And it was being stolen from her.
“Please.”
The word escaped before she could stop it—small, broken, desperate.
Merrick raised an eyebrow.
“Please what?”
“Let me go. I’ll… I’ll find another way to pay my father’s debts. I’ll work, I’ll dive, I’ll find salvage?—”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” His voice hardened almost imperceptibly. “Your father made his choice, and now you’ll honor the consequences. That’s how civilized societies function, Ariella. Contracts mean something.”
“This isn’t a contract.” Her voice cracked. “It’s slavery.”
“It’s marriage.” He set down his glass and rose, crossing the cabin to stand over her. His manicured fingers tilted her chin up, forcing her to meet his eyes. “And you should be grateful. Most women in your position, with your… limitations, would never attract the attention of someone like me. I’m offering you status, wealth, protection.”
“You’re offering me a cage.”
Something flickered in his expression—annoyance, perhaps, or wounded pride.
“You’ll learn to appreciate it.” He released her chin with a dismissive pat. “They always do.”
The storm hit with full force twenty minutes later.
One moment, the shuttle was lurching through heavy swells but maintaining its course. The next, the world tilted sideways, a wall of black water slamming into the vessel with enough force to send everything flying.
She screamed as her chair tore free of its moorings, the silver restraints cutting into her wrists as the shuttle spun. Glass shattered somewhere nearby—the elegant windows, maybe, or the display cases full of Merrick’s collectibles. Emergency lights flickered on, bathing everything in angry red.
“Report!” Merrick’s voice cut through the chaos, but for the first time, there was something other than calm in his tone. A hint of fear.
“Wave breach in the lower hold, sir! We’re taking on water?—”
Another impact. This one felt different—not water, but something massive striking the shuttle’s hull with a grinding screech of metal.
Cliff debris, she realized dimly.The storm is throwing rocks.
The lights went out.
In the darkness, she heard men shouting, equipment crashing, the terrible groan of a vessel breaking apart. Water was everywhere suddenly—pouring through breaches in the hull, flooding the cabin, rising around her ankles and then her knees and then her waist.
The restraints held.
I’m going to drown, she thought with bizarre calm.Trapped in this chair, wearing this suit, I’m going to drown like a human.
The irony was almost funny.
But then the water reached her chest, and the suit began to malfunction.
She felt it first as a tremor—a brief pulse of sensation returning to her gills, her skin flickering weakly beneath the suit’s surface. The compression systems were failing, the electronics shorting out in the flood.
Yes.
She didn’t think. She just acted.
She found the suit’s seams—the emergency releases Merrick’s technicians had assured him were escape-proof—and pulled. The fabric resisted, then tore, and suddenly she could feel the water against her skin, cold and wild and alive.
Her gills flared open.
