Beneath Still Waters (Tidehaven #1)

Prologue

REID

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

SLEEP NEVER STAYS for long.

By the time the sky lightens to that thin, gray veil, I’m already up. The cabin is nothing but quiet behind me, with the kind of silence that presses instead of soothes. The trail beyond my back door feels like the only place where my thoughts slow enough to catch my breath.

I walk most mornings like this—early…before the coast wakes and the town stirs. Before questions and conversations and the low hum of other people’s lives disrupt my peace. The marsh is still at this hour, the air cool and damp, the world holding its breath.

It’s usually the only time of day I feel even.

I’m halfway down the narrow trail that cuts behind Blackbird Cottage when I hear the sirens.

They rip through the quiet, close enough that my shoulders jerk and my breath catches.

They are loud, which means they must be close.

Something isn’t right. They don’t usually come this far back.

My body reacts before my brain does. My pulse kicks up, my muscles coiling tight, like an old reflex I’d learned to ignore.

The lights come into view through the trees—blue and red bleeding into the gray dawn—and I know, with a certainty I don’t question, that something is very wrong.

My feet stop for half a second.

Dr. Penelope Young’s face flashes in my mind.

Then I’m moving again. The pull is immediate and unmistakable. The way you hurry without realizing you’ve started, heart already ahead of your body.

The cottage sits far off the road, nestled between the forest and the marsh. Used by Coastal Carolina University to house research faculty, not many people know it’s here. I do because just through the short trail beyond it, my cabin sits in peaceful solitude.

As I break through the tree line, the driveway is already crowded.

Patrol cars line the dirt road. An ambulance is pulled all the way up to the porch, its red lights reflecting on the cottage’s white siding.

Unmarked SUVs are parked with casual authority, like they’ve been here before.

The air smells of salt and damp earth, threaded with the tight, contained tension of those standing around, who probably know more than they’ll let on.

I slow only when I see my friend Colt.

He’s in uniform near the porch, posture locked tight, jaw set the way it gets when he’s carrying something heavy and refusing to let it show. When his eyes find mine, the look that crosses his face isn’t surprise.

It’s warning.

He steps toward me quickly. “Reid. You shouldn’t be here.”

“What the hell is going on?” I bark, looking past him.

The front door stands open, light spilling across the porch in a harsh wash.

I’ve walked up those steps more times than I can count.

Sat at her table and listened while she paced, talking through funding battles and research setbacks and council meetings that went nowhere because certain men preferred things the way they were.

We’d had an unlikely friendship, rooted in a shared love of the marsh and the solitude it offered.

“Where’s Penny?” I demand.

Colt sighs, raking a hand through his hair. His eyes meet mine briefly before he looks away, his gaze fixed on the horizon.

“She was due at the university for a meeting last night. She didn’t show.” Colt drags a hand over his face.

“That’s not like her.”

“Right. Her supervisor got worried,” Colt agrees. “He came over here, banged on her door. When she didn’t answer, he called us.”

Before he can say more, the EMTs appear in the doorway.

They move carefully, guiding a stretcher between them. The sheet is pulled high, but the shape beneath it is unmistakable. Smaller than the woman I knew. Quieter somehow. Reduced to something that doesn’t argue or laugh or demand better.

Something fractures in my chest.

“She’s gone,” Colt says quietly.

I swallow the tightness in my throat, but my voice comes out like a whisper anyway. “What happened?”

Colt’s jaw tightens, just barely. “Apparent suicide.”

The words feel wrong the instant he says them. No. She was loud, unapologetic, and impossible to intimidate. This feels like a conclusion reached before any questions have been asked.

My gaze drifts back to the cottage.

The last time I saw her, she’d waved off my concern with a crooked smile.

They don’t love me working in what they’ve already claimed, she’d said. Especially when I keep standing between them and the money.

She’d said it lightly enough that I could brush it off. If she wasn’t concerned, then I wouldn’t be either. I’d told myself it was politics. Money. The same small-town power games Tidehaven has always played. I hadn’t wanted to believe it was more than that.

Standing here now, with too many lights and too many strangers already claiming the space, that explanation feels thin.

I scan the scene before me and notice the one thing that doesn’t fit.

Plain clothed officers walking around my friend’s space with a presence that doesn’t need to announce itself. One of them glances my way, his eyes darting between me and Colt, before dismissing me as insignificant.

“Who is that?” I ask Colt, keeping my voice low.

He exhales, slow and deliberate. “Feds.” He looks like he wants to say more but doesn’t.

Something heavy settles low in my gut. Feds don’t show up for an accident or a suicide. They don’t show up when everyone agrees on answers.

Before I can push Colt further, one of the agents steps onto the porch, phone pressed to his ear. As he passes, he gives Colt a brief nod. “We’ll handle it from here.”

Not we’ll assist. Not we’ll coordinate.

Handle.

The ambulance doors close with a dull, final thud, and the sound echoes longer than it should. I feel the familiar urge rise—the need to push, to demand, to tear into whatever box someone’s just tried to seal shut. That’s my friend in there. And I want to know what the fuck happened to her.

Experience has taught me what pushing costs though. I’ve been wrong before. And I’ve seen what happens when you move too fast. When you act on instinct without proof. When people get hurt because you were wrong.

Colt finally looks at me with something in his eyes that mirrors my own restraint, stretched thin by duty and rules.

“You should go,” he says quietly. “I’ll come by later.”

I nod, even though every part of me resists turning away. As I step back toward the trail, Blackbird Cottage looms behind me, silent now, its secrets already being absorbed into something larger and far less visible.

I know, with a certainty that settles deep in my bones, that whatever’s happening here didn’t begin today.

And that in Tidehaven, the most dangerous things don’t announce themselves.

They wait.