She shook her head.
Milly insisted. “You’re more alive right now, arguing with me, than you have been for the last year.”
Well, there hadn’t been anything worth arguing before. Zara hadn’t cared. Nothing had shaken her out of the numbness…
Which meant Milly was right.
She crossed her arms, the glass resting against her elbow. “And that’s his fault?”
Milly shrugged a shoulder. “You tell me.”
She didn’t feel alive right now. She felt scared and fragile and she wanted everything to go away. But not. She was too conscious of Elan waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and her baby sleeping in a bathtub of seaweed, and all the days that had separated them. It should be an uncrossable abyss. If she tried to cross it and failed, she wouldn’t survive.
“You crawled into hell to save me.” Milly pointed her erasable purple pen at Zara. “I’ll never forget that. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it. But you brought him here, into your home, when in the past you wouldn’t even watch a friend’s cat overnight.”
“Elan didn’t have anywhere else to—”
“He could have gone with Border and Immigration. It’s not jail. You could have visited. We even could have still taken them over to Vaw Vaw’s for dinner. You don’t bring anyone into your home. I think it means something.”
She couldn’t come up with a viable argument. “But he didn’t surface for a year.”
“Why?”
She was afraid to know the answer.
“Looks like you have something to talk to him about after all.”
Zara changed the subject. “Let me stay with you tonight.”
“Of course.” Milly returned to her notebooks and put in one earbud. “But I’m listening to my music and I won’t wait up for you.”
Zara left Milly’s bedroom with an unsettled feeling. She could have refused Elan. Within their first moments of meeting on the beach, he had slipped under her defenses. And she hadn’t even realized it.
That wouldn’t happen tonight.
She thumped down the stairs.
His hard, lithe form came into view, still leaned against the doorframe. His clear aquamarine eyes pulled her in with hypnotic force. His hands, so big and comforting, rested on his thickly muscled thighs. She knew exactly how they felt between her legs.
Not only had she come alive today, she had stepped from being a numb, practically comatose, sexless creature into a fiery skin that screamed for sensation. For sex. Elan’s hot gaze awoke her hunger. She wanted to feel more than his gaze on her body.
But that could not be allowed.
Zara strode past, deliberately avoiding him, and plopped on the living room couch. The glass of water sloshed. She rested it on one knee. “Okay. Talk. But it won’t change anything.”
Elan uncoiled from the doorframe with powerful virility. He strode across the smooth living room tile, seeming to suck the oxygen from the room. That was why she couldn’t get her breath. He stopped right in front of her.
Before she realized what he was doing, he pulled the glass out of her hand and set it on the table behind her. Then, he bent over, resting one powerful palm on either side of her thighs on the couch, bringing his kissable lips within inches of her face.
Her heart threatened to beat out of her chest and attach itself to him, loving him even harder than before.
“We belong together,” he growled. “You and I.”
She shook her head.
His gaze smoldered. “Do not fight what you know is right.”
“What I know is right,” she pressed a hand to his immovable chest, “is that we’ve been separated for a year and you want to pick up like nothing happened. With no plan in place to stop another separation.”
“There is a plan. You will transform into an unstoppable mermaid queen.”
“That’s not a plan. That’s a fantasy.”
“It is truth. You have great power within you. Queens can defeat an entire army. I saw this with my own eyes.”
The mythical mermaid queens who had died out a thousand years ago. Now, only males were born to the mer, and the women who birthed them were quickly returned — or exiled — back to the surface.
Kadir had wanted to change that. Expose the mer existence, invite modern women to become brides, and ask them to stay forever — recreating the lost queens.
Part way through Zara’s stay, Kadir had been arrested and imprisoned for blasphemy.
It was a sign she should have heeded.
“Kadir never said queens had magic powers,” she pointed out. “I think I would have remembered that part.”
“He thought the ancient legends exaggerated the queen’s powers. Channeling a Life Tree’s energy to create protective spheres around loved ones, or push enemies, or heal fatal wounds sounded fantastical. Now we know they are true accounts.”
If even mermen who worshiped magical “Life Trees” found something to stretch credulity, Zara could be forgiven for doubting its truth. It was too fantastical.
And convenient.
“If I have super powers, how come I don’t know?” she demanded.
“You will know after making your fins. Come with me into the ocean. We will grow your power together.” His gaze glimmered.
Her own desire rose to match. She fought against it. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”
“Swim with Zain and I, and you will—”
“No.” She pushed him back with full force. “The only way to keep Zain safe is to stay away from the water. Far, far away.”
“You can protect him. You are the only one who will. Believe.” He kissed the back of her hand. “Have faith.”
The kiss sizzled in her belly. Delicious, heroic, and unwelcome. She clamped down on the spreading desire, the need aching to wrap her arms around him and kiss him back. Believe, like he wanted. Close her eyes to reality and fall into the once beautiful fantasy of their life.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t believe in magic, and I can’t believe in you.”
His eyes lost their glimmer and seemed to sink into dark shadow. His cheeks hollowed in the dim light. He looked defeated. And tired. So tired.
