Page 11 of Drown Me Gently

“But what if I wasn’t?” Auren interjected, and Ulric froze at the swell of urgency in his voice. Like this is what he’d wanted to say all along. “What if I weren’t a prince? What if Poseidon’s blood didn’t flow in my veins? Would you still come after me?”

Ulric’s jaw clenched, and he said nothing.

Because he couldn’t. The magic in his skin wouldn’t allow him. Even now, as the honest truth rested on the tip of his tongue, the marks along his skin began to burn in warning.

Because Ulric’s magic was conditional. Not born into him like Auren’s. His connection to the ocean’s power was bestowed after years of training and trial… and an oath. An oath to give himself to the god of the sea and never let his heart belong to another.

He vowed never to take a mate.

A lover.

No tether to anything that would distract him.

He’d promised Poseidon his entire life in exchange for eternal power. The ability to protect the sea and all it birthed. He had never strayed from that path. Nothing had ever tempted him to do so.

Until now.

But the magic threatened. It burned on his skin. So he lied. He lied to those cerulean eyes looking at him with too much earnestness.

“No.” Ulric finally said. “I would not.”

The court of Atlantis rose from the seabed like a monument carved from time itself. Poseidon, it was said, had always favored the architecture of the Greeks, and so his builders had mimicked the Pantheon’s glory below the waves.

But where the Greeks etched their heroes into their temples, Atlantis honored only the god of the sea. Across the inner walls, murals bloomed in sweeping arches: the elegance of the Merfolk, the solemn watch of the Krakens, the wrath of the ocean as it demolished human fleets.

A visual scripture of sea-born power.

Ulric hovered to the right of the Queen’s throne, the designated place of the Court Sorcerer. Every tattoo along his upper body hummed with magic. Being this close to another carrier of the god’s power always charged the water around him. The queen’s magic was second only to his. The chosen Mermaid of the sea.

And kneeling at the far away base of her throne, head bowed before her diamond gaze, was Auren.

Ulric didn’t envy his position.

Auren knelt before the throne, tail curled respectfully beneath him. One hand lay flat against the tiled floor, the other crossed over his chest with a bowed head. The only stance one took before Queen Tritheya.

She sat above him like the sea itself—dark-skinned, with coiled black hair and piercing silver eyes. She looked nothing like Auren, nor most of her children. That was the nature of divine parentage. Poseidon’s magic had fathered them all, and so they bore little resemblance to her.

Her tail was a magnificent sapphire blue, longer than that of any Mermaid Ulric had known. Ear fins curved from the sides of her head like delicate fans, framing the crown of gemstones and shells that gleamed like they had grown there.

“Mother, I have come at your request,” Auren said, his voice clipped. His head remained bowed.

“Yes. I’m sure you came very willingly,” she replied, dry as salt.

Ulric kept still, arms folded behind his back.

“There has been a significant increase in human ships above our city,” Queen Tritheya said, silver eyes sweeping the room like a tide rolling in. “More than a dozen vessels over the past three moon cycles. One in particular concerns me. Civilian-marked, named The Windless. Captained by a biologist, we believe a coastal kingdom has sent it to study the sea. Particularly, right above Atlantis.”

Her gaze snapped to Auren, sharp as a spearpoint.

“Do you have any idea why that might be, my son?”

The room’s pressure shifted, magic responding to the Queen’s scrutiny. Ulric’s tattoos prickled across his chest. His tentacles coiled tighter.

Auren’s jaw tightened. “I wouldn’t know.”

A lie. And not a good one.

The Queen’s expression didn’t change. “You forget,” she said softly, “I can sense lies the way sharks smell blood in the water.”