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“I know.” I kissed her gently, expecting her to recoil but grateful that she didn’t. “This, us, is the reason the sea spat me out. You were what I was searching for without even knowing it. And now that I’ve found you? Nothing can keep us apart because...I need you. I need you to stay human. I need you to stay good. I need you to stop this curse and—”
“Curse? What curse?”
I sighed, struggling with the truth and so many lies.
I’d hidden from the truth for five years.
I wanted to keep hiding.
I’d never breathed a word of it to anyone.
But after tonight, I owed her.
I owed her the truth about who I truly was.
“There are things about me that I haven’t told you, Neri. Things that I didn’t know until the night my family boarded that smuggler’s boat.”
“What things?” she whispered.
“Bad things.” I flinched. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m not...good.”
“You’re the best man I know.”
“The fact that you can say that...after what I just did makes me want to drop to my knees before you and never let you go.” I kissed her again, a fleeting worshipping press.
She sucked in a breath. Her lips slowly parted beneath mine.
And when we pulled apart, her eyes were aglow with ferocity. Ferocity that sang to the ferocity inside me, full of fangs and fate.
“I don’t care who you are or why you believe the ocean should’ve chosen you instead of your family to die that day. All I know is...I need you. I need you to help me forget him. I need you to erase him from my thoughts like you erased him from my life.” Her voice wavered but she forced herself to say, “I-I don’t want a single night to pass where he exists inside me.”
I went deathly cold. “What...what are you saying?”
“I’m saying I don’t want him in my mind anymore. I don’t want him in my body. I never want to think of him again or remember a single moment when I was his. Take those memories away from me. Burn them to dust and cut them into tiny pieces. Be with me, Aslan. Be with me so I never have to remember being with him.”
My heart thundered.
I knew.
I knew what she asked of me and part of me recoiled at the thought. To be with her in that way after what she’d endured? To think I had any power whatsoever to heal her from what that bastard had done?
“Neri...I—”
“Please, Aslan.” Her jaw worked, hiding the depth of her torment. She stood so strong, so brave, so forgiving. She’d wanted Ethan to live. She was so much better than him. So much better than me. She’d been willing to let him keep his life, even after he’d stolen such a vital piece of hers.
I was in awe of her.
In absolute fucking awe and if I was honest, I didn’t deserve her.
Not tonight.
Nor any night.
And yet...
She flinched as she swallowed on a silent sob, revealing just how much she wasn’t okay. Just how much her strength would eventually break, and I needed to be there to pick up her pieces.
If this was what she needed from me.
She could have me.
All of me.
Forever.
Kissing her forehead, I murmured, “Okay, askim benim. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”
She shattered a little. Her composure fractured. Fresh grief wracked through her.
But then she sucked in a breath.
She kissed me on the mouth, then strode without a word back into the captain’s cabin.
Chapter Forty-Three
*
Nerida
*
AGE: 17 YRS OLD
*
(Sea in Zulu: Ulwandle)
I KEPT MY EYES GLUED TO THE bright screen.
The ridges and valleys of the reef below ghosted in the night.
The contours of another world where coral replaced trees and fins replaced legs. The water world was as familiar to me as the one above, and I followed the canyons and undersea hillsides as if they knew the way to happiness. As if they could heal me, revive me, and guide me to an existence where evil didn’t exist, where stress and worry, violence and rape didn’t happen.
Gritting my teeth so hard, bottling up the torrenting emotions inside me, I focused on navigating by the ocean floor.
The night sky enveloped us.
The faint lights of the town faded the longer we sailed.
No birds. No people.
Just me and Aslan, riding the sea beneath a gleaming moon.
The conversation from earlier today—God, it feels like decades ago—echoed in my mind.
“You said without the moon and the sea, we would never have met.” He narrowed his eyes.
“Thank goodness for the ay and the deniz then,” I murmured.
“For the luna and the mare,” he whispered, his gaze locking onto mine and making the world drop away.
Those two Latin words swirled in my head, a mantra that I clung to as other memories stalked and scratched.
Occasionally, I checked the moon’s location, using the compass to affirm I followed the right path. As long as I focused on the picture of the reef beneath my fragile feet, I could pretend I was okay.
