Chapter 1 #2
My mother used to say I was born in the wrong body. You should have been a fish, she'd laugh, watching me swim out past where the other children dared to go. Or a seal. Something that belongs to the sea.
She stopped laughing when I presented as omega at fourteen.
After that, everything changed. I wasn't allowed to swim anymore—too dangerous, too exposed, what if someone saw me?
I wasn't allowed to leave the house without a chaperone.
Wasn't allowed to speak to alphas, or look at them, or do anything that might attract their attention.
I was valuable now, you see. Precious. Rare.
I was sellable.
The memory surfaced before I could stop it—my father's study, the smell of pipe smoke and old paper.
A man I'd never seen before, twice my age at least, with grey at his temples and cold assessing eyes.
He looked at me the way you'd look at a horse you were considering buying.
Checked my teeth, my hands, the width of my hips.
"She'll do," he said. "I'll take her when she turns eighteen."
My father shook his hand. Smiled. "Pleasure doing business with you."
I stood there in my good dress, the one my mother had made me wear for the occasion, and felt something inside me turn to ice. I was sixteen years old, and I had just been sold to a stranger like a broodmare at auction.
I ran two weeks before my eighteenth birthday. Stole money from my father's desk, clothes from my brother's room, and slipped out in the middle of the night. I'd made it to the coast by dawn, and by noon, I was on a ship heading anywhere that wasn't home.
That was eight months ago. Eight months of running, hiding, working jobs that no omega should ever have to work. Eight months of pretending to be something I wasn't, all to avoid being turned into something I refused to become.
A possession. A prize. A broodmare for some alpha who'd paid for the privilege.
No. I'd rather drown.
The afternoon was mine.
I'd finished my tasks faster than expected, and Brennan had grunted at me to make myself scarce until evening duties.
It was as close to approval as he ever got.
I slipped away to the far side of the ship, to a spot near the stern where supplies were stacked in a way that created a small hidden nook.
My spot. My sanctuary within a sanctuary.
I checked to make sure no one was watching, then stripped off my vest, cap and outer shirt.
Beneath, I wore a thin undershirt that I could swim in.
Not proper swimming clothes, but I'd learned to make do.
The water called to me, glittering and vast, endless blue stretching to the horizon.
I could smell it, salt and life and freedom.
My skin ached with the need to submerge, to let the silence swallow me, to float in that weightless space where nothing could touch me.
I checked again. The deck was busy on the other side of the ship; no one was looking this way. The sea was calm, the current gentle. I'd done this a dozen times over the past three weeks, slipping into the water for an hour here, an hour there. No one had caught me yet.
I climbed over the railing and let myself fall. The cold hit me like a slap, sharp and shocking and wonderful. I plunged beneath the surface, and the world went quiet.
This. This was what I needed. I opened my eyes.
The salt stung, but I was used to it. Around me, the water was clear and blue, shot through with shafts of sunlight from above.
I could see the dark hull of the ship, the distant shapes of fish darting away from my intrusion, the endless depths below fading from turquoise to navy to black.
I swam.
Down and down, deeper than I should go, my lungs starting to burn in that familiar way that meant I'd have to surface soon. But not yet. Not yet. Just a little longer in this perfect silence, this perfect peace.
Something glinted on the seafloor.
I paused, suspended in the blue, squinting at the shape below. It was lighter than the surrounding sand—pale and round and luminous. Curiosity pulled me deeper.
An oyster bed. Old, half-buried in sediment, forgotten by whatever currents had swept through here. Most of the shells were empty, cracked open by predators or time. One was intact, and something about it caught the light in a way that made my chest tight.
I dove for it. My fingers closed around the rough shell, and I pried it open with practiced ease—I'd done this before, on the island, hunting for pretty things to sell at market.
Inside: a pearl.
Perfect. Luminous. The size of my thumbnail, glowing with soft iridescent light even in the dim water. I cupped it in my palm, marveling. It was the most beautiful thing I'd found in months. Maybe ever. A tiny treasure, just for me—
Movement in the blue.
I looked up.
My heart stopped.
He was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
The creature—the man—floated about twenty feet away, watching me with dark, dark eyes. His skin was pale, almost luminous, like moonlight trapped beneath water. His hair was ink-black, long enough to drift around his face like smoke, and his features were sharp and angular and utterly inhuman.
Because he wasn't human. Couldn't be.
Below his waist, where legs should have been, there was a tail. Long and powerful, covered in scales that shifted from charcoal grey at his hips to true obsidian black at the fins. The fins themselves were elegant, flowing, built for silent movement through deep water.
A mermaid. A merman. Something from a story, a legend, a sailor's drunken tale.
Real.
Watching me.
I should have been terrified. Every instinct I had should have been screaming at me to swim, to flee, to get away from this impossible predator. His teeth, I noticed, were sharp. His fingers ended in claws. There was nothing soft or safe about him.
I wasn't afraid.
I was awestruck.
He was beautiful. Strange and dangerous and beautiful, like a storm at sea, like lightning over water.
I'd never seen anything so perfect in my life.
My lungs were burning now, I needed to surface, needed air—but I couldn't make myself move.
Couldn't look away from those dark eyes that were fixed on me with an intensity I didn't understand.
I didn't understand what I did next, either. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was madness. Maybe it was the same impulse that made me collect shells and sea glass, the need to give beautiful things to beautiful creatures.
I held out my hand, the one with the pearl and offered it to him.
He went completely still. Even more still than he'd been before, which shouldn't have been possible. Those dark eyes dropped to the pearl, then back to my face, and something shifted in his expression. Surprise, maybe. Confusion.
I couldn't hold my breath any longer. Black spots were dancing at the edges of my vision.
But before I kicked for the surface, I did one more thing—I set the pearl drifting in the water between us.
Watched it sink slowly toward him. Then I waved, a small, silly gesture that made me feel like an idiot even as I did it—and swam for the light above.
I broke the surface gasping, gulping air, my heart hammering against my ribs. For a long moment I just floated there, breathing, trying to convince myself that I hadn't just hallucinated from oxygen deprivation.
Then I looked down. The water below was empty. Blue and clear and utterly vacant. Deep, deep down, something glinted. Pale and round and luminous. Like a pearl, clutched in someone's hand.
I climbed back onto the ship in a daze.
My hands were shaking as I pulled on my dry clothes. My mind was racing, replaying those impossible moments over and over. The creature in the water. His dark eyes. The way he'd looked at me, not like prey, not like a threat, but like something unexpected.
Like I'd surprised him.
I touched my palm, where the pearl had sat moments ago. I could still feel the phantom weight of it, the cool smoothness. I'd given it away. Given it to a monster from a fairy tale, for no reason I could explain.
Stupid, I thought. Reckless. You're losing your mind.
I didn't feel crazy. I felt... alive. More alive than I had in months.
Like something had cracked open inside me, and light was spilling through.
I pulled my cap down low and went to find work that needed doing.
There was always work on a ship. Always something to keep my hands busy and my mind distracted.
All through the evening, as I scrubbed decks and hauled rope and avoided Cort's watching eyes, I kept looking at the water.
Wondering if he was still down there.
Wondering if I'd ever see him again.
That night, I dreamed of dark eyes and obsidian scales, and when I woke, I was smiling.