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My heart tightened. “Goddess, hear me,” I whispered quickly. “I beg you, save Your daughters. Save the children here. I’ll return, I’ll do anything You ask, just⁠—”

“No, Rada,” Alexios murmured.

“No?”

I’d fallen to my knees somehow, and he pulled me off the ground, pressing a clean piece of cloth from I had no idea where onto my wound to staunch the blood. “You never need to beg Her. You don’t even need to speak. She knows your heart. She knows your wishes. Just have patience.”

I gazed dully at him, dizzy from the blood loss or the loss of the Goddess, I wasn’t sure. “She isn’t with me. I can feel it inside. The emptiness…”

He wrapped me in his arms, and I let myself melt until he was all that was holding me up. “Alexios.” It was all I could manage before my throat swelled shut.

“My love,” he whispered into my hair. “My mistress.”

I don’t know how long he held me there, only that I could feel the strength draining out of me by the second, until a shadow moved in front of the open doorway. Alexios set me down and turned to face the newcomer with his knife in one hand.

“Mate?” A figure blocked the sunlight. The form itself was human, but the odd, writhing shadows that moved around him were very obviously shaped like tentacles, and they reached for me.

“Lusca.”

LUSCA

My beloved was paler than the moon, and lines of pain bracketed her shimmering gray eyes, yet I’d never seen anything more beautiful. She stood amidst squalor, though the treasure that resided inside the filthy longhouse was greater than any I’d seen on land or in the sea in one place.

Nearly a dozen Omegas, many of them holding stout brooms and shards of obsidian that smelled of their blood, stepped in front of her, ready to strike me down. I stopped in the doorway, my strength diminishing with each step I took onto this cursed land.

Walking on what my kind called “the dry” was always painful, but this place cut into more than the flesh of my feet. I could sense the generations of women and children who’d been imprisoned here, who’d bled and suffered with no help coming. My shame had me staggering.

“I should have found them. I should have come here; I should have swum through the polluted waters. I should have protected these women from this horror.”

My mate’s voice cut through my mumbled words. “Lusca, are you—I can’t stand. Someone, catch him!”

Her Beta, Alexios, was at my side instantly, but he was not strong enough to hold me. Before I could slide to the ground, another young woman cursed and obeyed. Her arm was decorated with dark markings I recognized, and she wrapped it around my waist before I slid to the ground.

“Priest.” I nodded to Alexios as he lowered me to a seat close to a small, white-flamed fire. I handed him the small malachite bottle Lachlan had requested.

“Emperor,” he replied, before handing it to Rada. “I will stand guard outside.”

The young witch caught me again before I toppled to my side and into the fire. “You have my thanks, daughter of my people,” I murmured as she made bolsters out of cloth to help me stay upright.

“What else do you need, Emperor?” she choked out.

“Only to rest in the arms of my Empress,” I said, but before the words were finished, she was there, pale and stumbling, and smelling of blood. “Are you injured, Rada?” I demanded, as if I were strong enough to do anything about it.

“I’ll injure my fist on your stupid chin, fish boy. Why’re you here, on the Goddess-damned dry? On this putrid piece of it?” she snarled, her hands moving over me. She was as weak as I was, though she hid it better. With every touch, I breathed easier. “I told Lachlan to bring me your blood, not your sexy body.”

“I did not see a way to send enough of my blood without spilling it into the sea. And we had no time to wait for my subjects to find containers that could hold my blood. There are not many of my people with hands in this part of the world.” I nodded to the tattooed girl who had caught me and watched now. I had believed the sea witches to be all but extinct, but her markings proclaimed her lineage, even with no scent of magic on her. “Skadi waits beyond the rocks. He said his brother will know if he approaches. I’m using every bit of strength I can spare to contain any hint of our connection.” I waved a hand to the doorway, where some of the Omegas were slipping out silently, awe and fear etching their faces. “I sent Lachlan to alert his brother and your pathetic Warlord to our presence here.”

“Don’t call Goran pathetic,” she growled. “I’ve accepted him as my mate. He claimed me and I claimed him and if you don’t like it, you can slide back into a hole in the ocean and sulk alone for a few centuries.”

I stared in horror as she touched her left arm lightly, then her neck. Her throat was burned, marked as cruelly as her arm. The tattoos she’d loved were gone, burned away. “Skadi’s brother did this to you?” I breathed, finding enough strength in my rage to rise over her.

“Yeah, he likes to talk shit about my mates, too. Not good company, fish boy.”

I heard more than one gasp behind me, though it was the young sea witch who cupped her hand to my mate’s ear and whispered, “You can’t call him that. This is the Emperor of Emperors, Rada. He rules the whole ocean. All the oceans.”

Rada rolled her eyes and made a couple of extremely specific suggestions as to what I could do with all the oceans and some of my orifices, if I thought my position gave me the right to be rude to her.

I thought the witchling might pass out, but she left us alone to watch from across the longhouse. I liked the way she kept her stone knife in her hand, though, as if she might still attack me if I were to make a move to hurt my mate.