I didn’t raise a hand to her. I didn’t curse her name. But I left her all the same.
Too caught up in proving I wasn’t him to see the truth—that I’d been tracing his steps like a map. The sea claimed me too—not in death, but in everything that made me worth loving.
She loved me anyway. Fiercely. Without asking for anything in return. Even when I came to her stinking of blood and salt, silent with rage, hollow from loss—she looked at me like I was something worth hauling back from the deep. She never tried to tie me to the shore. Never begged me to stay. Just believed I’d find my way back before the tide closed over my head.
And I failed her.
Nerina looks at me like that sometimes. Like I’m salvageable. Like she can still see something worth pulling from the wreckage. Even when I make it damn near impossible. She makes me forget the worst parts of myself. Or maybe she just tricks me into believing there’s still a man beneath the ruin. Shemakes me believe, if only for a heartbeat, that I’m more than the worst parts of myself.
But I know how this story ends.
I’ve lived it.
If I’m not careful—if pride and fear keep rotting the space between us—she’ll be gone. Not torn away in one violent storm, but stolen in slow inches.
And I’ll do what I did with my mother—watch the tide take her without moving a muscle.
She’s humming in my quarters now. Gentle. Persistent. Carrying warmth from a world I can never return to. I can’t place the tune, but it pulls at something raw inside me—faint, painful. It reminds me of the sea songs my mother used to hum when I was young. And I’ll wake one day with nothing but the echo of her laughter in my head, the same way my mother’s songs still haunt me: half-remembered, half-dreamed.
I stepped onto the quarterdeck, boots striking damp boards like a heartbeat, the last note dies. And with it, the fragile calm she gave me.
“Set our heading for the Veil,” I said.
Our hunting ground.
A strip of ocean drowned in fog and rumor, where currents run backward and cold gnaws at the bone. Poachers favor it—theones who slit mermaids for their scales, bleed them for magic, carve out their voices as trophies. I used to be no better. Then I told myself it was survival. A trade like any other. That lie rots thinner every time I look at her.
The Veil is where prey comes to us. Once, I hunted for coin. Now, I hunt to feed. But lately… the taste of blood isn’t what coils in my chest. The hunger sharpens when she’s near—focused, deliberate. Like it’s learned her shape. The way it does when the hunt is close—only this time, it isn’t for flesh. It’s for the heat in her defiance. The fire in her eyes when she tells me no. The way her laugh makes my curse forget itself.
Nerina.
I’d sent her to my quarters without thinking, too caught between relief and fury—and something tighter, meaner, riding under my skin—to notice what I was doing. She’d looked up at me with those wide, unguarded eyes, and I needed to put her somewhere safe.
Somewhere away from me.
I drew in a breath, tasting iron and salt on the wind. The tang of blood still lingered on my tongue. Hers. Mine. I couldn’t tell anymore.
That kiss—
The hunger surged in response, and I hated how easily it answered. It burned through every wall I’d built, every vow I’dmade to keep my distance. Not tender. A collision. A demand. A warning. The kind of kiss that should never have happened.
And yet… I couldn’t bring myself to regret it.
Even now, the memory lives under my skin. The way she froze for a heartbeat. Her hands fisting in my shirt. The shock in her eyes before she gave in. The part of me that remembered the warmth wanted to relive that moment forever. The part that remembered what I am knew it was a mistake.
I stared out over the endless dark of the sea, jaw clenched until it ached. “Damn it,” I muttered.
This was madness. Weakness. Or something far worse—a glimpse of the man I might have been without the curse.
The thought twisted in my chest. For a moment, I wasn’t the monster. I was just the man who wanted her. Wanted the kind of love I wasn’t even sure existed.
I lingered, staring into black water. Maybe it was time. Time to stop circling the truth and face whatever waited between us—fire or silence.
Either would be better than this slow drowning.
30
Nerina
