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I hugged the tin to my chest. “I love it. Stolen gifts are my favorite.”

His tail tip caressed my face as I ate another handful of the broken pieces. “Stolen from under the very nose of the king of salty puddles.”

“The king of what?” Lusca asked, too calmly.

Lachlan whispered, “Oh, shit,” and rolled off the raft, bobbing beside it. Our eyes met. “Time to free our friends?” he asked.

“And get away from this island for good,” I agreed. Skadi and Lusca were both pale and exhausted. They needed rest, but I had work to do on shore, and night would fall soon. “I’m going back,” I murmured to Lusca, who had closed his eyes, half his body in the water, and the other nestled up close to Skadi.

His eyes snapped open. “Not alone.”

I let my hand move on his long, dark hair. “No, with Lachlan. The others are planning to meet us there two hours after sunset. Everyone’s ready. You stay here and rest. Keep Skadi from doing anything too stupid.”

Skadi made a low sound that I realized was a snore. It was cute, and I stifled a laugh.

“I’ll be back in a few hours with a bunch of Omegas and children. The waves will help me, right?”

“You rule them,” Lusca agreed, his voice far weaker than I liked. “I will… keep watch.”

Suddenly, I didn’t want to go back. Edan was there.

But so were my friends and my other mates.

“Let’s go.”

I might be Empress of the waves, but that didn’t mean I knew how to get them to cooperate with me. After the third time I sank to the bottom like a stone, I gave up and let Lachlan pull me back to the iron fence.

Even in his human form, he was the most graceful swimmer I’d seen, his lithe body slicing through the water. When we were at the edge of the dissipating fog bank, I asked him to stop. Then I wrapped my arms around his neck, giving him the most passionate kiss I could while bobbing like a cork.

“Go get the raft. Be safe. I’ll see you tonight.”

“I don’t like sending you back without protection.”

I patted my dagger handle and pinched him. “I am protection. And Alexios will be there. By this time tomorrow, we’ll be on our way back to Starlak.”

“We will.” He gave me another deep kiss, then dove beneath the waves, surfacing again in his seal form a few yards away.

The waves were kind, and the swim was far shorter than it would have been before, though when I stepped out onto the land, my knees trembled. Lusca’s power had been buoying me up, and by the time I was at the back door of the women’s longhouse and had put back on my shirt, I was shivering with fatigue.

I found my hand slipping off the latch, suddenly weaker than I’d felt in… ever. The combination of the approaching heat cycle, Skadi and Lusca’s weakness, and the separation from the sea made me feel almost boneless. I started to fall.

“Fuck.”

Something caught me as a harsh voice whispered in my ear, “That’s exactly what I plan to do, Omega.”

A pungent cloth covered my mouth, and I was asleep before I had the chance to scream, or even send a thought to my mates.

Fuck, indeed.

ALEXIOS

I’d been guarding the longhouse from outside for hours in the fog, when an odd noise caught my attention. Not from the sea, where Rada was still trying to save her mates, or so I assumed.

No, this sound came from the gate that led into the compound. A whine of hinges, cut short. I padded in that direction, staying low in the remaining fog, thankful for the dusk that hid me.

The gate was closed when I reached it, and no one was in sight, but a hint of something metallic and cloyingly sweet wafted through the air. A scent I knew.

A powerful soporific drug the Mirrenese called liquid sleep.