Then there was the Isle of Shadeau—the festering heart— black-market city where nothing was sacred and everything had a price. Where souls were traded like coin, curses bottled like wine, and hope was just another thing you sold when desperation took root.
You didn’t visit Shadeau.
You survived it—if you were lucky.
Before my curse, I’d spent years dealing in its streets—buying and selling relics, supernatural elements, and artifacts of power.I’d built a reputation, carved out a place for myself among the ruthless and desperate. A king among rats.
Then I was the hunter. Now, I was the hunted. A commodity to be carved up and sold if the wrong hands got ahold of me. My blood and my fangs could be harvested and auctioned off to the highest bidder if anyone discovered what I’d become. But even being bled dry—having my fangs ripped out—were among Shadeau’s lesser evils.
There were fates worse than dying. Souls could be broken in ways that didn’t bleed.
And yet here I was.
Saints help me, I was the one who pulled her out of the sea.
Maybe if I’d left her there—let the tide take her, let fate run its course—we wouldn’t be here now. Maybe the Black Marrow wouldn’t be sailing toward damnation. Maybe my crew would still trust me. Maybe I wouldn’t be standing on deck questioning every damned choice I’d made since the moment I saw her in the water.
And maybe that made me a fool.
I should’ve refused. I should’ve put her in chains if I had to—turned the ship around, locked the wheel—done anything but steer her toward this cursed place.
And the worst part? I didn’t know if it was loyalty, guilt, or something else entirely that kept my hands steady.
She didn’t even know what she was chasing—just a glimmer, a gut feeling, some half-formed whisper that dragged her toward oblivion.
I told myself it was necessity. That without Morgra’s deal we’d be adrift. That she’d forced my hand.
But the truth was uglier.
There was something about Nerina—something in her eyes—that cracked open the part of me I’d buried. The part that believed in redemption. In purpose. I didn’t want to trust her. I tried not to.
But when she looked at me after the fight—after her voice broke and she admitted how alone she’d felt, how none of it had ever really been hers—I understood.
Maybe more than I wanted to.
Because part of me still wanted to believe she might be right. That chasing ghosts wasn’t always a mistake.
She’d grown up behind the Veil—surrounded by ceremony, titles, rituals. I pictured marble halls, quiet pools, the kind of sacred solitude they reserve for things too rare to be touched.
Maybe that was the point.
So different from the dark coastal town I was from. A place that reeked of fish guts and salt, where secrets rotted under docks and the only rituals were debts collected with bloodied knuckles.There was no privilege there. No safety. Only hunger, survival, and the kind of silence that taught you to keep your pain to yourself.
I’d assumed she was sheltered. Privileged. I’d been wrong.
Because behind all that pageantry, she’d been alone. And that… that I understood. The ache of being watched but never seen. The loneliness you carried even when you were wrapped in silk. The kind that festered, whispering there had to be more than the life you’d been handed.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t stop her.
Because even if I couldn’t trust her mission, some part of me trusted her pain.
I’d lived it long before the curse.
That aching, hollow loneliness—the knowledge that even in a room full of people, you were always outside the circle. And I understood what it was like to want something so desperately, so violently, it made you reckless. Dangerous.
I’d made that mistake before. I’d reached for power, for answers, for something—anything. And in doing so, I’d hurt people. Put lives at risk. Damned myself.
So maybe I saw too much of myself in her. Maybe that was why I couldn’t walk away. I couldn’t let her drown in it alone.
