Chapter 34
Esmyra
Esmyra crouched behind the rotting boards of the shack, fingers twitching with restrained energy.
Wait here, Draevyn had said. It was adorable, really. Thinking she would do such a thing.
But she wanted to try. For him. For the man who seemingly had done everything in his power to do right by her since the moment they met but was torn away and manipulated by forces neither of them could’ve guessed.
Every scream outside, however, cracked something inside her, and every crash of metal stirred the storm in her blood. Even Kae seemed to have turned restless within her.
Esmyra wasn’t built for hiding, the siren wasn’t meant to be caged, and Kaelypso wasn’t made to kneel and cower before any man.
With a deep breath, she shoved the door open and took her first steps into the chaos.
The isle was a hellscape—soldiers pouring through the streets, dragging innocents from taverns and homes, swords flashing. Pirates and citizens alike fought back, ill-matched, but wild with defiance.
Esmyra was about to intervene, her magic stirring in her chest, but then a man stepped forward, stalking toward a group of the soldiers. She stopped in her tracks as he lifted a hand, and the earth beneath their boots trembled.
A woodland shifter.
The guards’ grips on their weapons tightened, frantically looking between each other as vines sprouted out from the ground and began to snake up their ankles and legs, rooting them in place.
But then a gunshot cracked through the air.
BANG.
Esmyra’s eyes flared, her breath catching in her throat as she found one of the soldiers aiming a gun, smoke rising from the end of its barrel. When she turned to the shifter, a bullet wound marked his temple—centered directly between his eyes.
But that wasn’t all.
Branching out from the wound, onyx, spider-like veins quickly spread.
Within seconds, they covered his face, spreading down his neck, torso, and arms. And then, as the infection spread to the tips of every limb, his body began to crumble, caving in on itself.
It didn’t stop until the man was nothing but a shriveled, vein-covered husk on the ground.
Esmyra stood there, frozen in horror as she watched.
He wasn’t just shot—he was murdered with a velsinyte bullet. She had never seen its effects on anyone other than herself before. Syrena and Azarian were right. Once in the bloodstream, velsinyte devoured anyone who wasn’t a god in seconds.
Bile climbed her throat. What if one of those bullets hit Draevyn? Or Jak?
Absolutely fucking not.
Fury, dark and relentless, swirled in her chest, and Kaelypso answered her call.
Talons extended, and the midnight hair sprawled over her shoulder lengthened to even longer, silver locks.
Her pirate guise shimmered and was replaced by billowing, royal robes.
Her fingers sprawled out, and a trident formed entirely of water rested in her hand.
Her bare feet settled into the dirt road, and her storm was summoned.
Water surged up from the earth, curling around her arms as lightning skittered within the liquid. Her hair lifted on a sudden windless charge, and the silver-blue tattoos glowing on her skin pulsated with her power, humming with her wrath.
Two soldiers turned at the sound, their eyes widening in the silver light cast from her own.
“This is the part where you run,” she warned.
They moved to scatter, but even with her warning, she never gave them a chance.
She aimed the points of her trident at them, and lightning erupted forward. It violently slammed into them with a blinding flash. They were hurled backward, their flesh melting from their bones as they landed in smoking heaps.
Esmyra cracked her neck to the side as she stepped over the piles of pulp they had turned into.
A whip of water lashed from her palm at a third soldier, yanking him off his feet and slamming him into the wall of a tavern.
Another raised his musket behind her, and she spun, eyes glowing; a bolt of lightning leapt from her fingertip and shot out straight into his chest. The godly powers humming through her felt the moment his heart stopped.
Let them call me a monster. If she was a monster for protecting her own, then so be it.
The onlookers who were once afraid of the soldiers now looked at her with something resembling both awe and fear. One of them let out a scream, and they all followed suit, running away from her in a frantic mess of shoves and curses as they scattered.
She didn’t care; she just wanted them to be safe. Because the rowdy mess of misfits who called this port their home were hers.
Esmyra took off in a sprint, her feet slamming against the cobblestone as she searched for Draevyn. She had to find him and her crew before any of them were hit with one of those bullets.
Every instinct screamed at her to disappear, to slip beneath the tide and vanish, but she ignored them. She knew it was more Kaelypso’s fear of velsinyte than her own, because what Esmyra feared was losing what few things she had left.
“We now know for sure they have the velsinyte in their guns. We need to leave,” Kaelypso hissed.
“No.”
“Or in the least, listen to Irah’s heir and hide!”
“Stop being a pussy!” Esmyra yelled out loud.
“Says the woman who hasn’t been killed by it before!”
She glanced down at her forearm, where the new mark of twisting sea serpents now lay permanently on her flesh.
Esmyra’s gut was telling her that something more sinister was at play. She knew she didn’t have the full story of what Syrena had caused or what her sister was up to now. All she knew for certain was that she would put an end to it with Draevyn at her side.
She had turned her back to him once, and its consequences nearly killed her. Over her dead, rotting corpse would she allow that to happen again.
Esmyra turned sharply down a narrow street, shadowed and quiet as she tried to catch her breath. But she didn’t realize it was a dead end.
Then a voice came from behind her, cold and unforgiving.
“Well, what do we have here?”
