The name tasted like poison on his tongue.
She nodded, a jerky motion that sent droplets of seawater flying from her dark hair. She pressed a hand to her mouth, swallowing hard. “He said if I don’t go through with the wedding, my father will die.”
The beast inside him went very, very still. It was the calm before the killing strike. The moment of perfect clarity that preceded violence, when every sense sharpened and every muscle coiled for action.
“He threatened your father.”
“He didn’t threaten.” Her laugh was brittle, cracking at the edges. “He promised. He told me exactly what would happen if I tried to run, if I did anything except smile and walk down the aisle in two weeks.”
Two weeks.
The number lodged in his throat, threatening to choke him.
“Come inside,” he said, keeping his voice carefully even. “You’re shaking.”
She let him guide her into the cave, past the banked fire and Lilani’s sleeping alcove to his own sleeping platform. He sat her down and wrapped the thickest fur around her shoulders, tucking it beneath her chin like he did for Lilani when she had nightmares.
“Talk to me.” He crouched before her, resisting the urge to pull her into his arms. “Tell me everything. Not just about this Merrick creature, but about the debt. About how it started.”
She was silent for a long moment, staring at the flickering embers of the fire. When she finally spoke, her voice was distant, detached—like she was recounting something that had happened to someone else entirely.
“I was six years old.”
His gut clenched. Six. The same age as Lilani.
“My father was a researcher. Brilliant, everyone said. A genius in the field of human adaptation—finding ways to modify the human body for extreme environments. Space, deep sea, toxic atmospheres. The Colonial Initiative funded his work for years, hoping he could crack the code for true underwater habitation.”
She pulled the fur tighter around her shoulders, and he noticed that her patches had settled into a dull, steady grey. The color of resignation.
“We lived in an underwater lab,” she continued. “Just me and him and a rotating staff of assistants who never stayed long enough for me to learn their names. I was his test subject as much as his daughter. Blood draws every week. Lung capacity tests. Pressure tolerance experiments. I didn’t know any other way to live, so I thought it was normal.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No.” A ghost of a smile crossed her lips. “It wasn’t. When I was six, there was an accident. A seal failure in one of the lower chambers. Water came rushing in faster than the emergency systems could handle, and I—” She broke off, her hand drifting to her throat. “I drowned. Or I started to. My lungs filled with water, and I remember thinking how strange it was that dying didn’t hurt more.”
His claws dug into his palms hard enough to draw blood, but he didn’t feel it.
“My father saved me,” she said. “Technically. He got me to the surface and got my heart beating again, but my lungs were destroyed. Even with the best medical technology the colony had to offer, I would have been an invalid for the rest of my life. Unable to dive, barely able to breathe.”
“So he modified you.”
“So he rebuilt me.” Her voice turned bitter. “But the Colonial Initiative wouldn’t fund experimental modifications on a child. Too many ethical concerns, they said. Too much risk. So my father went looking for private investors, and he found Merrick.”
That name again.
“Merrick saw an opportunity,” she continued. “A chance to own the world’s first truly aquatic human—a marvel of bioengineering that would be worth a fortune once she was fully developed. He funded the modifications, all of them, on the condition that he would have first claim to any resulting ‘products.’ Including me.”
“You were a child.”
“I was an investment.” She finally met his eyes, and the emptiness in her gaze made his beast howl with rage. “My father signed the contract without hesitation. He got his funding, his lab, and his chance to prove his genius to the world. And I got gills.”
Her hand moved to the delicate slits on her neck, tracing them with absent fingers.
“The modifications took years. Each one more experimental than the last. The gill implants. The lung restructuring. The skin alterations that let me withstand pressure that would crush a normal human. The elongated digits and webbing that make me a freak on land but a marvel in the water.”
“You are not a freak.”
“Aren’t I?” She held up her hands, spreading her webbed fingers so the translucent membrane caught the firelight. “I’m not human anymore, Valrek. My father made sure of that. He didn’t just save my life—he rewrote it. Turned me into a living experiment, a proof of concept, a…”
