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I walked faster. The cave narrowed. The ceiling lowered until I had to bend my head, and my shoulder brushed stone and came away wet. The walls closed in, slick with algae and mineral veins, until it felt like there was more lining my lungs than air in the space around me.

The dark thickened, as if I were pushing through it with my face and my hands and my chest. I thought, stupidly, that I wasn’t inside a cave at all. I was inside something’s belly, a hidden part of the earth where offerings from the surf were swallowed and left to die.

The air became less salty and more metallic. Like pennies. Old blood. And with it a sweetness so faint and vile my stomach turned before my mind landed on it.

Dead flowers.

My hand struck something slick and ropey, like the inside of an animal, and I recoiled and screamed. The sound came back too loud, shredded by the walls, and for one petrifying second, I couldn’t tell whether it had come from me or from somewhere farther in. Then my foot found the same slick surface, and my soul nearly left my body before I understood it was only the wall, thick with algae.

I was past the place where anyone could pretend this was brave. Past the place where the air still belonged to me.

I was not in the belly. I was not even in the ribs.

I was in the throat.

A throat of black stone and dripping weeds, taking in the sea one slow mouthful at a time. The smell grew louder than the water. Rot and salt and metallic decay, slick as eels, bright as tarnished rings.

Wedding rings.

The thought wasn’t mine. Or not only mine.

The cave swallowed.

That was the thought that undid me. Not the danger, not the tide, not the certainty that this was a place where a woman could be left to die. Just the unreasonable idea that the cave had swallowed. I didn’t believe it. My body did.

One moment I was standing with my hands thrown out like I expected something to swoop, and the next my chest had locked so hard I couldn’t pull air past it. I tried anyway. Nothing came.

The dark pressed closer. The water touched my boots again, colder now, and slipped around my ankles with a soft sloshing sound. Behind me, beyond the bend, the tide gurgled into the passage.

My heart slammed once, then again, then too fast to count.

Only one word surfaced, and it tore through me, useless. No. No, no, no, no.

I turned toward where the entrance should have been and found only black rock. I had to get out. I took one step and slipped, my shoulder striking the wall, pain flashing white down my arm.

Run, my body said. Run now.

And beneath that, a quieter voice said: Give it anything. Promise anything. Just make this stop.

I froze.

That thought didn’t feel like mine. It felt older than me. It felt like every woman who had ever walked into a room and thought she could surrender in return for safety.

Damian’s voice came back to me.

Feet first.

I sobbed once and forced myself to stop. I looked down. I couldn’t see my feet, but I knew they were there. I flexed my toes inside my boots and felt them move. I wasn’t floating and I wasn’t swallowed. The cave was rock and the rock was under me and I was standing on it.

I put my hand flat to the wall and made myself feel it without deciding it was flesh. Just cold, wet stone.

“I’m afraid,” I whispered.

My voice broke, and the cave echoed it back to me threefold. Afraid. Afraid. Afraid. I nearly went under again, and then I remembered the rest of it.

You won’t stop being afraid either way. So make it simple.

I dragged in a breath through my nose. Too deep, too sharp. I tried again, lower, smaller, and that failed, too. The third one made it down to my ribs.