She spun around, water gathering in her palms.
Atlas.
He stood at the opposite end of the road, flanked by armored soldiers. His expression wasn’t the rage she expected. Not entirely. It was colder than that, calculated and possessive.
“You,” Esmyra hissed, lifting her hand.
Atlas raised a hand as shadows swirled around his wrist. “Where is she, Esmyra? Where is my wife?”
Her throat tightened, her eyes darting between the guards protecting him and their guns aimed directly at her chest. Kaelypso thrashed within her, screeching to flee, and Esmyra desperately tried to ignore the soul-consuming panic crawling along her spine.
“Alive,” she answered, her head slowly tilting to the side, “for now.”
The air around her shimmered, moisture pulling from the air, from the stone, from the blood-soaked ground, as a faint storm crackled behind her eyes.
“Return her to me,” he demanded.
“And let me guess”—she clicked her tongue—“you’ll let me live?”
A dark chuckle slipped from him, riddled with malice. “No. There’s no scenario where you make it out of this alive.”
Her brows furrowed. “You’re shit at bartering, you know that?”
“What I can provide is a free life for my brother. If you return Elowynne safely to me, here and now, then Draevyn will remain a free man and will no longer be a fugitive of Lephyrin because of you.”
She bared her teeth. “I should drown you where you stand.”
“No. You started a war for your pride, and now you’ll be the one to drown in it.” His voice cracked like a whip, echoing through the night air.
“It was not I who started this war, young king. Your father did that,” she snarled.
His words from before, however, screamed through her mind—that there was a chance Draevyn wouldn’t be hunted for the rest of his days.
That would never become a reality if they were to remain together.
But if she could do this one good thing?
For him? For the only man she had ever found it in herself to love?
Maybe she could do that.
The appearance of Kaelypso melted away, and she now stood before the King of Lephyrin as Esmyra Blackwood.
“Swear to me you speak the truth,” she demanded. “That Draevyn will be a free man for the remainder of his days if I hand over Elowynne and then myself.”
“What are you doing?” Kaelypso whisper-shouted in her mind.
“We’ll find a way out. We always do,” Esmyra said, hoping she was right.
His eyes narrowed, shadows swirling in them beneath the light of the moon. “Unlike you, I actually care for my brother. Of course, I fucking mean it. His mind never would’ve become so godsdamn twisted up if he hadn’t met the likes of you.”
Her chest ached so intensely that, for a moment, she thought he’d shot her anyway. Because he was right.
Esmyra and Draevyn—Kaelypso and Irah—were always destined to destroy each other. In every lifetime, every vessel their souls bore. They would never be able to outrun fate.
Tears stung the back of her eyes as she admitted, “I don’t have her here, Atlas.”
Atlas’s stare darkened before his smirk grew cruel. “How devastating.”
She opened her mouth to explain that she would get her. She would bring him to her this instant in Maerinys and would somehow deal with Syrena later.
But then a glint of movement caught her eye from above, and by the time she realized what was happening, she was already too late.
Like a monstrous spider descending onto its prey, an enormous net dropped from the rooftops. Esmyra barely had time to glance up before it slammed into her from above, the weight and strange sting of it instantly robbing her of breath.
A scream of both her and Kaelypso erupted from the depths of her soul as she became trapped within a net bound by velsinyte.
Her limbs went rigid, her magic blinking out as the vibrance of her tattoos faded to an ashy hue.
It was like a thousand knives lanced into her nerves.
The net was unbearably heavy without her godly strength, and when her knees hit the ground, she could barely move.
Atlas casually walked up to her and crouched at her side, his grey eyes glittering with a thousand unreadable things. “And now this war is about to get a lot bigger, you see. Because not only did you kidnap Lephyrin’s queen, but also the daughter of the elven king of Sumnae.”
Esmyra’s eyes widened as she tried to process what he was saying.
“And let’s just say they have very intriguing punishments,” he continued.
“Kae, what are we going to do?!” Esmyra said in a panic.
No answer came. Kaelypso was gone.
Sharp, frantic fear nearly consumed her in an instant from having no way to speak with her goddess, and now to sit through torture at the hands of the elven and their mind-breaking powers. Could she shield her mind from them? Even if she could, she knew that wouldn’t hold up forever.
Her lip curled, but her strength was rapidly fading. “You’re not going to win with this approach, Atlas.”
“I already have.” His fingers grazed her chin through the net, forcing her to look up at him. “You’re not untouchable anymore.”
He stood from his crouch and turned to his guards. “Varis, your first duty in your new position is to take care of this. Get her out of my sight.”
Soldiers approached as Atlas stalked back down the road, disappearing into the darkness with his shadows.
As the men pulled her up, she forced herself to become dead weight. She lunged and tried to bite and punch them through the net, kicking at one of them as they grabbed her legs, but it was useless with her weakened strength.
“Knock her out. She’s too much fucking trouble,” one of them—Varis—said from behind her.
Her eyes flared, and as she moved to strike again, a sharp, brutal pain rocked through her skull, forcing a yelp from her that was cut short.
As the world began to fade and darken around her, Esmyra realized in a sick, bitter twist of fate that while trying to do something good—while trying to save Draevyn and those she loved—she had walked into her own indestructible cage.