Chapter 29 Alaric
Alaric
The Black Marrow
I’m a selfish man—always have been. But with Nerina, it’s a different breed of selfishness.
The taste of her blood still lingered on my tongue—sweet and strange.
It hit like a molten wave through my veins, flooding every sense until the world tilted.
Her blood wasn’t just sustenance—it was sacred.
Forbidden. A high that blurred the edges of reason, a pull so potent it made everything else recede.
I’d fed on hundreds before, but nothing had ever gripped me like this—nothing that made me feel both invincible and utterly undone all at once. It wasn’t just her blood I craved—it was her. Every unguarded laugh, every sharp retort, every piece of herself she didn’t even know she was giving.
What had once been a means to an end—the glowing mermaid I’d dragged from the sea—had become something else entirely.
Séraphine had asked me how long I’d loved Nerina. I lied. Love was a liability. I’d buried it before, watched it erode over years and oceans.
I’d loved before—saints, I’d lost before. I’d buried mortals and immortals alike. Love never lasted. Each story ended the same—by death, disillusion, or the slow erosion of time.
That’s the curse of the long-lived—we survive everything. Outlive everything.
But this was different. It didn’t ask permission.
It didn’t let me look away. It lodged under my skin like shrapnel, impossible to dig out.
She wasn’t a passing distraction anymore—she was the axis I’d begun to turn around.
I didn’t even notice it happening until the thought of her slipping beyond my reach felt like being cursed all over again.
I remember the first shift now—clear as salt on my tongue.
Not in a fight. Not in some grand gesture.
It was on deck during a storm, when she stood barefoot in the rain, head tipped back to the clouds, laughing like the world couldn’t touch her.
Lightning cracked, and for a heartbeat she shimmered with that impossible starlight beneath her skin.
She didn’t see me watching, but in that moment, I knew—she was dangerous to me in a way no blade or curse could be.
Nobody had ever risked their life for me.
But she had—reached for me like I was her safe place, saw me not as a monster, not as a vampire, not as a pirate, not a vampirate, but as something more.
Something redeemable. She stayed when she had every reason to run.
Pressed her blood into my mouth and risked every breath to drag me back.
She infuriates me—cuts through my commands like mist, dares the world to strike her and dares me to stop it.
She defies every warning, throws herself into danger.
Hoards her truths like stolen treasure, heavy and unspoken between us.
And still… she’s magnificent. Wild. Untamed. A force the sea itself should envy.
I needed to talk to her. Thank her. Apologize.
Since Shadeau, she’d gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with me—and everything to do with what she wouldn’t say.
I told myself I was giving her space, but the truth was, I didn’t trust myself not to say something I couldn’t take back.
And Saints, I was angry—angry she’d slipped away while I was bound to the ship.
Had something happened to her there, I would never have forgiven myself.
Killing the vendor wasn’t just protection—it was possession, and that truth should have sickened me more than it did. The second I pictured his filthy hands on Nerina, the world narrowed to a single thought: kill him.
I didn’t care if it was quick or drawn out—only that it ended with him rotting on the cobblestones.
I’ve spilled blood for coin, for power, for boredom, but this…
this was different. This was mine. A hunger so black it made the curse in my veins feel almost civilized.
And when his lifeblood hit the ground, I didn’t feel guilt—I felt satisfaction.
Almost cathartic. If I were the sentimental type, I might’ve called it justice.
I can still feel the hot spray of his blood against my skin.
The vendor’s shocked eyes locked on mine for a moment before they dulled, the copper-salt scent mingling with the starlight sweetness still lingering on my tongue.
It should’ve felt like any other kill—clean, efficient, forgettable—but it didn’t.
And I would do it again without hesitation.
She’d ended a life without intent, and it nearly broke her. I ended one with purpose—and felt nothing at all. That was the difference between us. And the thing I feared would hollow her out.
I stood at the helm, staring into the dark.
The truth gnawed at me—I could keep pretending distance was for her safety, but it was for mine.
Every time I let her close, I felt the fault lines widen, the parts I’d spent centuries sealing over beginning to crack.
And if she saw too deep—if she decided what she found wasn’t worth the trouble—
I’d fought gods, monsters, and men—but none of it made my heart pound like the thought of Nerina turning away from me.
Before the curse, there was The Atlas—a pirate’s creed passed hand to hand through smoke and salt. Articles of allegiance. The division of plunder. The ways you could challenge a captain—and the price you’d pay if you lost.
It kept greed in check. Kept men from slitting each other’s throats over a handful of gold.
But those laws were written for the living.
For men who bleed red and fear the noose.
And I am neither.
I remember the first time I held a copy.
The paper soft from years of handling, edges burned by cannon blasts, dark stains baked into the fibers.
My father put it in my hands when I was barely tall enough to see over the rail.
Told me to learn it like scripture—because a captain without order is nothing more than a target.
He believed in it.
Even as he broke it.
Captain Bastian Dreyses was a brute—fierce, feared, carved from salt and smoke. My father, though he never treated me like a son. I joined his crew at fifteen, still half a boy, thinking I might earn his respect.
Instead, I learned the only thing he valued was victory. And the only way to earn it was blood.
Love was weakness. Kindness an open wound.
I was a weapon he forged for his war.
The Atlas was his gospel—until he gutted it like everything else.
He was blood-sworn to Captain Vale, the man who’d saved his life.
Bastian repaid that debt by slitting Vale’s throat, stealing his ship, taking his crew, his coin…
and his wife. Not just betrayal—Atlas sacrilege.
It split the Eastern fleets clean in two, starting a blood feud that bled across years and oceans.
The Pirate Courts made an example of him.
