The Tide Reversed One kiss could free him—or drown them all. #8
Maren almost laughed. It came out as a gasp.
The water rose around their calves.
From beneath it, something brushed her ankle.
Cold fingers.
She kicked back, and Ronan was there, one hand hard at the small of her back, the other driving a broken shard of stone into the water beside her foot. Something shrieked beneath the surface and dissolved into black foam.
“Move,” Callum ordered.
No one argued.
They ran.
The tunnels had changed.
The passage that had brought them down now twisted like a living throat.
Algae flared brighter as they passed, turning the walls a feverish green.
The bones embedded in the stone rattled in their niches.
Finger-bone knots snapped apart, scattering across the floor.
Water poured from seams overhead and ran down Maren’s face, into her mouth, under her collar. It tasted of salt, iron, and old grief.
Behind them, the heart chamber boomed.
Once.
Twice.
Then something enormous began crawling through the dark.
Maren did not look back.
Finn kept hold of her hand as they climbed, his grip slick and cold, but firm.
Callum went ahead, forcing open passages that had narrowed since their descent.
Elias followed close behind Maren, muttering translations under his breath as fresh black ink bled from the walls.
Ronan guarded the rear, his breathing harsh, his battle scars glowing with each impact behind them.
“She is collapsing the embassy,” Elias said.
“Can she do that?” Maren demanded.
“She built part of the curse with it.”
“Not reassuring.”
“She is not trying to reassure you.”
A wet laugh echoed through the tunnel.
Morwenna’s voice seeped through the walls. “Run, little keeper. Run with my ruined sons. Every path beneath this island was carved from a bargain your blood made.”
Maren stumbled.
Callum caught her before she fell. His palm closed around her wrist, rough and hot, dragging her upright. The sea-glass pendant burned against her throat.
“Do not listen,” he said.
“She’s right.”
“No.” His silver eyes cut into hers. “She is using truth as a hook. That is not the same thing.”
Maren stared at him for one breath too long.
A shape dropped from the ceiling.
Ronan’s arm came around her from behind, hauling her back against his chest as the creature hit the stone where she had stood. It wore shell armor fused to skinless flesh, its hands tipped with white claws, its mouth a lipless wound filled with kelp-black teeth.
A drowned courtier.
Callum drove his shoulder into it, slamming it against the wall. Finn appeared at its side with a bone shard in his hand and stabbed upward beneath its jaw.
The creature dissolved into seawater and broken shells.
Finn looked at the shard, then at Maren. “Improvised weaponry. Very rustic. I prefer knives, but one must adapt.”
His smile flickered.
Not enough to hide the tremor in his fingers.
They climbed.
By the time they reached the hidden stair beneath the hearth, the water was chasing them upward.
The hearthstone resisted opening.
Maren threw her shoulder against it, then both hands.
Nothing.
From below, Morwenna’s army crawled closer. Shell scraped stone. Wet claws clicked. Bone chimes rang themselves to pieces in the dark.
“Move,” Ronan said.
He did not wait for permission. He planted both hands against the underside of the stone and pushed.
The scars along his arms lit white.
Callum joined him.
Then Finn.
Then Elias.
The four princes braced shoulder to shoulder beneath the hearth, half-drowned, weakened, exiled, and shaking with the last of their stolen magic.
Maren stood between them and the rising water, useless knife in hand, listening to skinless soldiers crawl toward the men she should have left in the sea.
The men who were not strangers anymore.
Not victims.
Not choices.
Hers, some reckless part of her whispered.
The thought terrified her so badly she almost dropped the knife.
The hearthstone cracked open.
Callum grabbed her first and lifted her through. Maren rolled onto the lighthouse floor into ankle-deep seawater and smoke.
The tower was breaking.
Every window was gone. Rain and spray flew through the rooms in violent sheets.
The hearth fire burned blue beneath the open stone.
Saltwater poured up through cracks in the floorboards, carrying white shells that had no business being so far from the beach.
They clustered around Maren’s boots like offerings. Like warnings.
The main door still stood, but it bowed inward with each blow from outside.
Boom.
The lighthouse trembled.
Boom.
Dust fell from the ceiling.
Boom.
The sealed salt crust split.
Maren staggered toward the window and looked out.
Blackwake Island was coming apart.
The beach below crawled with things.
Drowned courtiers in shell armor dragged themselves over the rocks.
Wraiths moved between them, draped in veils of seaweed and pearls, their hollow throats humming Morwenna’s song.
