Before the Tide: The Girl Who Should Have Drowned
by Lunaaslikolcu
"I've killed three men since they carved these marks into my ribs. Tonight I'm adding a fourth, and he doesn't even know I'm here yet."
Eleanor Winchester was a scholar's daughter with a future. Then her father sold her to the Congregation of the Drowned—a cult that has spent sixty years feeding children to something sleeping in the deep.
The ritual was supposed to kill her. It didn't.
Now Eleanor carries thirteen symbols carved into her flesh, a connection to an entity older than the continents, and a list of eighteen names. The people who held candles while she drowned. The priest who smiled as she screamed. The woman who carved the marks that changed her forever.
One by one, she's crossing them off.
From Dover to Paris to the gas-lit streets of London, Eleanor hunts with the patience of the tide and the precision of a blade. But each kill takes something from her. The void where her heart used to be grows larger. The thing in the deep watches with ancient patience, curious what its investment will become.
Then she meets Corrine Vane—a cult defector with burn scars where her brand used to be. Corrine is everything Eleanor shouldn't trust. She's also the only person whose presence makes the hungry marks go quiet.
The Congregation's hunters are closing in. Their priest is preparing a ritual that will wake the Deep One forever. Eleanor has months to stop him, eighteen names to cross off, and one impossible choice:
Become the monster they made her, or find something worth staying human for.
⚠️ Content: Graphic violence, cult horror, trauma, drowning. Dark fiction with hope—not grimdark despair.
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