Jasper turned his hand beneath Sam's — not pulling away, but turning it so their palms pressed together, rough skin against rough skin. The honesty came before the strategy, before the careful words he'd learned to build in the city like walls.

"I don't know yet," he said. "But someone tried to break into the lighthouse before I got here."

Sam's fingers tightened around his. The color in his face shifted — the soft hope hardening into something sharper, more alert. He glanced toward the fisherman in the corner, still nursing his coffee and staring at nothing, then leaned closer.

"Show me."

Jasper drew the brass fragment from his pocket and laid it on the counter between them, half-hidden beneath the manila folder. Sam's eyes locked onto it with the focus of a man who'd spent years reading the fine print of other people's histories.

"Single-tooth. Wide bore." Sam's voice dropped to barely a whisper. "That's not a house key, Jasper. That's a lever-bit — the kind used on ship's strongboxes or private vaults. Whoever made this had it cut specifically for one lock."

He looked up, and the fear in his eyes was real now — not abstract worry but the grounded terror of someone who understood exactly what was at stake.

"They weren't trying to get into the lighthouse," Sam said slowly. "They were trying to get below it."

The steam wand hissed behind them. A gull cried outside, thin and sharp against the glass. Sam withdrew his hand — not coldly, but with the deliberate movement of someone who needed to think.

He pulled a rag from his apron and wiped the counter in slow circles, his gaze distant.

"Your grandmother fired me once, you know." A ghost of a smile. "I was sixteen. She caught me trying to pick the lock on the cellar door. Said the only thing below that lighthouse was water and old ghosts, and I'd do well to leave both alone."

He stopped wiping.

"But she was lying, Jasper. I saw it in her face then, the same way I see it in yours now. There's something down there. Something the Blackwoods have wanted for decades. And your grandmother spent her whole life making sure they never reached it."

The folder still lay open between them — the glass-walled observation lounge, the staggering offer, the handwritten warning in old cursive. Sam's fingers drummed once against the counter, then went still.

"Julia Blackwood is hosting a reception tomorrow evening at the Reach Hotel," he said, his voice carefully neutral now. "She's calling it a 'community engagement dinner.' It's invitation only, but—" He hesitated, and something complicated moved behind his eyes. "I could get you in. If you wanted to look her in the face and decide for yourself what kind of enemy you're dealing with."

He picked up the brass fragment and held it to the light, turning it slowly. The single tooth caught a beam of afternoon sun and flashed gold.

"Or," he said, "you could go back to the lighthouse tonight. Find the cellar door your grandmother sealed. See for yourself what she was protecting."

His eyes met Jasper's, and the choice hung between them like the taste of salt on the wind — dangerous, necessary, and impossible to ignore.