Prologue
The Highlands were never quiet, not truly, but tonight the silence felt wrong.
Wind skimmed low over Loch Arkaig, tugging at Eilidh Campbell’s riot of red curls as she stood at the water’s edge, the mist clinging to her coat like cold fingers.
The loch glimmered dark and depthless beneath the rising moon, its surface disturbed only by the faint ripples from the old jetty half-submerged in shadow.
This was where the legends said Harris Mackenzie had come. Where treasure hunters, scholars, and fools insisted the Jacobite gold had vanished forever beneath the black water.
But Eilidh knew better.
She had always suspected the loch was a grave for truths someone wanted buried.
And she had unfortunately been right.
Her breath clouded in the frigid air as she knelt, brushing her fingertips over the damp stones near the marker she had traced so many times in the archives. A faint, weathered thistle, impossible to see unless the moon struck it just so, was carved into the rock.
Not just Glenoran’s thistle.
Harris’s.
Her pulse quickened. She slipped her notebook from her coat and flipped to her sketches—the ones she had sworn to Charles she would put away for good. The ones she told her daughter Heather were “just old stories” when she caught her staring at the pile of books by the fireplace.
She closed her eyes.
I shouldn’t be here.
Charles had begged her to stay home. To not hop on the next plane to Scotland. His voice was rough with the fear he’d tried so hard to hide.
“Heather needs you,” he’d pleaded. “We need you. Let the damned past rest, Eilidh. Tell Eleanor you can’t make it.”
Guilt pressed hard beneath her ribs. She loved him.
She loved their daughter. And she knew—God, she knew—that returning to Harris’s trail had hollowed something between her and her husband.
Every page, every archive, every sleepless night spent chasing shadows of a man long dead had carved fractures in the life she’d built.
She whispered into the cold:
“I’m sorry, Charles.”
But she couldn’t leave this undone.
Not when she was this close.
Not when Heather’s future might depend on the truth staying hidden—or being found by the right hands.
A twig snapped behind her.
Eilidh’s head lifted sharply, and she held her breath.
She scanned the tree line.
Dark… Still—too still.
She rose slowly, heart hammering against her ribs. She had been careful—doubling back along the road, parking miles from the footpath, walking by moonlight. No headlights. No engines. No footsteps but her own.
But something was wrong.
Another sound—soft, deliberate—rustled through the pines.
Someone was here.
Eilidh stepped closer to the loch, gripping the worn edges of Harris’s copied map in her pocket. Her eyes dropped to the water. The moon reflected a jagged, shifting silver across the surface. Beneath the glimmer, the depths churned in a way that made her skin crawl.
This was never the place.
Harris hadn’t drowned the gold here.
He had to have hidden it somewhere far safer—yet far more dangerous.
She repeated the phrase:
“If the thistle endures, follow it home.”
Then she turned toward the forest.
“Who’s there?” Her voice broke on the wind.
Silence.
Then—movement. Fast.
Panic flared hot in her chest. She stumbled backward, boots skidding on wet stone. The loch lapped hungrily at her heels. Her fingers fumbled for her field phone—dead signal, of course. The Highlands swallowed reception like secrets.
Don’t run, she told herself.
But she was already stepping back, pulse galloping, breath sharp.
Heather’s face flashed in her mind: wide-eyed, curious, trusting.
If anything happened to her, if these men found her research, Heather would inherit danger she could never outrun.
She is why I’m here , Eilidh prayed.
She is why I have to finish this.
A dark figure broke from the tree line.
Eilidh gasped and spun toward the path, sprinting into the night, clutching the map against her chest.
Branches whipped at her coat. Gravel scattered under her boots. Her lungs burned. She didn’t dare look back, didn’t dare breathe too loudly, didn’t dare think—
Another pair of footsteps crashed behind her.
Faster. Closer.
She stumbled once, caught herself, and kept running, the roar of the loch fading behind her as the forest swallowed her whole.
The last thing she heard before the world narrowed into darkness was a voice she recognized—low, commanding, too close:
“Stop her.”
Eilidh didn’t stop.
She ran for Heather.
For the truth.
For the legacy someone had died to protect.
The night closed in…
And the Highlands kept their secret.