Nothing like her Elan.
She shook her head. “What happened to you?”
He looked away. “Nothing.”
“How can I have faith in you if you won’t be honest?” She tapped her flat palm against his chest. “You keep trying to pretend nothing has changed. But I’ve changed. You’ve changed a lot.”
“I have not changed.”
“Those dark shadows under your eyes weren’t there a year ago.”
He flinched.
Zara leaned back and crossed her arms. “You’ve told me nothing, Elan, except to ‘believe.’ How can I trust in you if you’ve given me nothing to trust?”
His brows drew together as though peering into the inky blackness of his past.
Her heart ached to believe in him.
She fisted her hands and shook her head. “I can’t.”
The hollows shadowing his commanding eyes deepened. He looked malnourished, exhausted, and unwell. Tormenting him with this argument was cruel.
But so were the hopes he tried to raise in her heart.
Elan had made her so many promises. Even though no other merman had kept his bride, Elan swore he would be the first. They would remain under the water together, forever. One happy mer family.
And then the night Zain was born, she’d barely finished giving birth — an amazing, life-altering experience with Elan — before warriors had burst into the protective chamber.
They tore away her newborn baby suckling at her breast. Elan had tried to fight them off, but he’d been overwhelmed. They had beaten him horribly.
Zara had fought the warriors herself. They weren’t supposed to lay a hand on a “bride,” but no one said she couldn’t lay a hand on them. Eventually they’d lassoed their seaweed ropes around her, hog-tied her, and dragged her out, leaving her
on an abandoned beach in the dark, moonlit night.
She’d nearly bled to death.
And now Elan wanted her to believe she had superpowers that could have prevented his beating. Their separation. He also wanted to pretend nothing had changed. That his year apart had been a walk in the underwater park.
Right.
“You want me to believe you laid around Dragao Azul for a year because you couldn’t be bothered to swim to the surface,” she pointed out.
Worry lines deepened. He thought that was better? Then he was trying to protect her from a terrible truth.
She cut to the chase. “You want to convince me I have superpowers? Fine. I’ll believe after you do one thing.”
He looked at her. His brows lifted with hope. “What?”
Outside, the black sky growled with thunder.
She leaned back again in her seat and crossed her leg over her knee. “Exactly what did you do during the year you denied me my son?”
8
Zara demanded the impossible.
She already hated Elan for failing to keep her safe. How much more would she hate him once she knew what he had done?
“Because I know you weren’t asking permission to surface,” she continued. “Or you weren’t very convincing.”
He stared at her stiff crossed-arms glare. Fiery, uncompromising. She waited.
Elan closed his eyes.
Outside the open windows, a spatter of liquid hissed on the ground as the first cold drops of rain hit the earth.
Zara had the strongest spirit of any warrior he had ever known. Compromise was not in her. If their roles had been reversed, and she had been ordered to betray everyone or die, she would have chosen death.
“Just start at the beginning.”
He forced his voice. “A thousand years ago when we created the ancient covenant? Or more recently when Kadir roused us to return to the pre-disaster harmony of mer and human?”
“More recently,” Zara ordered. “When you convinced me Kadir was right and inspired us to dream of a future together.”
He remembered she had convinced him. Zara’s hopeful wish had surprised and filled him with new dreams. To love her even more deeply. To long for the impossible. To fight for their future together, no matter the cost. Even now, it drove him to speak the horrors that could not be uttered.
“Did you ever even try to come to the surface?” Zara finally asked.
He opened his eyes. “Yes.”
“But?”
“We were captured and returned to the city.”
“We?”
“Zain.” His throat closed. He swallowed and continued. “And I.”
She frowned, trying to hear words he wasn’t saying in his broken voice, in his expression. Deep, unending sadness. “You tried to sneak out with Zain?”
“Yes.”
“Right after I was forced to the surface?”
“No.”
Her bitter expression returned. “You took your time, huh?”
“Raising a newborn is tiring.”
“You don’t say.”
“Especially because…”
“Because?”
“I had to recover from my injuries.”
She frowned, and her confusion cleared. The bitter judgment faded. New sympathy radiated from her soul light.
It calmed.
“They were pretty bad?” she asked.
He flattened his lips to avoid telling her.
Caring for Zain when his own bruised bones and deeply slashed muscles made it difficult to cross his own castle had taxed him to the limit. But he could not be declared unfit to raise Zain. He’d strained alone to feed his son, to sleep him against Elan’s unbroken skin, to cleanse and sing to and shower love so Zain would still feel the fierceness of Zara’s in her absence.
And he’d tried to lull the elders of Dragao Azul into believing he had given up his blasphemous desire to remain with Zara.
“She does not remember you,” elder Varo, his old friend and also a former First Lieutenant, had promised. “Brides gratefully return to the air world. They would die longing for the surface. Now, she has found another husband. Brides easily forget. Only the mer remember.”
He had pretended to agree. Pretended that his fight to keep Zara had been an incident of “newborn illness,” a temporary sickness that caused mermen to have blasphemous thoughts about breaking the covenant to remain with their brides.
