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I twisted enough to free my right hand and had the shard ready to cut his throat, but stopped at an odd sound. It was a bird call, this time whistling a specific pattern, a code we’d made up on Havira. Hold: friend.

Alexios?

Suddenly, two strange thudding sounds came from where Karl and Vallen had been. I blinked my eyes clear just in time to see them unconscious on the ground, with hints of foam already seeping from their mouths.

I scanned the area around us as Frol set me down gently. Where was he?

“Frol help,” the giant Alpha repeated his earlier words, nodding at me. He had a sweet smile as he patted me on the top of my head. “Go home?” He stomped over to the Alphas. “Frol take. Shhhh.” He held a finger to his lips, then began dragging the two toward the ocean.

“Yes,” I said dumbly, looking around again. Could it have been Alexios who’d saved me? Why wouldn’t he have come and spoken to me, instead of sending Frol?

No time to think about it now. I tucked the shard back into the tube sheath I’d fashioned from a broad leaf at my waist. “Thank you, Frol,” I muttered and jumped up, scaling the iron fence and landing on the other side. I’d only just closed the Omega longhouse door behind me when shouting began on the far-off hillside, and questions started up inside the room.

The Omegas mobbed me, sniffing and gaping. “You smell like Alphas,” one of the younger ones whispered.

I sniffed myself, hoping I didn’t have any of Karl or Vallen’s funk on me. But I just smelled like me, and… Ah, yeah. A little like my mates, though I’d washed off in the sea.

“Leave her be. It’s only Frol. And one other Alpha. And one fish,” Adiah teased. The others took their cue from her and backed off. “Where’ve you been, Rada?”

“You been worrying about me?” I whispered back and went to check on Rielle, keeping one ear on the shouts from the barracks.

“We were worried you’d been taken to the other side of the island,” the young Omega admitted. “The new moon’s in two nights.”

“I know.” I kneeled to check on Rielle, who was breathing oddly, her fingers grabbing onto the fabric of my cloak. The scent of overblown rose was cloying, and I tasted scorched vanilla on my tongue as I leaned down to feel her brow. She was burning up. “When did she have her last dose?”

“An hour ago,” Mirrim said quietly. “It’s not working anymore.” My shirt had slid off one shoulder, and she gasped as she noticed my new claim. “You’ve taken another mate?”

I rubbed the healing bite mark absently, the hum of Kellin’s power coursing through it still. “Ah, yeah. I went back up to the beach to check in with Goran, and Kellin was there.”

“One of your selkies?” She smiled when I nodded. “I’m glad. You look stronger.” She held a hand to my head, and the smile vanished. “But you feel hot. Maybe you should take the yam root tonic. Or a little more of the aqila tea.”

“Or stay away from Alphas and sexy selkies, at least,” I muttered. I told her quickly what had occurred with the Alphas.

She only nodded. “The Goddess has us in Her hands.” But she took the other Omegas to the corner of the longhouse and began praying with them.

I wished I could dose myself with aqila and wake up back home in Rimholt. Or even have a good stiff drink of potato whiskey. Of course I couldn’t take a full dose of anything, except cofi. I needed to have my wits about me. But my heart pounded with a mix of pain and fear, and Rielle’s shallow breathing made it clear that I could not make a single mistake in the next few hours, or days. The price was too high.

Alexios’s face swam in my thoughts again, and an echo of words he’d repeated too many times to count filled my frantic mind. “You cannot chase calm down like an enemy. You cannot stab panic to kill it. You must learn to slow your breathing and your mind, even in the middle of battle, and find a quiet place where you can be still and centered.”

I closed my eyes now, my legs folded beneath me, and tried to remember everything he’d said.

“Too slow. Clumsier than before,” Alexios teased, ducking yet another of my darts. I was faster, and my darts never missed. This little shit had to have magic of some kind.

We’d only been traveling together for a few days, but his constant deference to me as “Her daughter” and a “treasured Omega” was getting very old, fast. I’d decided it was time to show him what kind of Omega I was.

Deadly.

Only I couldn’t seem to land a punch or a kick. He moved like water, gone before my blows landed. And he did it with a smile that made me want to slap it off his face, or kiss it, or both. Damnit, he wasn’t even my type. I liked my men big, Alpha, and slightly submissive.

Well, I’d liked one man like that. But Alexios was the opposite of Goran.

I panted, annoyed to death that he wasn’t even winded. “How’re you doing that?” He stood still, with his hands together in a prayer position, but raised one elegant eyebrow. “How are you avoiding everything—my knife, my fists, my darts! No one is that fast.”

“You’re too reliant on outside weapons and poisons, mistress,” he said calmly. “Even your fists and feet are slow when you’re drawing your energy from a place of turmoil. Once you find the center of your being, the source of your true power, you will not need a weapon to fight.

“You may not need to fight at all.”

He’d spent years teaching me to meditate, though I’d never loved it. Holding still, being quiet—it reminded me of my early childhood, when those were all the weapons I had to keep me safe from evil men. But I had to try.