Stay Dead, Darling: BOOK SIX (Deadman’s Daughter 6)

They called her father the Drowned Bride Killer.
They never asked what Harper saw that night.

At sixteen, Harper Wynn stopped speaking. Not out loud, not to anyone. Her sister Lily was gone—drowned in Starling Lake wearing their mother’s wedding dress—and by morning, their father was in handcuffs. The police said the case was closed. The town said justice was done. Harper said nothing at all.

Ten years later, she’s still silent in her own way. Living under a new name, in a borrowed life, tucked into a place where no one knows what she left behind. Her voice is calm. Her routine is safe. She doesn’t think about the water. Or the veil. Or the weight of guilt that’s never let her go.

Until another body is found.
Another woman in white.
Another bride returned to the lake like an offering.

The headlines are familiar. The photographs unbearable. The message clear.

Come home.

Beckett Frost has made a living out of walking into places no one else dares go. War zones. Murder scenes. Mass graves where the silence screams. But this? This is different. This isn’t just a case—it’s a pattern. And Harper Wynn is at the center of it.

He doesn’t trust her. But he believes her.
And sometimes that’s more dangerous.

As the body count rises, Harper and Beckett begin pulling at the threads the town left knotted years ago. The more they unravel, the more they uncover whispers of a secret marriage pact—a blood bargain made generations ago to protect the town’s prosperity in exchange for something precious: a bride, every decade, offered to the lake.

No one talks about it. No one admits to it. But the pact is real. And someone is making sure it stays unbroken.

Harper doesn’t know who to trust—not the town, not her memories, not even Beckett, who stares at her like he’s already seen her dead. But the deeper she digs, the more the cracks form. In her silence. In her story. In the neat little version of truth she’s been telling herself since the day her sister disappeared.

Because the closer she gets to the truth, the more impossible it becomes. Her father might not have been guilty. The town might have known more than it ever said. And Lily—sweet, wild Lily—might not have been a victim at all.

When Harper receives an audio recording with no sender and a voice she hasn’t heard in a decade, everything collapses.

The voice is unmistakable.
The message is precise.
And the threat is personal.

Lily is alive.
And she’s orchestrating everything.

As past and present collide, Harper must face the one question she’s never dared to ask:
What if the person she’s been mourning… is the person she has to stop?

Because Lily didn’t drown.
She transformed.

And if Harper doesn’t make the right choice this time—
Another bride will go under.
And it might be her.