Farther down the shore, selkie soldiers with no skins of their own stood in ranks knee-deep in surf, faces empty, bodies pale and scarred where pelts had been cut away.
Bound soldiers.
Stolen soldiers.
Morwenna had not only exiled her sons.
She had made an army of everyone she had stripped.
The waves rose behind them higher than the cliffs.
Waiting.
Watching.
Callum came to stand beside Maren.
His face had gone very still.
“They were ours,” he said.
Maren knew he meant the soldiers.
His people.
His dead.
His failure, though he did not say it.
She wanted to touch him. To take his hand. To press her mouth to the fierce line of his knuckles and make one impossible promise after another.
Instead, she stepped back.
No safe mouth.
No safe want.
No safe mercy.
The pendant at her throat pulsed with heat, answering every unsaid thing.
Elias emerged from the hearth passage last, coughing blood into his hand. Maren crossed to him at once.
He waved her off.
She ignored him.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I am tired of men telling me that.”
His mouth curved faintly, then tightened in pain.
Maren caught his wrist and pulled his hand away. Bright red marked his palm. Not seawater. Not magic.
Human enough to bleed.
The sight of it shook her.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Read too much.”
“That is not an injury.”
“It is in old magic.”
She hated that he could still sound calm. She hated more that calm made her want to lean into him until the rest of the world stopped tearing itself apart.
Outside, something scraped up the side of the lighthouse.
Ronan barred the broken window with a table.
Finn dragged another cabinet in front of the door, then staggered, catching himself against the wall.
Callum saw it.
So did Maren.
Finn smiled before anyone spoke.
“Do not all look at me so tenderly. I will become unbearable.”
“You already are,” Callum said.
“Good. I would hate to decline.”
But he was declining.
They all were.
Maren could see it now with a horrible clarity.
The longer they remained without their skins, the more their bodies forgot how to hold magic.
Callum’s hands shook after every act of strength.
Finn’s lips had gone blue again. Ronan’s scars opened in thin silver lines that refused to close.
Elias’s eyes kept losing focus, as if part of him were already reading some language written beneath the floor.
And all the while, the magic flowed into Maren.
She felt it beneath her skin.
Storm-command from Callum, sharp and protective. Silver-tongued glamour from Finn, bright and slippery as fish scales. Ronan’s battle fire, old as blood on stone. Elias’s binding lore, symbols unfurling in the dark behind her eyes.
Power gathered in her bones.
So did want.
It was not clean. It was not simple. It was not the gentle longing songs pretended love should be.
It was Callum’s palm on her wrist and the devastating safety of his restraint.
It was Finn’s mouth on her bandaged knuckles and the heartbreak hidden under his smile.
It was Ronan’s heartbeat hammering beneath her hand when she brought him back from the edge of violence.
It was Elias’s breath warm against her temple as he turned cruelty into language she could understand.
Maren had spent years refusing attachment because the sea always came to collect.
Now the sea had sent four men to her door and demanded she choose which loss would hurt least.
She pressed one hand to her mouth.
“No,” she whispered.
Elias looked up.
Maren lowered her hand. “No. I will not choose like that.”
The room went still.
Even the sea seemed to pause outside the broken windows.
Callum turned from the door. “Maren.”
“I mean it.” Her voice shook, but she did not stop. “This curse was built to make me selfish either way. Kiss one, kill three. Refuse all, lose all. Want one, betray the rest. Want all—”
She broke off.
The word burned worse than the pendant.
Finn’s expression changed.
Callum’s did too.
Ronan looked at her like she had finally spoken the thing he had already heard in every heartbeat.
Elias stepped closer. “Want all,” he said softly.
Maren laughed once, ragged and afraid. “That is supposed to be monstrous.”
“No,” Callum said.
The force of it startled her.
He crossed the flooded floor slowly. Water swirled around his boots. His silver eyes held hers without mercy and without shame.
“No,” he said again. “Morwenna made love into scarcity. She made freedom into a blade we were meant to hold against one another. That does not make your heart monstrous.”
“But if I want all of you—”
“Then you are honest.”
Finn leaned against the wall, smile gone sharp and heartbroken. “Careful, brother. She may not survive that much royal approval.”
Callum ignored him.
“I will not accept freedom purchased with their deaths,” he said to Maren. “Not if you offer it. Not if the curse demands it. Not if the sea itself opens and begs me to rule from its throat.”
Maren’s eyes stung.
She looked away from him and found Finn watching her.
He seemed almost frightened.
That, more than any flirtation, pulled her toward him.
“What?” she asked.