He put her onmyship.
Then the sirens took us.
And I fell for her. Elowyn Blackthorn. The king’s only daughter.
Fate is a cruel cunt.
Cedric was always power-hungry, thinking if he obtained enough, he could outrank Jessal and change the trajectory of her path. Help people. He was good-hearted like that, in a deranged way. He wanted to help poor souls out of poverty and starvation. Even if it meant doing terrible things. But it was a fool’s errand. People would always starve. Always freeze. Always die. And from atop a damned ivory tower, you couldn’t do shit for them.
But on the sea, I helped my men. Gave them work and purpose. Yet once again, the games of rulers took the lives of the ordinary.
This time though, it was done by the woman I loved. No, the woman I once loved. Long ago. When she was all woman and no beast. Catarina. But now the sirens called her Calypstra.
I shook her from my mind. Dark circles hung under Cedric’s eyes. His black hair was disheveled. When did he last sleep? What kept him up each night? I wondered only for a second, my question answered by who he trained his gaze upon. Elowyn.
He cared for her. No, he loved her. I knew it.
How ironic it was that despite his hard exterior, my brother was ridiculously tenderhearted. He kept that hidden, like many things, deep in his chest behind a black iron ribcage. I always worried that burying that blossom of compassion so deep inside himself meant suffocating it. I feared that one day it would finally cease to exist at all.
What part of his soul had already died in this mad quest for power? He was smothering his own humanity by slithering through court, all while being trampled on by aristocracy. Destroying himself in search of brighter days that did not exist.
He looked up at me, absolutely ruined.
She would be his undoing.
“How long has she been asleep?” I asked.
“They found her floating in the middle of a bay,” Cedric said in his terse, direct way. Tempered so as not to allow a single hint of emotion seep into a syllable unless he put it there. But I knew him all too well. He was hiding more from me.
“How long?” I ground out through clenched teeth.
“She’s been like this for three days,” he said, eyes never leaving her.
I took her from his arms. The sight of him holding her so carefully was making my stomach churn. She was not a delicate, fragile thing; she was strong. Resilient. Tall. Proud. Her expansive hips and long legs poured out of my arms.
The legs that had been my salvation when they wrapped around me under the sea, bringing me back to life when I had lost everything. My crew, my men, my sanity. All taken by those damned sirens.
I would make them pay, those beasts. For a moment, all those thoughts vanished when she was safe in my arms. And I hated myself for that relief.
Fuck. She might be my undoing, too.
Her skin, warm against mine, sent waves of pleasure through me, her familiar scent of rosewater slamming into my senses. I never thought I’d see her again. When she leaped into the sea, I wanted to dive in after her. Follow her into the abyss. But when the strange lights came and sank out of sight, I knew the sirens had found her. So I turned around and went to the one man relentless enough to find her. Cedric.
Having her back felt like a gift from the Guardians, a blessing I would be grateful for the rest of my life. And a curse. All the same, my shoulders dipped in relief as I held her. Her breath against my neck, the faint whisper of her heartbeat against my chest, all proof that she was safe, in my arms again. I cared so deeply for her. She had saved me. Kept mesane. Showed me I was capable of cracking open my chest and allowing another to witness my scarred heart.
“How did she survive jumping into the ocean?” Cedric asked, too calmly, as he latched his now vacant hands behind his back.
“Her prayer beads, they hold some type of power—”
“How?” he asked concisely, not giving me a breath to spare. “We found her miles away from where you said she jumped. How, Arlo?” He countered like we were playing fucking chess.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m just happy she’s alive.”
The look in my brother’s eyes told me he was too, and that turned my stomach. We had both fallen for the same woman, like the idiots we were.
“These are not the clothes she left in,” I said, laying her carefully on the cot in the light-house’s room beside the sea. Below, in the cells, we were once prisoners. Not anymore. Jessal was scheming again, so Elowyn and I would remain physically free as long as we followed her commands.
Elowyn’s red hair tumbled in fiery runnels around her. Wild, wicked, fool.
