Irah stumbled back a step, his chest heaving. “Asyris killed Malya because she was dangerous. A threat!” he finally said, eyes wide, voice shaking. “Kaelypso is no threat!”
Her laugh was low and knowing. “No threat? She’s the most powerful of usall.” She crossed her arms. “I would argue even more powerful than you, pretty boy.”
He shook his head, disbelief evident in his stare. “She’s your sister. Your fuckingtwin.”
“Like I give a damn.” The words cracked like ice.
His shadows surged again, a visible tremble in his arms. “I won’t let you do this.”
Naerysa tilted her head, gaze burning with cruelty. “What makes you think you can even stop me? Once a soulbond is complete, there will be no stopping it.”
Esmyra’s eyes flared in horror, and she lifted a shaking wrist to her face. Her stare fell to the soulbond tattoo that now permanently marked her flesh—of the two sea serpents coiling around one another with a paired sun and crescent moon.
“I give my strength. I give my skin. To the sea and to who drinks the blood of my blood. If Kaelypso falls, may Naerysa rise.”
Esmyra’s heart leapt in her throat and she stumbled backward, gasping for air as that fractured memory pieced itself together. There were glimpses of flickering moonlight, a talon slicing through flesh as blood welled, and warm amber eyes right before their irises morphed into serpentine slits.
“All fucking gods,” Esmyra whispered in shock.
Kaelypso thrashed within her as they both realized what Syrena and Naerysa had done and what the Goddess of the Surface had been planning for centuries.
Syrena had bonded their souls and bodies together so she could somehow absorb Kaelypso’s magic. Her sister hadcompelledher.
Esmyra was right. She knew something was off that day, and Syrena lied to her face repeatedly. It wasnevernecessary to save her. Syrena and Naerysa took her choice away. They robbed her of her life, tethering both sets of twins together forever.
A jolt surged through Esmyra, and her vision began to blur and fray as the memory she was plunged into began rapidly slipping away. Her breath caught as her world wrenched sideways. Everything stretched before once again shattering into shards of color and sound.
She clawed at her temple as if she could pull the vision back, digging her nails into her scalp. “No, no, no!” she screamed. “I need to see the rest!”
But the world before her tore apart. A great howl of wind, a crack of stormless thunder, and then she was falling.
Through stars and space and time, through nothing and everything. The agony in her mind was like being pulled through a needle’s eye as her body unraveled and reformed in the space between breaths. Light flashed, darkness surged, and a scream tore from her throat, but it was swallowed by the void.
Then Esmyra’s knees slammed into soft sand, sending it flying in all directions.
The air was cool against her skin, thick with the scent of salt and moss. She gasped, her chest rising and falling as her eyes darted around. She was in a cove, half shrouded in the moon’s shadow, with towering rock walls on either side. The sky above was dark as midnight, the stars twinkling brightly even behind the cover of the clouds.
Waves lapped gently at the shore, but then there, far ahead near the water’s edge, Cyrus Blackwood stood.
Esmyra froze when her stare landed on her father.
He stood facing the sea, cloaked in a dark coat, his black hair tousled by the wind. Even from this distance, she could see the tension in his posture. His hands were fidgeting as they clenched and unclenched at his sides, ruining a parchment between them that she only assumed was some kind of map.
Several feet away from him, a small pinnace had been dragged on the shore.The Night Wraithwas nowhere in sight, and their crew was absent.
Father is here alone.But why?
It was odd to see him standing in the sand, breathing and taking in the air like any other man. This must’ve been before Maerinys sank—before he was cursed to spend eternity at sea. This was what she had asked the Veil to show her… but why wasn’t this shown first?
She crept forward slowly, instinctively keeping to the shadows of the rocky ledge even though she knew he couldn’t see her.
Esmyra crouched behind a drift of stones, watching him with wide, glassy eyes. Her heart thudded painfully in her chest. Not justfrom the shock of seeing him alive again, but from the look on his face.
It wasn’t just fear.
It… it looked likeguilt.
“Your father was the reason our kingdom sank to the depths.” Syrena’s words from when she arrived in Maerinys rang in her ears.
