Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
AVIORA
Darkness. Pressure. The roar of water in my ears.
The current drags us through stone passages so narrow, my shoulders scrape walls on either side. I can’t see Zoric—can’t see anything—but his hand is locked around mine, and I focus on that grip with the single-minded intensity of someone who’s run out of options.
My lungs are screaming. Every instinct I have is demanding that I open my mouth, breathe, give in to the pressure building behind my ribs. I’ve been underwater too long. The edges of my vision are going gray, though there’s nothing to see except blackness.
Keep kicking.
The current strengthens. Pulls harder. We’re accelerating through the passage, tumbling past formations I can feel but not see, and I have a terrible moment of certainty that this is how I die—not fighting Oreth, not facing Finn’s ghost, but drowning in an unnamed tunnel while the man beside me drowns too.
Fitting.
Zoric’s hand tightens on mine. Not comfort—command.
So I don’t. I kick. I claw at water that resists every motion. I hold on to his hand with strength I didn’t know I had left.
And then—
Light.
Gray and distant, filtering down from somewhere above. The passage opens. The current releases us into open water, and I’m kicking upward before I process what I’m seeing—kicking toward that light with everything I have, lungs bursting, vision narrowing to a pinprick of not-quite-dark.
We break the surface.
I gasp. Choke. Gulp air that tastes like salt and storm and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever breathed. Water streams from my hair, my clothes, my skin. The world is spinning around me—sky and sea and the dark mass of cliffs in the distance.
Dreadhaven. We’re in the Wrecktide’s outer reaches, maybe half a mile from shore. The keep’s blackstone towers rise against the predawn sky, and I have a hysterical urge to laugh at the sight of them.
We made it. We actually made it.
“Aviora.” Zoric surfaces beside me, water sluicing off gray-green skin. His braids have come loose, black hair plastered to his face, and he looks as wrecked as I feel. “You’re alive.”
“Noticed that.” My voice comes out raw. Scraped. “You?”
“Functional.” He treads water beside me, his massive frame moving with the easy efficiency of someone born to the sea. “Can you swim?”
I take stock. Arms: exhausted but working. Legs: screaming but operational. The gash on my palm from cutting Oreth’s chains has reopened, blood swirling pink in the water around my hand.
“I can swim.”
We strike out for shore. The water here is different from the cursed depths we left behind—cold, yes, but not the bone-deep wrongness of Oreth’s domain.
The Wrecktide stretches around us, studded with the broken masts of sunken ships, but the ghost lights that usually drift among them are gone. The whispers are silent.
The curse died with Oreth. I can feel its absence in the water, a lifting of pressure I’d grown so accustomed to that I forgot it wasn’t normal.
My arms cut through the waves with the mechanical rhythm of pure exhaustion.
Beside me, Zoric matches my pace, his bulk creating wakes that push me slightly off course every few strokes.
We don’t talk. Don’t have the breath for it.
Just swim—toward the cliffs, toward the cove beneath the Eastern Collapse, toward solid ground and whatever awaits us there.
The sky is still dark when we reach the shallows. I stagger through waist-deep water, my boots finding purchase on black sand, and then I’m out—actually out, actually standing on solid ground—and my legs give way beneath me.
I drop to my knees in the sand. It’s cold and gritty against my palms, and I don’t care. I’m alive. We’re alive. Oreth is ash and saltwater, the curse is broken, and I’m kneeling on a beach beneath Dreadhaven’s cliffs trying to remember how to breathe like a normal person.
Zoric crashes down beside me. For a long moment, we just kneel there, gasping, shivering, looking at each other with the wild-eyed disbelief of people who expected to die and somehow didn’t.
“We did it.” My voice sounds strange in my own ears. Too quiet. Too raw. “We actually fucking did it.”
“You did it.” His palm cups my face, tilting it toward him. His touch is rough and cold and steady against my jaw. “Oreth. The curse. All of it.”
“We did it.” I lean into his touch. Can’t help it. “I couldn’t have scattered those coins without you keeping him busy.”
His face changes. The guard drops, just for a moment—a crack in the wall he keeps between himself and the world. “Aviora—”
“Captain!” The shout comes from the cliffs above. I look up and see figures descending the treacherous path from the keep—guards, by their silhouettes, moving as fast as they dare on stone slick with spray. “Captain, you’re alive!”
Zoric’s hand drops from my face. The mask slides back into place—warden, commander, the man responsible for everyone in that fortress. He rises, and I watch the shift happen: from the man who touched my face with something close to tenderness to the captain who has people depending on him.
“Brek.” He identifies the lead figure. “Report.”
The young orc guard stumbles to a halt at the waterline, chest heaving. His face is bloody, one arm hanging at an angle that suggests he should be lying down instead of running. But his eyes are bright with relief as he takes in Zoric’s survival.
“The drowned—they just collapsed. An hour ago, maybe less. One moment they were everywhere, and then...”
