castle was waking up.

And Armande Marchand, the dead husband she had never learned the name of, was no longer the only thought she would share with Yann tonight.