I was there when they dragged him in chains to the Maelstrom Gallows. Salt spray in the air. The crowd pressed close. The sea roared below like it already knew it would be fed. They lashed the anchor chains to him while the judge read the sentence.
He never begged. Never cursed.
Just stared through the crowd like he was still captain—still untouchable.
Then he spat in the judge’s face and laughed—a sound that cut through the wind like steel on bone—right before they tipped him into the deep.
I watched from the front row. The jerk of the chain. The last flash of his face before the water closed over him.
And I felt nothing.
No grief.
No rage.
That kind of emptiness doesn’t fade. It settles into your bones.
The Black Marrow chose me not long after.
She wrapped herself around me like a noose.
Claimed me before I knew enough to run. I was twenty when I took the helm, hands still trembling, the crew watching like they’d just seen a ghost climb aboard.
They didn’t cheer. They didn’t trust a boy with salt barely in his veins.
They thought the ship had made a mistake.
Maybe I did too.
But I kept the wheel.
I bled for their loyalty. Fought for their trust. Taught them I wasn’t my father—but I wasn’t soft either. One shattered alliance at a time. One corpse at a time. I turned doubt into fear, fear into respect.
By the time they stopped questioning me, the boy they remembered was long gone.
Only the captain remained.
And beneath it all was a fear carved so deep it felt etched into bone—that I’d become him. That the sea had already gutted from me what it once gutted from him: the softness my mother knew before it drowned.
I saw that fear in my mother's eyes. In the way her gaze lingered too long on my hands—scarred, callused, built for breaking. In the hesitation tucked behind her smile. She never said it aloud, but I knew she was waiting for the moment I’d turn into him completely.
She died not long after I took the Black Marrow.
Alone.
I wasn’t there.
That was when I finally saw him in myself—not the captain, not the myth—but the man who abandoned the only good thing he had.
I didn’t raise a hand to her. I didn’t curse her name. But I left her all the same.
Too caught up in proving I wasn’t him to see the truth—that I’d been tracing his steps like a map. The sea claimed me too—not in death, but in everything that made me worth loving.
She loved me anyway. Fiercely. Without asking for anything in return.
Even when I came to her stinking of blood and salt, silent with rage, hollow from loss—she looked at me like I was something worth hauling back from the deep.
She never tried to tie me to the shore. Never begged me to stay.
Just believed I’d find my way back before the tide closed over my head.
And I failed her.
Nerina looks at me like that sometimes. Like I’m salvageable.
Like she can still see something worth pulling from the wreckage.
Even when I make it damn near impossible.
She makes me forget the worst parts of myself.
Or maybe she just tricks me into believing there’s still a man beneath the ruin.
She makes me believe, if only for a heartbeat, that I’m more than the worst parts of myself.
But I know how this story ends.
I’ve lived it.
If I’m not careful—if pride and fear keep rotting the space between us—she’ll be gone. Not torn away in one violent storm, but stolen in slow inches.
And I’ll do what I did with my mother—watch the tide take her without moving a muscle.
She’s humming in my quarters now. Gentle.
Persistent. Carrying warmth from a world I can never return to.
I can’t place the tune, but it pulls at something raw inside me—faint, painful.
It reminds me of the sea songs my mother used to hum when I was young.
And I’ll wake one day with nothing but the echo of her laughter in my head, the same way my mother’s songs still haunt me: half-remembered, half-dreamed.
I stepped onto the quarterdeck, boots striking damp boards like a heartbeat, the last note dies. And with it, the fragile calm she gave me.
“Set our heading for the Veil,” I said.
Our hunting ground.
A strip of ocean drowned in fog and rumor, where currents run backward and cold gnaws at the bone.
Poachers favor it—the ones who slit mermaids for their scales, bleed them for magic, carve out their voices as trophies.
I used to be no better. Then I told myself it was survival.
A trade like any other. That lie rots thinner every time I look at her.
The Veil is where prey comes to us. Once, I hunted for coin.
Now, I hunt to feed. But lately… the taste of blood isn’t what coils in my chest. The hunger sharpens when she’s near—focused, deliberate.
Like it’s learned her shape. The way it does when the hunt is close—only this time, it isn’t for flesh.
It’s for the heat in her defiance. The fire in her eyes when she tells me no.
The way her laugh makes my curse forget itself.
Nerina.
I’d sent her to my quarters without thinking, too caught between relief and fury—and something tighter, meaner, riding under my skin—to notice what I was doing. She’d looked up at me with those wide, unguarded eyes, and I needed to put her somewhere safe.
Somewhere away from me.
I drew in a breath, tasting iron and salt on the wind. The tang of blood still lingered on my tongue. Hers. Mine. I couldn’t tell anymore.
That kiss—
The hunger surged in response, and I hated how easily it answered. It burned through every wall I’d built, every vow I’d made to keep my distance. Not tender. A collision. A demand. A warning. The kind of kiss that should never have happened.
And yet… I couldn’t bring myself to regret it.
Even now, the memory lives under my skin. The way she froze for a heartbeat. Her hands fisting in my shirt. The shock in her eyes before she gave in. The part of me that remembered the warmth wanted to relive that moment forever. The part that remembered what I am knew it was a mistake.
I stared out over the endless dark of the sea, jaw clenched until it ached. “Damn it,” I muttered.
This was madness. Weakness. Or something far worse—a glimpse of the man I might have been without the curse.
The thought twisted in my chest. For a moment, I wasn’t the monster. I was just the man who wanted her. Wanted the kind of love I wasn’t even sure existed.
I lingered, staring into black water. Maybe it was time. Time to stop circling the truth and face whatever waited between us—fire or silence.
Either would be better than this slow drowning.