Chapter 12
As the days go on…
The coral walls cycled through a rhythm that I’d started to recognize, brighter during what I assumed was day, deeper and softer at night, a slow tidal beat that the entire palace breathed in and out.
By that measure, I’d been here for somewhere around two weeks.
Maybe longer. Time moved differently at the bottom of an ocean.
It stretched and compressed and was all about how full or empty the hours felt.
They felt full. That was the part I was still getting used to.
I floated on my back in Ishka’s chamber, staring up at the vaulted coral ceiling where bioluminescent veins branched and converged in patterns I’d started to memorize. The shell bed was behind me, its soft lining still holding the impression of my body from the night before.
My gills opened and closed in an easy rhythm.
I didn’t think about them anymore. The first few days I’d caught myself reaching for my neck every few minutes, fingers tracing the three smooth slits, my brain still stuttering over the impossibility of pulling oxygen from water.
Now it was just breathing. Just what my body did.
I’d spent twenty-three years in a body that felt like it was held together by sheer willpower, and now I moved through the water like I’d been born to it, fluid and painless.
The mineral deficiency that had been eating me alive since childhood, the legacy of Krackus baked into my bones before I’d taken my first breath, was gone.
Ishka’s people had rebuilt me from the inside out, and some days I still couldn’t believe this body was mine.
Other things were mine too. The room. The food that appeared in the alcove near the entrance, purple fish, kelp, and a dense spongy sweet substance I could only describe as a sort of nutty flavored cake I ate by the handful. Anything and everything I wanted was mine to have.
And nothing beat the peace and quiet of knowing that nobody was going to pound on the wall at four in the morning because the quota had been moved up again.
Look at me living the life of a kept man.
You are.
I didn’t flinch anymore when his voice arrived.
Two weeks of sharing my skull with a telepath had burned that reflex out of me.
Ishka’s presence in my head had become something closer to weather, always there, sometimes quiet, sometimes close, impossible to lock out and no longer something I wanted to.
I know.
I felt the water move before I saw anything, like someone had kicked the current. Then his shadow cut across the mirror behind me. Tentacles slid through the archway first, thick and deliberate, curling out and claiming space instead of drifting into it.
He followed. Ducked low under the stone lintel, armored shoulders scraping the sides, and straightened up fast. Those blue-violet eyes locked on mine in the reflection the second he cleared the doorway. Same as always: I was the first thing he scanned for.
One tentacle came up fast, brushing past my shoulder. I grabbed it mid-motion, closed my fist around the slick muscle, and pressed my palm flat against the row of suckers. They latched on hard, the way they’d been doing lately. Neither of us had bothered to call it anything yet.
I have something for you.
I turned to face him. He was holding something in his hands, his actual hands, not his tentacles, which meant it mattered. The Veylith used their tentacles for almost everything. The hands were reserved for things that required care.
It was a beautiful dark metal, or something like metal, bracelet.
But it had that organic quality that everything in Ishka’s world carried, shaped in a smooth seamless band.
Jewels were set into the surface at even intervals, each one a different color, each one glowing with its own faint inner light.
The gems I’d seen scattered across his floor like afterthoughts, except these had been chosen and placed with a deliberation that I could feel through the link before he said a word.
He held it out to me, open, waiting.
I stared at it. My throat worked around nothing.
A slave bracelet. That’s what it was. Property marker. Ownership tag. It marked me as belonging to someone who could afford to brand you in jewels.
What does it mean? I knew the answer already. I could feel it through the link, the weight of it, the permanence, the intention. But I wanted him to say it.
You are mine. This marks you so. Nothing in my ocean, no creature, no force beneath these waves, will touch what belongs to the Leviathan.
I looked at the bracelet. At the jewels glowing softly in the dark water. At Ishka’s hands holding it open, waiting for me to choose.
That was the part that cracked me open. He was waiting.
He could have put it on me at any point, while I slept or while I was pinned beneath him.
He was the Leviathan. Everything in his ocean belonged to him by right, and he’d told me that the first day, and he’d meant it.
But he was standing here with the bracelet open in his hands, and he was waiting for me to come to him.
I swam forward. The water parted around me and I stopped in front of him, craning my neck back to look up into those burning eyes. I was a minnow in front of a god, and I was about to let him mark me as his, and what I felt wasn’t fear.
I held out my right hand. The one Zayne had shattered. The one Ishka’s people had rebuilt.
The bracelet closed around my wrist. Cool at first, then warm, adjusting, settling against my skin. It fit perfectly.
Ishka’s tentacle wrapped gently around my braceleted wrist and lifted it, turning my hand over, studying the jewels against my skin. Those eyes looked down at me, and for the first time since I’d met him, I felt something through the link that wasn’t cold or commanding.
It was warm.
Brief. Barely there. A ghost of something vast and quiet that passed through the connection and was gone before I could name it. But I felt it. And he knew I felt it, and he didn’t take it back.
His tentacle released my wrist. He turned and moved toward the archway, unhurried, tentacles trailing behind him. At the threshold he paused.
You may go where you wish. The ocean is yours to explore. Nothing will harm you. They will see the bracelet and know.
Then he was gone. The water settled in his wake. The room was quiet.
I floated in the chamber of the Leviathan pressed my fingers against the bracelet and laughed. A real laugh. One I hadn’t done in what felt like ages.
My mother had made me promise. Anything and everything, she’d said, coughing up blood as she griped my wrist on that company cot. Leave this place. Never look back. Build a life.
I’d tried. I stole a ship and been betrayed and sold. I’d washed up on more shores than I could count, and I’d kept going because she’d asked me to, even when keeping going meant crawling.
And now I was here. At the bottom of an alien ocean, breathing through gills I didn’t ask for, wearing a bracelet I’d chosen, belonging to a creature who’d crossed a star system to buy me back before I even knew his name.
This wasn’t the life she’d imagined for me. It wasn’t the life I’d imagined for myself.
This was better.
Not because it was easy. Not because it was safe, though it was, safer than anything I’d ever known. It was better because it was real. It was truth, our truth. Because the creature who owned me could hear every ugly broken piece of me and still wanted me.
My mother had told me stories about pirates. About freedom, about living wild, about answering to nobody. She’d been wrong about the details. But she’d been right about the feeling.
This was it. The thing she’d wanted for me, underneath all the specifics. Not a ship. Not a system. Just a place where I could breathe. A place where someone wanted me enough to cross the dark to find me, and keep me, and make sure nothing ever hurt me again.
I pushed off from the archway and swam out into the corridor. The water was warm. The light was blue. And in the back of my mind, the voice that never lied was quiet, and close, and mine.
Time to see what I could get up to.
The End