I stared at her.
She burst out laughing—full, head-thrown-back, belly-deep laughter. The kind that made something in my chest ache a little.Not from annoyance. From the fact that I hadn’t heard a sound like that in… too long.
“I swear,” she gasped, wiping at her eyes, “if you sparkle, I’m throwing you overboard.”
I leaned closer, voice low. “Oh, I radiate, sweetheart. But only on Tuesdays. Right after moonlight meditation and blood margaritas.”
She cackled harder.
Saints help me—I almost smiled.
I realized then that I was closer to her than I meant to be. Close enough to feel the heat of her skin.
Close enough that the hunger stirred—not urgent, not violent, but awake.
Outside, the wind howled through the rigging.
Between us, silence settled again—heavier this time. She wasn’t quick to speak. I saw it in her eyes, the way her gaze dropped to the blood drying on the floorboards, the glass glittering like shards of memory. She was thinking. Turning everything I’d said over and over. Weighing it against what she thought she knew about me—and about herself.
"Why did you bring me aboard?" she asked. "Why pull me from the sea?"
I hesitated. That was the question, wasn’t it? The one I’d been avoiding even in my own mind. Because answering it meant peeling back layers I’d spent years building like armor—admitting there was a reason I’d pulled her from the water, a reason I hadn’t let her go.
She had the ocean in her blood, the stars in her eyes. And some part of me—something old, instinctive, primal—recognized it before my mind did. That recognition wasn’t born of sentiment.
It was purpose.
I needed her—what she was, the freedom she might offer me. Protecting her wasn’t kindness. It was strategy.
Still, some traitorous part of me wondered if it was more than that. That terrified me more than any curse ever had—
because if I couldn’t explain why I’d chosen her, then I didn’t control it.
"Part of the curse, is to protect the sea,youare part of the sea." I admitted, and the words landed heavier than I intended. Not just strange or curious—other. I could feel it, like static in the air between us. Her chaos. Her magic. It pulsed beneath her skin, ancient and wild and not entirely her own. The kind of power the sea would notice. The kind it would want to claim.
Her breath hitched, but she masked it quickly. She was perceptive, but something about that answer unnerved her.
"So that’s it?” she said quietly, motioning again to the blood, the ship, the weight of everything between us. “The sea took who you were and made you into this?"
I studied her for a long moment. "I’m saying the sea doesn’t give without taking something in return. Some men seek power and find themselves shackled in ways they never imagined. Others have no choice in the matter. I didn’t choose this, Nerina. And neither did my crew."
"And yet, you continue," she said, not unkindly, but probing.
"Because stopping means dying. Or worse—becoming something beyond even the sea’s reach. Not all gifts are blessings. The ocean marks its chosen, and once it has you, there is no escaping its grasp. It bends you, reshapes you, until you are something new—something neither alive nor dead, forever caught between the tides."
Carefully, Nerina stepped away from the blood and glass, her bare feet cautious on the slick boards. She moved to the chair beside the desk and sank into it slowly, fingers tightening on the armrests, her mind turning over my words.
I turned to a small cabinet and pulled out another glass. Pouring a measure of dark liquid into it, I slid it across the desk toward her.
"Drink?" I offered.
She eyed it before shaking her head, then exhaled slowly. "No... actually, make it two."
I chuckled, taking a slow sip from my own glass. "Fair enough."
Outside, the storm had begun to calm—the rain now a mere whisper against the ship’s timbers—but the questions in her eyes remained.
"How did this curse come to be?" she finally asked, voice steady, eyes searching.
