Read Chapter 4: The Captain's Warning

The storm broke as Yann reached for the mooring line, and Isabelle felt the first cold slap of rain against her cheek. She had come down to the harbor without meaning to, drawn by the roiling sky and the need to move, to do something, to escape the walls of Keravel and the weight of the locket against her collarbone.

Yann’s hand closed around her wrist. Not hard, but firm enough that she couldn't pull away. His face was set, the weather-lined skin gone pale beneath his beard.

“You’re still wearing it,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

Isabelle looked down. The moonstone caught the grey light, pulsing faintly as if it had its own heartbeat. She had tried to take it off twice—once in the east tower, once in her grandmother’s bedroom—and both times her fingers had refused to unclasp the catch. It wasn’t that she couldn’t. It was that some deeper part of her had decided she shouldn’t.

“You said the sea would come for whoever wears it,” she said, pulling her wrist free. “Maybe I want it to come for me.”

Yann’s jaw tightened. The rain quickened, drumming against the wooden pier. Around them, fishermen scrambled to secure their boats, shouting to each other in Breton. A gull screamed overhead and wheeled away inland.

“You don’t understand what you’re asking for.”

“Then explain it.” Isabelle lifted her chin. The wind tore at her hair, whipping dark strands across her face. “You told me the curse kills women who sail on the full moon. You told me the locket marks me. But you haven’t told me why, or how, or what any of it has to do with your family being bound to serve the castle’s women.”

Yann went very still.

For a long moment, the only sound was the sea—the grind of shingle, the hiss of foam, the rising howl of the wind. The harbor was almost empty now. The last boat had been hauled up the slipway, and a small boy ran past with a basket of fish, his mother shouting after him from a doorway.

“My family has served the Marchands for three hundred years,” Yann said at last. His voice was low, rough, the sound of a man who had swallowed saltwater once too often. “Every generation of Le Goffs has watched over the castle. We’ve ferried your people across the bay. We’ve kept the secrets. And we’ve buried the women who didn’t come back.”

Isabelle felt the cold seep through her boots. “Buried them?”

“What was left of them.” Yann looked out at the sea, and for an instant, the mask he wore cracked. She saw something beneath it—grief, or guilt, she couldn’t tell. “My grandfather found your great-aunt Yvonne’s shawl tangled in the rocks on the third day after the full moon. That was all. Just the shawl.”

The name landed in Isabelle’s chest like a stone. Yvonne. Her mother had mentioned her once, briefly, in a half-drunken confession during a holiday dinner Isabelle barely remembered. A sister who had died before she was born. A tragedy the family never spoke of.

“You never told me that,” she said.

“You never asked.”

The rain was harder now, soaking through her coat. She should move, find shelter, but her feet seemed rooted to the planks. “What happened to her?”

Yann shook his head. “She broke the rule. The moon was full, and she sailed out alone in her little skiff. My grandfather saw her go and took his boat after her—tried to bring her back before the sea took her.” He paused. “Neither of them returned.”

Isabelle thought of the ledger in the east tower. The coded columns. The torn page that had mentioned another way. “Your grandfather,” she said slowly, “was trying to save her. And the curse took him too?”

“The curse doesn’t take the Le Goffs,” Yann said, with a bitterness that made the words scrape. “We’re bound, not cursed. We serve. Even when it means rowing into a storm to save a Marchand woman who refused to listen.”

The accusation hung in the air between them, sharp as the salt wind. Isabelle felt her face flush. She hadn’t asked to inherit any of this. She hadn’t chosen the castle or the curse or the dead women whose portraits lined the gallery walls.

“I didn’t come here to break anything,” she said. “I came to see what my grandmother left me. And I’m not leaving until I understand what’s happening.”

“That’s the problem,” Yann said. He stepped closer, and this time his voice was almost pleading. “You think understanding will save you. It won’t. The women who understand the curse best are the ones who died trying to outsmart it. The only way to survive is to leave. Sell the castle. Go back to Paris. Forge the papers if you have to—I don’t care. Just get out of Brittany before the next full moon.”

“And the locket?”

“Throw it in the deepest part of the sea. Or give it to the church. I don’t know. Just—” He broke off, his hands clenching at his sides. “I promised my grandmother I would keep this from happening again. She made me promise on her deathbed. And I’ve watched three Marchand women walk into the water since I was a boy, and I’ve never been able to stop a single one.”

Isabelle saw the tremor in his hands. He wasn’t trying to frighten her. He was trying to save her, the only way he knew how.

“I’m not her,” she said. “I’m not my mother. I’m not Yvonne.”

“That’s exactly what they all said.”

A crack of lightning split the sky, so close that Isabelle felt the air vibrate in her teeth. The thunder followed a heartbeat later, a rolling boom that shook the harbor stones. Yann swore under his breath and grabbed her arm again, pulling her toward the shelter of the fish market building.

“We need to get off the pier. Now.”

They made it to the stone archway just as the true force of the storm broke—a cascade of rain so thick it was like standing behind a waterfall. Isabelle was drenched to the skin, her hair plastered to her head, the locket cold against her chest. She shivered, but not from the cold.

Yann stood beside her, his breathing ragged. He ran a hand through his wet hair and stared out at the harbor, where the waves were climbing higher with each passing minute. White caps raced across the grey water. The gulls had vanished. Even the sea birds knew better than to stay.

“Something’s coming,” Isabelle said, without knowing why she spoke.

Yann shot her a look. “What did you say?”

“Something’s coming.” The words felt as though they were being pulled from her by a tide she couldn’t see. She touched the locket. The moonstone was warm now, unnaturally warm. “The sea is searching.”

“Isabelle, you’re scaring me.”

She turned from the harbor, but her gaze was arrested by something bobbing in the churning water—a shape that didn’t belong to the rocks or the driftwood. Dark, waterlogged, caught in the suction of the waves between two boulders.

“There,” she said, pointing.

Yann followed her gesture, and his face went pale. He didn’t move for a long moment. Then he stepped out of the shelter, back into the rain, and made his way down the wet stones toward the water’s edge. Isabelle followed without thinking, heedless of her boots filling with seawater.

The shape was a box. Sea-worn, crusted with barnacles, the wood bleached almost white by salt and sun. It had wedged between the rocks, caught on a snag of driftwood, as though the sea had placed it there deliberately.

Yann crouched and pulled it free. It was smaller than a fishing crate, about the size of a hatbox, bound with a length of rotted rope. Something was tied to the rope—a scrap of oilcloth, folded and sealed with wax.

Isabelle knelt beside him, the rain hammering against her back. Yann’s hands were steady as he cut the rope with the knife he kept at his belt. The oilcloth came away first. He unfolded it, revealing a piece of paper yellowed with age, the ink blurred by years of salt and water.

The handwriting was faded, but legible. French. A woman’s hand, elegant and precise.

*If you are reading this, you have found the box my family has lost for a hundred years. The debt is not paid. It is only delayed. Tell her there was another way, and I was too afraid to take it.*

*— S.D.*

The rain fell. The storm roared. And Isabelle felt the world tilt beneath her.

S.D. Séraphine Desmarais. The woman in the portrait. The name on the key.

Yann looked up at her, the paper trembling in his fingers. “You know who wrote this?”

Isabelle couldn’t answer. She was staring at the box in his hands, at the water streaming off its scarred surface, at the name that had followed her from the east tower and across the cobblestones of the village.

The sea had sent her an answer.

And the answer was not what she had hoped.