I’m here. We’re here. Come find us.
She started swimming towards the shore, Lilani’s still body cradled against her chest.
Please let her live. Please, if the ocean has ever loved me, let her live.
CHAPTER 23
The fishing skiff lay overturned against the rocks, its hull cracked like an eggshell.
Valrek seized the gunwale and heaved, his claws gouging deep furrows into the weathered wood. The boat groaned but refused to move—wedged between two boulders by the storm surge, trapped as surely as his heart was trapped in his chest.
Useless.
He threw back his head and roared his frustration into the howling wind.
The storm answered with a crack of lightning that split the sky, illuminating the chaos before him. The sea had become a monster—waves cresting thirty feet high, foam and spray turning the air into a wall of salt water. Through the maelstrom, he could see the lights of the shuttle flickering in the distance.
Lilani is on that vessel.
My mate is on that vessel.
Another wave crashed against the rocks, and he watched in horror as the shuttle lurched violently to port. Something had struck it—debris from the cliffs, perhaps, or the sea itself rising up to reclaim what the land had stolen.
“No.”
The word was barely a whisper, torn from his throat by the wind.
He abandoned the useless skiff and ran along the shoreline, his bare feet finding purchase on rocks that would have sent any human tumbling to their death. His beast was fully awake now, clawing at the inside of his skull, demanding action. But there was nothing he could do—the sea was beyond even his strength, and swimming into that chaos would only add his body to the toll.
I cannot reach them.
The thought was a blade through his chest.
He’d been too slow. Too focused on Korrin’s news about the pack, about the possibility of acceptance. While he’d been dreaming of futures that might never come, the present had been ripped away from him.
My child. My mate.
The shuttle’s lights flickered once more, then went dark.
His knees hit the wet sand.
He had witnessed death before. He knew the shape of loss, the weight of it, the way it settled into the bones and refused to leave.
But this?—
This was different.
This was his daughter, his bright and fearless child who had never met a stranger, who hugged everyone she loved with the same fierce intensity, who had asked him just that morning if Ariella would stay forever.
“She smells like the sea, Papa. Like home.”
And Ariella—his mate, his unexpected gift from this same ocean. The woman who glowed like starlight and sang like the tide, who had looked at his scars without flinching and touched his beast without trembling.
Gone.
Both of them, gone.
The howl that tore from his throat was not a sound any human could make. It was the death cry of a Vultor warrior who had lost everything that mattered. The storm seemed to pause for a heartbeat, as if the sky itself recognized his grief.
