Tidebound to the Leviathan
Dr. Iona Vale maps the sea's secrets for a living—but when her mentor vanishes above a drowned Bronze Age city in the eastern Mediterranean, the map she needs most is the one no human has survived drawing. Thirty meters below the surface, something ancient is watching her. Nerith has guarded the sunken city for three thousand years. He has crushed salvage boats, swallowed cables, and driven every treasure hunter back to shore or down to the silt. He is not merciful. He is not human. He is precisely the kind of creature Iona has spent her career explaining away with science and sonar—until he pulls her from a fouled regulator and carries her into a bioluminescent archive older than her field of study. What begins as a forced alliance becomes something neither of them has language for. Iona brings GPS precision and the stubborn refusal to romanticize what she doesn't understand. Nerith brings three millennia of embodied memory, alien patience, and a secret about the city's sealed volcanic trench that makes her evidence case look small. As they translate Linear B fragments in dry chambers beneath the sea, survive submersible sweeps, and negotiate intimacy across the distance of species and century, the syndicate drilling above them gets closer to shattering something that cannot be repaired. The city can be preserved or it can be plundered. Iona can surface or she can stay. And Nerith, who has never once considered letting anything in, is running out of reasons to keep her at depth's length. Tidebound to the Leviathan is a standalone oceanic monster romance with high-heat intimacy, Bronze Age archaeology, and an HEA that lives exactly where the map runs out. Free sample available.