Before going to the surface to woo a bride, “newborn illness” had been a silly feeling Elan would never suffer. After Zara, Elan could not call it a sickness. It was a natural and correct reaction to losing the woman with whom you had created a new life.
With Kadir’s forbidden call still whispering through their shaken city, Elan had been under extra watch. And when he’d tried to make his escape, he was caught.
“I made the attempt as soon as I could. But perhaps I would have been more successful if I had waited longer. We did not even get beyond the limits of our territory. That was the end.”
“The end? You tried one time,” she said flatly. “One time.”
He gritted his teeth at her judgment. “They pressed me into service. Perhaps you remember my second-in-command, Soren?”
Her eyes narrowed. “He was the lead thug forcing me to the surface.”
“And he was supposed to take the First Lieutenant position.”
“I heard your elders promising he could have it as soon as he disposed of me.”
Elan didn’t like hearing her talk about the Dragao Azul elders or Soren with such disrespect. They were only following orders. Following orders was the most honorable act of any warrior.
But Zara refused to follow laws if she believed they were wrong. Another person’s authority meant nothing if she thought they misused it.
Soren, most of all, followed orders with dedication. His large size intimidated even his own elders, so he had to work three times harder to overcome the stigma. Elan was one of the first to recognize Soren’s discipline, and as a consequence, Soren had pledged total loyalty to Elan for life.
Until that night.
“He did not accept the First Lieutenant position,” Elan said, conveying the most shocking reversal in a generation. “After Soren returned from taking you to the surface, he refused the honor and left the city in exile.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Good.”
“This doesn’t surprise you?”
She shrugged.
Leaving one’s home city was a death sentence. Worse, it was a betrayal to the warriors left behind. To the city’s king. To the Life Tree. Soren’s action had rocked the city to its core.
“Why would an unimpeachably honorable warrior like Soren suddenly throw off his values and embrace an anathema disgrace?”
“If he was so unimpeachable, he wouldn’t have abandoned an injured woman in the dark.”
The image stung.
Elan would do anything, anything, to reverse time. Protect Zara that night. Keep her safe with him and Zain.
But that time was past. “I thought, perhaps, you cursed Soren.”
“Only with the truth.” She crossed her arms tighter. “He shouldn’t feel so satisfied. He’d purchased his promotion with my blood. And I was literally bleeding everywhere so he couldn’t dare deny it.”
No wonder Soren had lost his way and fled the city in horror. Injuring a bride was far worse than breaking the ancient covenant. Soren’s own soul must have darkened when he heard Zara’s judgment.
“He had his orders,” Elan pointed out.
“That doesn’t make what I said less true.” She cocked her head, tilting her chin up at him in challenge. “He knew it, too. Sounds like he did something.”
Indeed.
“The shock of two highly positioned, ‘honorable’ warriors choosing exile shattered confidence in the city leadership. No one would take the First Lieutenant position. Dragao Azul was left dangerously unguarded.”
“Boo hoo.”
He chastised her. “If the city dies, so do I and Zain.”
“You mean if your city’s Life Tree dies,” she corrected. “Your king and elders can all jump in a volcanic vent and boil.”
The sap of Dragao Azul’s Life Tree ran in Elan’s and Zain’s — and even Zara’s — veins. Drinking the nectar of a Life Tree blossom had imbued Zara with the power to transform into a mer. If the tree died, then he and Zain would surely die. Zara … he did not know whether her humanity would save her from that fate.
Elan did not wish to test it. “No one would accept the First Lieutenant position. I was forced to take it once more.”
“What?” Zara shot to her feet. “Great! So you tried to escape one time, and you didn’t even get a demotion. What a punishment!”
She stomped towards the stairs as if the conversation were over.
Her accusation scored his heart like the slice of an unexpected trident.
He sucked in a breath. Harsh air stuck in his throat. “It was a punishment. Fathers are supposed to bond with their young fry. Duties that could separate a father from his young fry are duties for single warriors.”
“Welcome to the human world,” she scoffed, stopping at the stairs. “Some mothers can’t even get maternity leave. And almost no fathers do.”
“But this is the world of the mer,” he reminded her. “Our young fry are our life. In Dragao Azul, separating a father from his young fry has only been done once in our city’s history. They punished a male who attempted to injure his own young fry.”
She quieted and the fire in her eyes calmed to understanding. Almost, just a little, sympathy.
He also calmed. If she had insisted he not feel the hurt, betrayal, anger, and shame at being treated to the second worst punishment possible in a city — one so terrible it had only been given out once before Elan — then he might close up into a husk.
“You never tried to escape again,” she accused, more softly, resting one hand on her hip.
“My time with Zain was supervised.” He bit the words. “I could not leave him behind.”
The king and city elders had forced Elan back into a “privileged” position of First Lieutenant and distorted the honor into a prison. They did not trust him. Wisely so, but gravely insulting at the same time, and all the more reason for him to stew in his shame.
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