22. The First Battle
The First Battle
Andie & Alexander
One week later
For an Alpha, Orion Maris was a strange man. I’d expected him to show some sign of breaking his promise. But on the first morning here, I’d emerged from the cabin… only to find him standing outside my door with two cups in his hands.
“How do you take your coffee?”
“Black,” I’d said.
He’d held out the cup on the left. “Good. So do I.”
It had been that simple. A cup of coffee and an Alpha who didn’t try to explain my own situation to me. After months of containment strategies, the simplicity of it had cracked something open in my chest that I hadn’t been able to close since.
By the third day, I was eating dinner with him on the aft deck.
The galley crew had prepared grilled fish and a salad dressed with oil from the Sicilian coast. Orion served the plates himself, dismissing the steward with a nod.
He talked while we ate, about the currents that mapped the seabed like roads, about the fishermen who still sang to the Strait before casting their nets.
He didn’t ask me about Alexander. He simply… let me think.
“This is good,” I’d told him.
He’d refilled my wine glass before I noticed it was empty. “Eat. You’ve lost weight you can’t afford to lose.”
By the fifth day, I was sitting beside him instead of across from him.
My body had made the choice on its own, the way you drift toward warmth in a cold room.
His scent didn’t trigger the alarm that Alexander’s presence had wired into my biology.
Being near Orion felt like standing at the edge of a tide pool.
Cool and clear and contained. I could see the bottom.
On the sixth day, he touched my hand. We were watching the sunset from the upper deck, and he reached over and covered my fingers with his. I didn’t pull away.
The curse was still there. I could feel it if I reached for it, a low hum buried deep in my chest. But it had no teeth in the Strait. During the day, the water held it at a distance, and my body was beginning to believe the reprieve might last.
At night, it was different. The hum grew louder, and I woke at three in the morning with my heart hammering and my hands gripping the sheets.
I was certain that something was wrong but unable to name it.
The curse started whispering, less potent but still insistent.
Where is he now? Is he looking for you? What if he stops?
I wanted to believe I was getting better at ignoring it.
Now it was the seventh evening. We were in the galley, and I was watching him open a bottle of wine.
“You’re staring.” He didn’t look up from the bottle.
“I’m still trying to figure out the catch.”
He poured two glasses of wine and set one in front of me. “What makes you think there’s a catch?”
“Experience.” I ran my thumbnail along the stem of the glass. “Every solution anyone has offered me has come with a price.”
“And what has this cost you?”
I looked at him. He was leaning against the galley counter with his own glass in hand, his posture open and relaxed. The sea-colored eyes watched me with the same steady attention he’d given me since the boarding platform, present and asking nothing.
I pushed the glass away from me. “That’s the problem. It’s cost me nothing, and I don’t trust it.”
“You don’t trust peace.”
“I don’t trust things that come free.” The wine was good. Warm and earthy, with a mineral depth that tasted like the volcanic soil it had grown from. “In my experience, the longer something seems free, the more expensive the bill turns out to be.”
He left his glass on the counter and came around to sit beside me. Not close enough to crowd, but close enough that I could feel the steady pull of his presence.
“I won’t pretend I’m offering you this out of pure altruism.” His shoulder brushed mine as he settled. “I’m not. I want you here. I’ve wanted you here since the night on the Odyssey.”
The honesty caught me off guard. Not because it was surprising—I’d known, or suspected, since Samos—but because he delivered it without the charming lies I’d come to expect from Alphas.
There was no manipulation, no calculated vulnerability.
Just a man telling a woman what he wanted and letting her decide what to do with the information.
“But wanting you and trapping you here are not the same thing.” His hands rested on his knees, open and still. “When you want to leave, you leave. That hasn’t changed.”
“And if I don’t leave?”
Something shifted in his expression. Not triumph. Something warmer and more careful, as if my question had opened a door he’d been cautious about approaching. “Then you stay. And I show you what true life looks like.”
A life. Without the fire and the paranoia and the involuntary rage that had cost me my career, my best friend, and my sanity. Without Alexander.
The thought of him hit the way it always did, like an ambush from behind my own ribs.
