Her living current sustains the harbor. His celebrated breakwater may destroy it.

For centuries, Thessa of the Deep Choir?a four-armed, gilled leviathan sovereign?has kept Greywake Harbor safe while its people reduce her to legend, wildlife, or infrastructure. Now a storm is driving lethal pressure against the breakwater, the deep gate is sealed, and the city may drown beneath the triumph it once celebrated.

Master harbor engineer Darius Venn designed that triumph. Kind, brilliant, and old enough to recognize accountability when it comes for him, he returns to find his signature stamped across a system that erased the woman beneath it. Saving Greywake means discovering who altered the harbor, admitting what his own work made possible, and learning to build with Thessa instead of around her.

Forced into close quarters at a tide station, they negotiate every boundary: wet rooms and dry, shared evidence and sovereign secrets, four-handed touch and the slow pressure of desire. But as sabotage, civic panic, and a hidden campaign against nonhuman authority tighten around them, trust becomes as essential as engineering.

To survive the storm, Thessa must decide whether intervention can become partnership rather than sacrifice. Darius must stop defending a legacy built without her consent?and prove that love can make room for the whole of her life.

Reader Promise

• An ancient, visibly leviathan heroine and a kind, competent, mature human engineer
• Tide-station forced proximity and a slow, deep-burn romance
• Consent-centered open-door intimacy and four-armed aquatic touch
• Civic mystery, found family, dangerous infrastructure, and substantial fantasy-adventure stakes
• No fated mates, taming, or transformation?only chosen partnership and a complete HEA

This volume contains a complete straight female/male romance and a resolved local fantasy-adventure conflict, while the Living Concord mystery rewards reading The Monstrous Heroines in order.