Perhaps one day, one of them will hear it too. Perhaps the blood runs stronger than I dared believe.
My fingers curl around the pendant, the metal still faintly warm against my palm. Dawn is hours away. Sleep, I already know, won't come easily—not with the weight of tomorrow pressing against my chest and the memory of those eyes watching from the dark.
CHAPTER 3
GRAYSON
The Warden's Tower wakes before I do, stone groaning in the pre-dawn wind like an old man stretching his bones. I lie in the darkness of my grandfather's bed, listening to the sound that has greeted every generation of Hale men since the tower was built centuries ago. The walls remember.
My bear stirs restlessly beneath my skin, and I know sleep is finished with me for the night.
The tower is cold this time of morning, stone holding the night's chill long after the sky begins to lighten. I dress in the dark, pulling on layers of wool and oilskin, my mind already on the water. On her.
Isla's face surfaces in my memory before I can stop it. Those eyes that changed with every turn of the conversation, sometimes light like morning fog, sometimes dark as storm clouds gathering over open water. The stubborn set of her jaw when I tried to send her away. The way she held her ground even when I towered over her, refusing to be intimidated by my size or my silence.
And that handshake.
My palm tingles at the memory, phantom electricity racing up my arm the way it did when her skin touched mine. She felt it too. I saw it in the widening of her eyes, the sharp intake of breath she tried to hide. Something passed between us in that moment, something my bear recognized in her that she doesn't recognize in herself.
The tower's spiral staircase descends through three floors of history, past the room where my father slept before me, past the kitchen where my grandmother cooked fish stew over an open fire, past the entrance hall where portraits of dead Hales watch from the walls with eyes that know too much.
The door at the base opens onto a narrow path cut into the cliff face, switchbacking down to the dock whereDeepwatchwaits. The wind hits me immediately, salt-sharp and cold enough to steal breath, and my bear pushes closer to the surface in response. He wants to run, to feel the morning air in his fur, to patrol the territory the way we did before responsibilities and secrets made such freedom dangerous. But there's no time for that today.
I follow the path down through darkness, my feet knowing every stone and turn from decades of practice. The sound of waves grows louder as I descend, the rhythm of the sea that has been constant through every morning of my life. When I was a boy, my grandfather told me the waves were the heartbeat of something ancient sleeping beneath the water. Something that dreamed in currents and spoke in storms. Something we were sworn to protect.
I believed him then. I believe him still.
Deepwatchsits at her mooring, forty feet of steel and stubbornness that has weathered more storms than I can count. I inherited her from my father along with everything else, the tower and the duty and the knowledge of what lurks in waters the tourists never see. She's not pretty. Her hull is scarred fromrocky channels, her paint faded by sun and salt. But she's solid where it matters, and she's never let me down.
The pre-dawn checks are routine, the kind of work that lets my hands move while my mind wanders. Fuel levels, engine diagnostics, navigation systems, safety equipment. I run through the list automatically, but my thoughts keep circling back to yesterday's conversation on the dock.
Isla wants to understand the whales. She has five years of data showing migration patterns that don't make sense, congregations in locations that should be empty, behavior that defies biological explanation. She doesn't know it, but her research has mapped the boundaries of the sacred waters.
She also doesn't know that her data nearly made my heart stop when she showed it to me.
The sonar imaging was the worst. Shapes in the deep trenches that her instruments couldn't identify, moving in ways that no known marine life should move. Activity at depths where pressure should crush anything with a skeleton. She called it evidence of undiscovered species. I call it proof that she's getting too close to things better left hidden.
But she's also getting close to something else. The development corporation, the surveyors mapping our sacred sites, the threat that could expose everything we've spent generations protecting. If her research can stop them legally, can give the island council a reason to deny their permits, then the risk might be worth taking.
The radio crackles to life as I finish checking the bilge pumps, Declan's voice cutting through the static.
"Hale. You awake?"
I grab the handset, already knowing this isn't a social call. Declan MacRae doesn't do social. "I'm here. What's wrong?"
"The equipment you found in your cove. We traced the serial numbers." A pause filled with implications. "Maritime Development Corporation. Name mean anything to you?"
"It does now." I tell him what Isla shared with me—the dredging permits, the council meeting at the end of the week, the promises of jobs and modernization. His silence grows heavier with each word.
"And none of our people caught wind of this," he says finally. Not a question.
"The scientist knew more about it than we did. That's a problem."
My grip tightens on the handset until the plastic creaks. "They've been mapping all the sites?"
"Every one we know about, and probably some we don't. Rafe's people found more gear hidden near the kelp forests. GPS coordinates, depth charts, photos of the rock carvings. They know exactly what they're looking for, Grayson. This isn't random surveying."
The implications settle in my stomach like cold stones. If they've mapped the sacred places, they know something. Maybe not everything, not the full truth of what sleeps in those waters, but enough to know that certain locations hold value beyond simple real estate. Enough to know that something worth finding lies beneath the surface.