“Oreth.” Zoric’s tone carries no emotion. “We destroyed him.”
Brek’s gaze swings to me. I can read the calculation in it—putting the pieces together, realizing that the woman who brought the curse to Dreadhaven also helped end it. The relief in his expression wars with resentment. With grief, he doesn’t know where to aim.
More guards are arriving. Thorne among them, practical and bloody, her expression grim as she surveys the two of us dripping on the black sand. Salt Margit limps behind her, supporting a younger guard whose leg is wrapped in makeshift bandages.
“How bad?” Zoric asks. Just two words, but I hear what’s beneath them.
Thorne’s jaw tightens. “Half the keep is flooded. The lower levels are gone—armory, stores, the vault. When you collapsed the hoard chamber, it took a lot of the eastern foundations with it.” She pauses.
Gathers herself. “We lost over a dozen. Out of the twenty-three who survived Oreth’s first assault. ”
So many dead.
“Who?” Zoric’s voice is too controlled. The voice of a man who’s learned to receive casualty reports without flinching.
Thorne lists names. I recognize some of them—guards I fought beside at the Eastern Collapse, faces I saw in the Great Hall when Finn’s ghost came through the window. Each name lands like a blow, and I watch Zoric absorb them with no visible reaction.
But I see his hands. The way his fingers curl into fists at his sides. The white of his knuckles showing through.
“Secure what’s left of the keep.” His orders come out clipped. Precise. “Salvage what you can from the flooded levels. Anyone too injured to work—get them to the Warden’s Spire. Should be dry.”
“Captain,” Thorne hesitates. Her gaze flicks to me, then back to Zoric, “There are questions. About what happened. About—” Another glance in my direction. “About the curse.”
“Later.” Zoric’s voice brooks no argument. “Right now, we secure the keep. Everything else can wait.”
The guards move off, climbing back toward Dreadhaven with the weary determination of people who’ve survived something terrible and aren’t sure yet if they’re grateful. Brek lingers a moment, his eyes on me with an expression I can’t quite read, before turning to follow the others.
We’re alone on the beach. The storm clouds overhead are thinning. The sea behind us whispers against the shore—a gentler sound than I’ve heard from these waters. A sound without hunger.
“Eighteen.” The word scrapes from Zoric’s throat. “Eighteen more.”
“You didn’t kill them.” I step closer, close enough to touch if I dared. “Oreth killed them. The curse killed them.”
“The curse I let loose when I abandoned Oreth in those caves.” His hands are still fisted at his sides. “The curse you carried here because I failed to destroy it properly the first time.”
“We can stand here all night assigning blame.” I reach up, press my palm flat against his chest. His heartbeat thuds against my hand—fast, strong, evidence that we survived.
“Or we can acknowledge that we’re alive, and they’re dead, and there’s nothing fair about it, and guilt won’t change reality. ”
He looks down at my hand. Then at my face. His expression changes—that guarded hardness giving way to something rawer underneath.
“Aviora—”
“I’m tired of talking.” I grab his collar, the same way I did on the wall walk before the siege.
Yank him down to my level. “I’m tired of thinking.
And right now—” I pull him close until our mouths are inches apart, his breath hot against my lips.
“Right now, I just want to feel something that isn’t fear. ”
His hands grip my waist. Massive hands, scarred and rough, holding me with a pressure that borders on pain. “This isn’t the place.”
“Then find a place.” I pull back just enough to meet his eyes. Gray and turbulent, filled with something hungry and barely controlled. “I don’t care where. I just need—” My voice catches. “I need to know we’re alive. I need to feel it.”
He doesn’t answer with words. His hand closes around my wrist, and then he’s pulling me—not toward the keep, but along the shore, toward the tumbled rocks of the Eastern Collapse where boulders have fallen from the cliffs above to create a maze of shadowed alcoves.
I stumble after him, my boots slipping on wet stone, my heart pounding in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
The rocks close around us—black volcanic stone worn smooth by centuries of waves, cold and damp and utterly private.
The sounds of the keep fade behind us, replaced by the rhythm of the sea against rock.
He backs me against a boulder. The stone is freezing through my wet clothes, rough against my shoulder blades, and I don’t care. I pull him down, and when our mouths meet, there’s nothing gentle about it.
This is hunger. Pure and raw. His tongue slides against mine, tasting of salt and survival, and I open for him with a moan I couldn’t stop if I tried.
His hands frame my face, tilting my head back to deepen the kiss, and heat floods through me despite the cold—pooling low in my belly, making my skin flush beneath my wet clothes.
We break apart, breathing hard. His eyes are wild, dark and burning with something that makes my breath catch. I’ve seen him fight. Seen him face down the dead without flinching. But this—this raw need etched across his features—is more dangerous than any battle.
“Tell me to stop.” His voice is a growl against my throat. “If you want to stop, tell me now.”
“Don’t you dare stop.” I yank at his armor, fingers clumsy with cold and urgency. “If you stop, I’ll kill you myself.”