"There." The witch released him and turned to me, pressing the potion bottle into my hand. "One breathing potion, as promised. Enough for seven doses, give or take. Should last you quite a while, assuming your little human survives your courtship….or unless you come back to replace her feet with a tail"
I clutched the bottle tight, feeling its cool weight against my palm. "She'll survive."
"Will she?" The witch drifted back toward the shadows of her cave, already losing interest in us. "You're sirens, pack leader. Death follows you like a shadow. You can dress it up in pretty words—courting, protecting, treasuring, but at the end of the day, you are what you are." She paused at the edge of the darkness, looking back over her shoulder. "The question is whether she can love you anyway."
Then she was gone, swallowed by the shadows, leaving us alone in the sickly green glow of her cave. Vale grabbed my arm, his eyes urgent, his mouth forming words that had no sound. I understood anyway, we needed to leave. Now. Before the witch changed her mind or decided she wanted something more.
We swam out of the cave and up, up, up, away from the cold and the dark and the ancient creature who lived there. The water warmed as we rose, the pressure easing, the light returning by degrees. By the time we reached the shallows, the sun was setting, painting the water gold and red. Beautiful. Alive. Everything the witch's trench was not.
Somewhere to the north, a merchant vessel was sailing toward its doom. In the next day or so, the witch would use Vale's voice to lure them onto the rocks, and they'd all be dead—drowned or devoured, their cargo scattered across the sea floor.I felt nothing about it. No guilt, no regret, not even curiosity. They were humans, and humans died. It was the natural order of things.
The only human who mattered was waiting for us on a ship in the eastern waters. Vale stopped swimming, floating in place, his hand pressed to his throat. His expression was thoughtful, distant—already accepting the temporary loss of the voice that had defined him for centuries.
I reached out and gripped his shoulder, waiting until his blue-green eyes met mine.
"Thank you," I said. "What you gave up—" He shook his head, cutting me off. His hands moved in a series of gestures—old signs we'd developed centuries ago for silent hunting. Worth it, he signed. She's worth more than a hundred ships. A thousand sailors.
She was. Whatever lives the witch took two days with Vale's borrowed voice, it was a small price to pay. Those sailors meant nothing to us. She meant everything.
"Let's go home," I said. "The others are waiting." Vale nodded, and together we turned toward the eastern waters, toward the ship that rocked gently on the surface, toward the girl who didn't know yet that she'd already stolen four siren hearts. We had the potion. We had our plan. And somewhere in the north, strangers were going to die so that we could keep our memories of her intact.
We didn't look back.
Now all we had to do was make her love us back.
Chapter Eight
LILY
I woke before dawn, my heart already racing.
The dream clung to me like seawater, fragments of warmth and safety and the feeling of being surrounded, held, wanted. Four shapes in the darkness, pressing close. Hands and tails and voices I couldn't quite hear, speaking words I couldn't quite understand.
I lay in my hammock, staring at the wooden beams above me, and tried to convince my heart to slow down. It didn't listen. It kept beating too fast, too hard, like it was trying to escape my chest and throw itself into the sea.
They knew. The thought circled through my mind for the hundredth time since last night. They knew what I was. They'd scented me on the ribbons, and their expressions had changed, and the dark one had pressed his hand to his heart and pointed at me like—Like he was claiming me.
I pressed my own hand to my chest, feeling the rapid flutter beneath my palm. The pouch of their gifts was warm against my skin, the shells and sea glass and tiny pearls a constantreminder that this was real. That they were real. That something impossible was happening, and I had no idea what to do about it.
What did it mean? What did any of it mean? They were mermaids. Creatures from fairy tales, beings that shouldn't exist. And somehow, impossibly, they had the same designations as humans. They'd recognized me as omega. They'd reacted to my scent with that same intensity I'd seen in human alphas a hundred times before.
They hadn't tried to take me. That was the part I kept coming back to. The scarred one had wanted to—I'd seen it in every line of his massive body, the coiled tension, the extended claws. He'd wanted to surge up out of the water and claim me right there. And the dark one had stopped him.
Why? Human alphas didn't stop. Human alphas took what they wanted, when they wanted it, and omegas like me were expected to submit and be grateful for the attention. That was the natural order of things. That was what I'd been running from for eight months.
These creatures, these beautiful, impossible creatures—had held themselves back. Had looked at me with hunger, yes, but also with something else. Something that looked almost like reverence.
Like I was precious.
The word kept surfacing in my mind, warm and strange and terrifying.
Precious.
Not property.
Not prey.
Precious.