I hadn’t said his name aloud since the plane.
I hadn’t needed to. He lived in the silence where the curse used to scream—a different kind of ache, quieter but no less persistent.
I thought about him when the water was still.
I thought about him when Orion’s hand covered mine, and the absence of electrical burn felt like a missing limb.
I took another sip of wine and forced the thought back down.
“The water changes at night.” I hadn’t planned to say it, but the words came out anyway. “During the day it feels like freedom. At night it feels like it’s pressing in.”
“The Strait responds to emotional states,” Orion replied. “When you’re settled, the water is settled. When you’re not, the currents shift.”
“So the claustrophobia is mine.”
“You’ve spent months in containment, Andromeda. Your mind doesn’t trust enclosed spaces anymore, even when the space is open water. It gets easier. The longer you’re here, the more the Strait recognizes you.”
That made more sense than I wanted it to. It was also something I didn’t want to analyze too closely. “I’m not ready to answer you,” I told him. “About staying.”
“I know.” He didn’t move. “The ocean teaches patience, Andromeda. I have plenty.”
The wine was almost gone. The galley was warm and golden, lamplight catching the dark teak and the brass fittings. Outside the portholes, the last of the sunset was bleeding into the water. Orion was close, and the quiet between us felt almost too comfortable.
He reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. His fingers were light and careful, and they lingered at the curve of my jaw.
His thumb traced my cheekbone once, slowly, and then he leaned forward. The movement was unhurried and deliberate, giving me every opportunity to pull away. His eyes stayed on mine the entire time.
“You are remarkable,” he murmured. “Whatever you decide. Whatever happens after this. You are the most remarkable person I have ever met.”
My heart kicked hard against my sternum. It wasn’t anything biological. Just a woman’s heart, responding to a man who was looking at her like she mattered.
Did I want this? I wasn’t sure. Suddenly, I was terrified that if I let him kiss me, I’d be imagining Alexander the whole time.
The hatch behind us banged open.
“Lord Maris.” A crew member stood in the doorway, breathless and rigid. “I apologize for the interruption. We’ve just received word from the mainland. There’s a situation with our shore operations.”
Orion’s hand dropped from my face. His expression didn’t change, but something behind his eyes went flat and cold.
“What kind of situation?”
“House Zeus, my lord. They’re moving on our holdings.”
Orion set his wine glass down on the counter with a soft, precise click. He stood. The ease was still in his body, but it had hardened into something with edges. He looked at me, and for the first time since I’d arrived, what I saw in his face wasn’t warmth.
“Excuse me.” He straightened his cuffs. “I need to handle this.”
He followed the crew member out of the galley. The hatch closed behind them, and I was alone with the empty wine glasses and the last of the copper light fading from the water.
Alexander. The whisper came before I could stop it. He’s coming for you.
I didn’t know if the thought was the curse or the truth. Or if there was any difference anymore.
The Poseidon shipping terminal in Catania occupied three square miles of reclaimed coastline.
It was a sprawling complex of warehouses, dry docks, and container yards that processed roughly a quarter of all commercial traffic moving through the eastern Mediterranean.
On paper, it was owned by a Sicilian holding company with no visible ties to any Olympian House.
In practice, every foreman, dockworker, and security guard on the premises answered to Orion Maris.
Nikos straightened his tie in the side mirror of our car. “You realize that this is an act of economic warfare against a sovereign House.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, brother.” I opened my door and smiled tightly. “It’s a regulatory inspection.”
“Conducted by the head of House Zeus. Personally. At eleven o’clock at night.”
“I’m a hands-on leader, Nikos.”
He sighed, tucked the leather portfolio under his arm, and followed me out of the car.
The terminal was still operational at this hour.
Floodlights turned the container yard into a white-lit maze of stacked metal, and the deep groan of crane mechanisms carried over the water.
Two refrigerated cargo ships sat at berth, their hulls painted in the blue-green of Poseidon commercial livery.
A smaller vessel was being loaded at the far dock, containers swinging overhead in the grip of a gantry crane.
The air smelled of diesel, brine, and hot metal.