I looked at her, wide-eyed. “How? How did you—?”
The Oracle only smiled, faint and knowing. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “mothers make mistakes.”
A laugh—wild and desperate—burst from my throat. For the first time in longer than I could remember, something like joy cracked through the sorrow.
The bag felt too warm in my hands—alive in a way that made my pulse stutter.
My mother—who had never truly been my mother—had called it protection. She had lived inside that word the way people lived inside storms, convinced the damage was necessary, that survival justified the wreckage left behind. It did not forgive what she had taken from me. It did not heal the harm she had done. But it changed the shape of the wound. Maybe she had not been the architect of my suffering. She had been another piece on the board—one who realized the game too late, and tried, in the only way she knew how, to undo it.
“When you are ready,” the Oracle said, her voice dipping low, “you must assemble them. Piece by piece and place them where they belong.”
My gaze dropped to the shards. My mark flared in answer, the pieces pulsing in time with my heartbeat, as though they already knew me.
“And when I do?” I asked.
The Oracle’s smile faded, her face carved into shadow.
“Then tread carefully, child,” she warned. “Power like yours does not come without a price. It will love you—but it will hunger for you too. It will cling like a shadow you cannot outswim.”
Her blind eyes fixed on me, unblinking. “It will either crown you… or consume you whole.” She paused.
“And if you fall,” she said softly, “you will not fall alone.”
59
Alaric
Covenant Ship
Across the water, poachers hauled in their nets, hooks flashing like teeth in the gray light. Their laughter carried faintly over the waves—thin and cruel. The sound scraped something feral awake inside me. Hunger coiled low and vicious—not the clean ache of thirst, but something uglier. I could taste blood in the air that wasn’t there. The sea demanded I move. My curse sang for it—compelled me to serve the water, to guard its depths from the vermin dragging hooks through its flesh. To stand idle while Nerina swam below was torture. Like drowning on dry land.
Veyrion stood at the prow, eyes fixed on the horizon, every line of him drawn tight. He looked carved from stone, but I saw it—the tension in his jaw, the restraint in his stance. For all his calm, even he was braced for violence.
“Too long,” I muttered, the words dragged out of me like a confession. “She’s been gone too long.”
Veyrion’s gaze lingered on the dark water where she had vanished. His shoulders stayed rigid. Then, quietly, he said, “She knows what she’s doing. We have to trust her.”
The words scraped like broken glass. Trust her? To slip past nets laced with poison? To swim through waters crawling with hooks and blades?
My curse snarled in answer, every wave urging me forward—to act, to protect. Waiting went against every instinct I had left. “Trust?” I spat, my voice low, shaking. “You’d just stand here while she’s below with death circling her?”
Veyrion turned then, icy gaze locking with mine—steady in a way that only made the fire in my chest burn hotter.
“Yes,” he said simply.
Trust. Saints, I wanted to. But trust wouldn’t keep the nets from closing. Trust wouldn’t stop a hook from tearing into her skin.
And yet—there was something in the way he said it. Not hope. Not denial. Certainty. A calm that anchored itself into the deck beneath our feet.
It gnawed at me.
The words lodged deep—right where they hurt most. Because she had asked me once. Begged me.
Trust me, Alaric.
I remembered the way her eyes burned when she said it—fierce and fragile all at once. She hadn’t wanted my protection then. Or my orders. Or my fury. Just that one thing. To be believed in.
To be seen as capable—not breakable. And I hadn’t given it to her. Couldn’t. I had caged her instead—storming and snapping, throwing walls high enough to keep her safe. Or so I told myself. The truth was uglier. Now she was gone beneath the waves, facing gods knew what—and all I had were Veyrion’s damned words echoing her own.
