I saw my husband’s hand on another woman before I saw his face. / Chapter 33 / 50

Chapter 33 - The Keeper's Ledger

The lighthouse keeper’s name was Nikos. Inside the whitewashed stone quarters, surrounded by brass oil lamps, dried herbs, and yellowed maritime registers, he poured us three small glasses of fiery anise-scented raki.

"I was twenty years old when your father brought his schooner into this caldera," Nikos said, his hand trembling as he set the bottle down. "He wasn't running from the law. He was running from men who claimed to own the seabed itself. Cassian."

"The blue hull," Julian said, leaning forward across the rough wooden table. "We were shadowed across the Cretan passage. Who commands Cassian now?"

"Helena Cassian," Nikos spat onto the floorboards with utter disdain. "The granddaughter. She took over the family’s private security firm in Athens. For twenty years she has dredged the sunken reefs around Therasia looking for what Arthur took from her grandfather's wreck."

"What did he take, Nikos?" I asked, my heart thumping against my ribs. "My father was an honest surveyor. He spent his life preserving coastal shipping, building honest trades in Maine."

"Honest men find things they cannot return, child," Nikos said softly. He stood up, went to a heavy floorboard beneath his cot, and pried it loose with the tip of his knife. From the cavity below, he lifted a heavy iron box wrapped in oilcloth, bound by an intricate three-dial combination lock.

"Arthur left this with me the night he sailed for America," Nikos explained, placing the heavy iron box between us. "He told me: *Nikos, my daughter will come when the French wolves are dead. If she doesn't come with Julian Thorne's bloodline, do not give it to her, for she will not survive the voyage.*"

I exchanged a stunned, breathless look with Julian. "My father knew Julian's family?"

"The Thornes and the Vances held the harbor charters of Brittany and Maine together before the war tore them apart," Julian murmured, his hand finding mine under the table, his fingers warm and fiercely protective. "They weren't rivals. They were guardians."

"The combination," Nikos warned, pointing at the iron tumblers. "Arthur said only his daughter would know the numbers that broke her father's heart."

My breath hitched. The numbers that broke my father's heart weren't maritime coordinates. They were the date my mother died at sea—the day he sealed the harbor gates and fled to the New World.