The wind from the north whipped over the sharp, salt-encrusted rock where I lay in my seal form, and whispered the same words it had for days now in a voice filled with warning and possibility, even in late summer.
She’s coming.
Not that I needed the wind to tell me my mate was on her way. I’d felt her distance for years, and her approach now had my blood surging. I’d been waiting for this day for eleven years. A chance to redeem myself.
Would I be able to talk to her this time? I couldn’t possibly make a worse impression than I originally had. Maybe, if I told her what I’d done since I’d met her, she would give me another chance to earn her affection, or at least to speak to her.
A gull cried out overhead, laughing at me, as I remembered that first meeting.
“You’re a quiet one,” Ratter muttered, staring at me like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to show me the secret tunnels she’d discovered under the castle at Drakonspear or stab me and leave me to die in the hallway. My brother Lachlan haddragged Goran into one already, winking at me before they left me alone.
I knew he was trying to give me a moment with her. He’d watched me stare at her for the past hour like she was the first woman I’d ever seen. Even our mother had scowled at me and asked if I’d left my manners in a tidepool.
The girl was the ward of the Empress Wren, who I’d brought Mother to meet, but she dressed in trousers and an assassin’s cloak, and her vocabulary was nothing like any royal I’d encountered.
Lachlan and I were both princes of the Eastern Seas, though he was a youthful forty-six, and I was six years older. Goran and Lachlan looked about the same age, and had decided within minute of meeting that they would be friends. It made sense. They were alike in a lot of ways, gregarious and charming.
“How old’s that in human years?” the silver-eyed girl had asked during dinner.
Lachlan had answered with what may have been intended as a sensual smile. “Old enough to know better. Young enough not to care.”
She hadn’t laughed, just glared. For some reason, her not falling for his lines made me need to examine her more closely.
She was covered with weapons, from the sharp jeweled brooch on her gray cloak, to the knives slid into her clever boots, not to mention the wicked obsidian-jeweled dagger she wore at her waist. I was almost certain there were more weapons on her. She had called herself a spy in training, and an “assassin by temperament.” Wren had introduced her as an apprentice herbalist, but over dinner, it became clear the only herbs she cultivated were poisons.
Ratter, they’d called her. Ratter, like the vermin that scurried off the ships that crossed the ocean and infested everyland they touched. Not a name for the ward of the Empress, and definitely not for an Omega.
And I was standing in a hallway with her now, mute. Possibly under some spell, or a curse.
She was my mate. My true mate. I could sense it in my soul, but I couldn’t say a damned word.
Leaning against the wall, she plucked three small throwing knives out of somewhere in her cloak and began to juggle them. She stared at me, not the flashing blades, and teased, “Rat got your tongue?”
I sucked in a breath, trying to answer, then choked on my own saliva. It felt like I’d sucked in an entire lungful of spit.
“Don’t choke,” she ordered, the knives disappearing and a flask of something appearing in her hand. “Have a drink.”
I coughed helplessly, wondering what the self-described assassin was giving me. But I took it, uncorking the top and sipping. If this was how I died, at her hands, then so be it.
Whiskey burned down my throat, and I began coughing for another reason entirely.
“You think Goran and your brother are gettin’ lost down in the tunnels?”
I still couldn’t speak, but mouthed the word.Lost?
She shrugged, her eyes sliding over me in a way that felt intimate. “Nah, we’ve mapped this place out. You like maps? I heard your ma sayin’ you liked to draw.”
I nodded and took another desperate sip of the whiskey. I’d taken drawing lessons when I was younger.
“Wish I could draw. You heard I’m goin’ all around the world, right? My old boss Vilkurn planned it all out. If I could draw, I’d make a map of every last bit of it. A pretty one with a diamond on the compass rose, and plenty of sea monsters.”
I still couldn’t speak, and when she reached for her flask, I could tell she didn’t understand.
“You don’t like me?”
She couldn’t think that! I shook my head, making a face, mouthing the wordno.
“No?”
