“Ah, mostly merfolk,” he said, quickly ducking his head under the water. “Only a few. There weren’t any other selkies, and I never felt close enough to humans to… Well, I’m not experienced like Kellin. I hope I wasn’t a disappointment.” He batted his lashes at me, small droplets of water on them making his eyes look even more sensual. Below his waist, his cock started to thicken again.
I stared at him until we both broke into laughter. “If you were any better in bed, I’d need a healing tonic. Put that weapon away, mate.” He pursed his lips, repeating the word silently.
Oh shit.I hadn’t meant to call him that. I ducked my own head under the waves, the roaring of the ocean far louder, and the burn of my cheeks far more bearable, beneath the surface.
He was there when I surfaced and wrapped his arms around me. “I like that very much. We are mates, even if we fell into it.”
“I’m sorry I claimed you officially and all, without asking first. You and Kellin both got the shit end of the privy stick, I’m afraid.”
“I disagree. It was meant to be, right?” He pushed my wet hair back, his thumbs tracing my cheekbones, then my jaw, with one brushing my lips. “Goran told me once that he knew he’d never have you for his own. You told him you’d met another mate before him?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, thinking of Serak. And… for some reason, another face swam into view. I grabbed my pendant. “But I hadn’t been with anyone else since him, until you.” I felt his curiosity in our bond and shrugged, looking out at the horizon again. “We were both so young when we married. I thought he understood that I couldn’t stay in Starlak and start making little warlords. I may have overreacted when he gave me a fertility charm knife thing. I was nineteen.”
“Ooh, he never told me that part.”
“My stupid Omega body kept reacting to him, trying to go into heat over and over. I took so many heat suppressant tonics, my hair started to fall out. That’s what first gave me the idea to leave. One of my braids came out in the bath. The whole chunk of hair and the bead… all of it. I knew I had to take drastic action. The bridal blade was just the final straw.
“I didn’t just leave him. I left the Goddess, too. Made a deal. If She’d let me do what I needed to, I’d give up running from the mates and the babies.” I made a face. “I only have a few months left before I’ll find out if She still has some use for me.”
“What you needed to?”
I told him about the apothecaries and safe houses I’d planted in every country I’d visited. By the time I’d gotten to the one in Wyngel, where Omegas had populated a deserted island and were growing their own herbs to send to all the other clandestine Omega groups on the continent, his jaw was hanging wide.
“You’re a… merchant? A diplomat, and a shipping magnate.” His laugh was slightly hysterical. “No one knows, Rada. They all think you’re a thief and an apprentice spy. Goran thought that was what you left him for, so you could go home in glory and claim the Master Spy position.” He went quiet. “Why didn’t you tell him?”
There were a lot of reasons, and promises I’d made to the Omegas I’d hidden and helped. But I would have shared more with him, after we’d married. “Why didn’t he ask?” I replied evenly, but I knew Lachlan could feel the old hurt there.
His arms came around me. “Males are idiots.” He pressed a kiss to my neck.
“One of the universal truths.”
“What can I do to help you finish your mission?” Lachlan asked, testing that universal truth.
“Help me get to Pict?” His arms tightened around my shoulders, but he stayed quiet. “You said you thought it was unlikely that the Pict marauders would have left Omegas to die. I thought the same and went looking for information. I found a hidden archive in a camp in Verdan eight years back. There, I read letters written by the disgraced Chieftains of the Eastern Reaches, the ones who imprisoned the Omegas. They’d made a list of all the women they’d left there and of the numbers of bodies they burned when they went back. There were forty Omegas unaccounted for. I believe they took them back to Pict.”
“There were rumors of a slave camp there,” Lachlan mused aloud. “Kellin and I have swum as close to the island as anyone, I would think, but far to the south. The currents all around itare treacherous, and the seas too hot and acidic for most fish to survive. The sky is ash, with no green on the land that we could see.”
“I found a sailor in Gael years ago, whose captain had been obsessed with finding the edge of the world.”
“Gael?”
“He said it was as far from Pict as he could get.” I closed my eyes for a moment, remembering how the sailor had insisted I put out the fire in his room before he told his story. Even then, if he hadn’t been dying, I wasn’t sure he would have said a word. But my herbs would kill the pain of the wounds that had been festering on his body for a decade. Bone-deep wounds in the shapes of handprints, burns with scars that would never heal. “They tacked close enough to make out the coastline, on a day when the winds swept the ash clouds away, and discovered a main island with two southern, barren islands. Only the main island and a smaller one to the north have plants, and long, low-roofed dwellings of some sort.
“On its southern edge sits an active volcano. They call it the Alldyns Vug, or the maw. Their ship wrecked on the southern edge, not far from the volcano, and they sent up a white flag for help.” I wiped what had to be salt spray from my face. Surely I wasn’t crying. “That sailor was the only one the priests of Pict left alive when they came to the beach. They sent him back to the continent as a message to the rest of the world not to intrude again.”
I took a deep breath. I hadn’t told this part of the story to anyone, at the sailor’s request. But he was long dead, and Lachlan needed to know why I had to get to Pict. I would need his help. “The sailor had to repair his own ship to return home. One night, there was some kind of ritual, at the very edge of the maw on the night of the new moon. He said he watched themlower a woman into the lava, like they were feeding a monster, one inch at a time.”
His scratchy voice echoed in my memory.“The whole beachfront smelled like despair and jasmine for a half hour as she burned. And something was laughing the whole time she died. They held me there, ropes all around me, and made me breathe her in.”
“Tell me that’s not where you’re going.” His grip tightened. “Tell me you’re not planning to plant an apothecary in the middle of the cult.”
“I’m not. I’m planning to rescue all of the Omegas that are left there. I’m going to get them back to the continent, to a safe place.” The sea roared even louder for a moment, like it was listening. “My mother died saving me from that island. They’re breeding Omegas somehow, and killing them in some sort of sacrificial ritual. I can’t leave them there, Lachlan.”
“You’re not planning to… attack the fire god?” Panic spiked in our bond.
“I haven’t lived this long by being stupid.” I pinched his arm, then pushed away from his embrace, pretending to be annoyed, though I wasn’t telling the whole truth. I took a few steps toward the beach. “I’m a spy, remember? A sneaky, thieving, trained spy. What, do you think I’d just walk into an active volcano and shout, ‘Honey, I’m home?’”
For some reason, those words popped and fizzed in my memory like champagne…“Honey, I’m home.”
