Undertow

Coralie Dunmarsh reads the tide the way other people read a face. Her grandmother kept the drowned bells at the Weir before she was born, and her father mapped the true water until the sea took him, or so the good Warden says. So when the town chains her to the causeway and gives her to the sea to keep the coast safe another year, she already knows the thing they worship is a lie. She does not yet know the thing under the water will be the one to prove it.

They call him the Leviathan, and the drowned coast has feared him for longer than anyone can count. He does not drown her. He asks. He offers her a shore she can walk back to on any tide and a truth no one else has ever told her: the sea was never calmed by the girls they gave it, because a thing taken by force feeds nothing at all. Every drowning they called mercy has only rotted the deep and bred the horror that eats their boats. He would know. He has been choking on it for forty years.

Everyone on the coast loves the man who did it. The Warden who reads the omens and keeps the sea and feeds the poor, and who put her grandmother under the water with his own hands to steal her office. He wants Coralie drowned for good this time, because she is the last soul alive who can read the true bells and prove that his mercy has been murder all along.

They think she is the girl they let hold the ropes. They have not understood yet that the terrible thing they married the sea to is the only one who never lied to her, and that she would stand up at the Weir in front of the whole town and ring the true tide against his lie to keep him.

Undertow is a standalone dark fantasy romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.