I needed a distraction, something to dull the pain and the panic and keep me from spiraling further. Picking at the sludge, I tried desperately to bottle my despair by guessing what Cass would've named the strange seaweed.
I heard her voice in my mind, nose wrinkled as she gagged.Gourmet sea slime, salted with silt and scum. A mermaid convict's favorite treat.
A descriptive enough name for whatever sloshed at the bottom of my bowl. I’d tell her about it when I saw her again; how, when I pressed my thumb into the slippery goo, bubbles surfaced, and I was pretty sure it groaned.
Though that might have been me.
My stomach rolled, and I cast aside the seaweed to explore my cell. Reid would want all the details. Dimensions. Colors—or the lack of them. The temperature—freezing. He’d try to sketch it while I relayed every inch from memory, making it the first entry in his brand-new notebook.
I got to work, awkwardly, still unable to properly use my tail. My motions were jerky and anything but fluid, but I examined the kelp bedding and ran my hands underneath it. Then I moved to the shale table, taking measurements in my mind. I dug into the sand as if searching for buried treasure and found a chipped shell with a sharp edge. I scanned the walls, my gaze stalling on marks etched into the rock.
My throat tightened. The dread was back with a force thatmade the water press in until I choked on the weight of it.
The scratches were thin, straight lines. One after another, in neat rows. Someone else had drawn them. Counting the days. There were so many. I closed my fist around the broken shell until the edge pricked my palm.
Had they been set free or had they died here?
I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
Forcing the jagged point against the rock, I carved a similar mark.
Day one.
I stared at it, numb for the first time. Then, with a shake of my head, I buried the shell back into the sand for safekeeping.
Exhaustion tempered some of my fear, and muscles I’d never used before ached. Tears heated behind my eyelids. Could mermaids even cry? I curled up on the pallet of seaweed and gazed at the ceiling, counting the organic starlight while imagining I was camped under a vast sky.
I hadn't slept alone in a year. The nights were filled with the sound of crickets, the snap of a campfire, and Gavin's bedroll next to mine. His grin in the dark. The warmth of his body. Always within reach.
But not tonight. Maybe never again. And it wasn't long before even the anemones had extinguished their light, leaving me cold and alone in my empty cell.
I didn't sleep.
I mourned.
Chapter 10
Three more marks onthe wall.
Six servings of sea sludge.
No answers.
With time on my hands, I practiced using my new tail, swimming from one end of the cell to the other. In any other circumstance, the experience would have been thrilling. But in my tiny recess of stone, it was barely enough to keep me from thinking the worst.
The nights were so cold. I shivered on the kelp curled into a ball, my body refusing to acclimate to the depths. The days were cast in shadow, silent in my wing except for the eerie hum of the currents.
From deeper in the prison, the coral bars groaned and slammed. Sometimes, shrieks of pain or deep, guttural roars of terror echoed through the tunnel.
I wasn’t alone then.
I shared their fear, even if I couldn’t see their faces.
But none of it made sense. Why me? What had I done to deserve this? I kept reliving the past week. The months. The years. Trying to figure out where I went wrong.
Where was the line in the sand?
The stories my father used to tell didn’t feel like fairy talesanymore. They felt like secrets, dark ones that had followed me around, waiting to spread their curse.
