AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I watch as he walks off and then I attempt to climb into the tank, trying to move my gown and body next to Asherah, until I’m in the water and wrapping my arms around her.
“What the devil is wrong with you?” Aerik says derisively from his cell. “You’re mad. You’ve gone absolutely mad.”
I ignore him, the tears still flowing, the sobs shooting through my lungs until I feel they might shatter. I kiss the top of Asherah’s head, smelling the same sweet scent that she’s had since we were young, like the coral gardens we would play in, where she would teach me the names of the animals that lived nearby, and I feel like I might just die here on the spot. All I wanted was to be with my family again, and I was reunited with my sister only to have her taken away so brutally.
And she was here because ofme. She came looking across the Pacific for me. This is my fault that she was captured and tortured, my fault that she’s in my arms dead. My fault that my father died. I have ruined everyone and everything.
“I’m so sorry,” I cry, the water sloshing from how much I’m shaking as I hold her tight. “I am so sorry I chose this life when I should have chosen what was right. I never wanted to hurt anyone. I love you. I love you and I wish you didn’t love me, because if you didn’t love me you never would have come here. I never would have lost you.”
I continue to cry, letting it all come out, my sorrow and grief swirling together with vengeance and rage, like a maelstrom forming inside my soul that’s growing deeper and wider and more destructive by the second.
“You really think you know thismermaid? Do you think you are one?” Aerik sneers, his hands on the bars and his ugly face pressed through. “Have you concocted all of this in your head to make up for all your shortcomings? The fact that you have come from no family, that you have no one that loves you, that the only thing you have going for yourself is a pretty face and a nice pair of tits and a tight cunt that I’m sure you’re doling out to the captain whenever he wants.” He pauses. “And so now you pretend to have feelings for this overgrown piece of rotting salmon.”
My rage goes white hot. It blinds me. Overcomes me.
Your rage will free you, my sister said.
Ramsay said something similar to me, too.
And now, now I’m letting it go free.
Whatever energy Asherah passed through her lips and onto mine I feel coursing through me, changing my structure, making me become primal fury.
I feel my teeth sharpen in my mouth, look down to see my fingernails extending and curving, growing into hard claws, feel strength building in the marrow of my bones, giving me power I hadn’t felt since I was sixteen.
Aerik makes a sound of horror and surprise and my gaze shoots to him, pinning him in place. I growl at him, baring my razor teeth, and before I know what I’m doing, I’m jumping out of the tank and landing right in front of the cell.
“From this moment forth, I will never have to listen to you again,” I grind out, my voice sounding less human, more monster.
More Syren.
His mouth opens to say something but I cut him off.
Forever.
My arm shoots out through the bars with my claws extended and I pierce his skin with them, reaching through muscle and fat and bone until I feel his beating heart under my palm. I snarl and close my hand around his heart and pull it back out of his chest and through the bars.
While he’s still looking at me, while he’s still alive for just a few more seconds, I take his still beating heart and shove part of it in my mouth, biting down with needle sharp teeth as ravenous, monstrous hunger takes over.
I make sure it’s the last thing he sees.
CHAPTER16
Ramsay
It takesme a moment to comprehend what I’m looking at. At first I reckoned the princess was offering some type of meat to the prince just outside the cell.
Then I realized she was holding not meat but a pulsing heart.
Then I came to see that it wasn’t just any heart, but it had come from Aerik himself, and I watched as the princess brought the heart to her mouth and started eating it gleefully.
Aerik’s dead body teeters on its feet for a moment, the sight of her eating his own heart no doubt the last thing he will ever see, and then he topples over, his head smacking the bars as he slumps to the floor. Dead.
I stand here flabbergasted because I still can’t figure out what’s happening.
Princess Maren just pulled her husband’s heart out of his chest and is currently eating that heart like she’s never eaten anything before. She’s eating his heart with more gusto than she did the roast boar the other night.
She’s mad. This woman is pure madness. She needs to be locked up. She’s dangerous and wild and unsafe.
