He takes my face in his hands again, gentle as the tide.
“Listen,” he says. “When he comes back, I’ll take the key from him. One way or another.”
“He’s huge,” I whisper. “You can’t fight him.”
He shrugs. “You’d be surprised what I can do… when I have the proper motivation.”
Then, he sits next to me, close enough that our arms touch, and we wait. The silence is heavy, but it's nice not being alone anymore. Everything is a million times easier when I'm with the kings. Even when it’s just one of them, I almost feel safe.
After a while, he says, “You’re trembling.”
“Am I?”
He wraps an arm around my shoulders. “I’ll keep you warm.”
I lean into him, letting the weight of him anchor me. His heartbeat is steady, slower than mine, which must mean he’s not afraid. And maybe if he’s not afraid, I shouldn’t be either.
Still, some part of me is surprised he came to rescue me at all. I know I’m the Chosen One, but he had to weigh the odds of saving me versus taking on a merman and decided to do it anyway.
“Why did you come after me?” I ask, my voice small.
He doesn’t answer at first. Then he says, “Wouldn’t you have come for me?”
I want to argue, but he’s right, and that notion is absolutely crazy. In just a short time this man had gone from someone I feared to someone I cared about, and I hadn’t even noticed the change happening.
We sit, two bodies curled on the sand, waiting for the monster to return. He holds my hand, and I hold his back, tight, surprised by how natural it feels to hold his hand. I’m surprised that I’m able to hold Cassius’s hand as easily as I was able to hold Ashton’s. It’s something I never thought I’d be able to do.
“I won’t let anything happen to you.”
The words settle into me, and I believe him. They may be fragile but they're real, something warm in the middle of all thiscold. His thumb brushes once against mine, a small, grounding motion that keeps me from coming apart.
Then the water shifts. There’s not a sound exactly—it’s more like a pressure, a disturbance that crawls along my skin and sinks into my bones. The chain at my ankle goes taut as I instinctively pull closer to him. Cassius stills beside me.
The door rattles.
Once.
Twice.
Cassius’s grip tightens, his body angling slightly in front of mine without even thinking. The lock begins to turn. He squeezes my hand, and I see it in his face. There’s doubt. And that doubt clutches around my heart like a block on ice.
Can he really get me free? Or are we both going to die here?
15
Alette
Cassius squeezes my hand, then releases it, and in that last second I see how cold his eyes have gone, how empty he makes himself before violence. He melts behind the door, shoulders pressed flat to the stone, his own dagger angled upward and ready. I shuffle closer to the table, trying not to breathe, heart battering at my ribs.
Act normal. Just act normal. Don’t give him away.
The chain clinks softly as I move, but there’s no other sound. Nothing but the water surrounding me and a sense of impending doom that isn't just all in my imagination.
The door swings open and the merman floats in, all his eyes fixed on me, tongue flicking between lips already pulled back to show those awful teeth. He doesn’t even notice Cassius. He just stares at the trash on the floor, at the bone piles and the old food, then at me, as if the only thing in the room that matters is how I failed him.
“You lazy shit,” he says, the words coming out in one long, bubbling slur. “Didn’t clean. Didn’t listen. Should have drowned you when I had the chance.” He spits, then grabs a handful of seaweed and whips it at my face.
It hits with a slap. I flinch, but not much. I don’t want him to see that he hurt me. Like with my grandparents, showing weakness is always a mistake.
