I thought I had already lived through the worst of my curse. But having Maren sitting naked just a few steps away from me and being unable to touch her convinced me this was the worst torture known to man.
She didn’t look like any woman I’d been with before, and gods knew, I’d been with many. It wasn’t just that Maren wasn’t a siren or even a fae, not because she was a human, an exotic species rarely encountered in Nerifir, but because she was so uniquely her.
I’d never met a human before. But I had a feeling that I would prefer Maren even if I had an entire city of pretty, willing human women available to me.
She was shorter than a siren. Her skin didn’t shimmer with magic like ours did. She wore her hair shorter than any woman and many men I knew. She was practically a prisoner here, and she knew it. Yet even powerless and imprisoned, she never lost her sense of worth. She behaved with dignity and wouldn’t let anyone, not even me, disrespect her.
I admired it in her, envied it even. It might be my palace, but in many ways, I was just a prisoner here too. The king without a crown. The ruler who didn’t rule. I knew the struggle of keeping faith in oneself way too well. It often seemed so much easier to give in to self-loathing instead.
Granted, I’d been wallowing in my dark, wretched thoughts for over a century now, when her imprisonment had only just begun. But I had crashed and broken most of my palace’s interior in those early days of my curse. And there she was, smiling.
Maybe the entire gravity of her situation hadn’t fully descended upon her mind yet. Maybe she still believed that she would leave Nerifir and be free again. She spoke about her old life as if she would still return to it. Maybe denial was what helped her cope.
If so, I felt sorry for her because the inevitable disappointment would be so much more crushing in her future. She’d never leave here. The life as she knew it was forever lost to her now.
So many emotions rose inside me when I looked at her. Some I had hardly known before—compassion, protectiveness, gratitude.
Others I knew extremely well—possessiveness and lust. Hot, relentless, torturous lust that gripped my groin in a vise and wouldn’t let go. The fact that I hadn’t touched a woman for so long multiplied the torture tenfold.
As if sensing my raging need, Maren opened her eyes and looked at me. My cock was safely underwater, but she didn’t need to look at it to know how I felt. Burning desire spread through my body, likely perfectly obvious on my face too.
Her easy expression slipped from her face. She sat up, bringing her arms over her chest and pressing her legs together.
“Don’t,” I rasped. “Please. I want to see you. All of you.”
A blush sprang to her cheeks, giving her face a warm coral glow.
Fuck, how much more tempting and adorable could this woman get?
“What’s the point when nothing can come out of it?” she asked in an equally husky voice.
Did she really want more than just looks and glances to come between us?
Because I’d give her everything in my power. Granted, I didn’t have much power left, but...
I splayed my fingers in the water, willing it to move. The thick, heavy, glass-laden swell rolled from my palm toward Maren. It was small. So low, it barely rippled the surface. I’d never do this in front of another siren. For a siren, it’d be a pathetic demonstration of how my magic had weakened.
But Maren hadn’t seen a siren’s magic in its full power yet. She had nothing to compare it to. Besides, she’d uncovered enough of my weaknesses by now for me to hope that she wouldn’t be repulsed by this one either. I trusted her.
I felt a faint bump when my small swell of water reached her.
“Ah!” she cried out in surprise, jerking her foot out of the water. “Something touched my leg. What was that?”
“Me. It’s me, Maren, and whatever power I still have over water.”
“You? You’re doing it?” She gingerly dipped her foot back into the water, and I wiggled my fingers, sending thick splashes over her toes. She smiled, dipping her leg deeper into the embrace of my waning magic curling around her ankle. “Oh... This feels so weird.”
“Unpleasant?” I worried.
“No. Not at all.” She stretched on the wide steps of the reef, submerging her leg even further into the water below.
Her hands slipped, and she slid down the step into the water.
I couldn’t lift her. I didn’t have enough magic to even lift an actual minnow out of a teaspoon. But I sent the swell around her body, trying to cushion her fall with a gentler splash.
She grabbed onto the edge of the reef on the other side of the steps from me and laughed. “While I’m teaching you how to swim, you’re clearly making me forget how to do anything at all, Kye.”
Her laughter stopped abruptly as I sent a ripple of water up her body in a spiral.
