Siren of the Storm (Tides of Fate #5)

Prologue

FINN

Isle of Skara

Off the Coast of Scotland

Centuries Ago

The scent of death reaches me before I crest the cliff path. Salt and copper and the particular stillness that comes when a soul departs. I know what I will find before I see her lying on the rocks where we used to watch the storms roll in.

Saoirse.

My mate. My heart. The woman who taught an ancient dragon what it means to be mortal, fragile, and brave all at once.

But beneath the death-smell, something else lingers. Ash and fire and the distinctive burn of phoenix transformation. Fresh. Recent. Minutes, not hours.

Mikhail has been here.

I drop to my knees beside her, my hands hovering over her body, unable to touch what I have already lost. No visible wounds mark her skin. No blood stains the stone. She looks as though she has simply laid down to rest, her dark hair spread across the rocks like a silken veil.

But her chest does not rise. Her heart does not beat. And the warmth that has always drawn me to her, that mortal fire that burns so bright and brief, has guttered out.

"I tried to save her." Mikhail's voice comes from behind me, rough with what might be grief. "I arrived too late. The wolves got to her first. They wanted leverage over you, and when she wouldn't tell them where to find you, they killed her."

I keep my gaze on Saoirse's face, refusing to turn, refusing to acknowledge my oldest friend who stands behind me.

The phoenix I have trusted with my secrets, my territory, my life.

Instead, I focus on Saoirse's features, already committed to eternal memory.

The delicate arch of her brows. The curve of her lips.

The freckles scattered across her nose like stars.

"They ran when they sensed me coming," Mikhail continues. "If I had arrived sooner, I could have stopped them. I'm sorry, Finn. I know what she meant to you."

I taste the lie beneath the phoenix ash, beneath the careful construction of his story.

I rise slowly, still not looking at him, and finally lay my hand against Saoirse's cheek. She's cold. The woman who burned with life and laughter and fierce, stubborn joy is gone. In her place remains only an empty shell, a mockery of everything she had once been.

"You chose power over her life." The words emerge flat and dead, carrying no inflection. The rage hasn't hit yet. Only the cold knowledge that my closest friend killed my mate. "They offered you something. What was it, Mikhail? What was worth her death?"

His silence stretches between us like a chasm opening in the earth.

I turn then. Guilt writes itself across his face, followed by calculation, followed by the terrible certainty that he has made the right choice even as it destroys the only friendship that has lasted through millennia.

"She was mortal," he says finally. There it is.

Justification wrapped in rationalization.

"She would have died eventually. Fifty years, maybe sixty if she was lucky.

You would have lost her anyway, and then what?

You would have grieved and raged and descended into the same madness that took your grandfather.

She was a weakness waiting to be exploited.

I simply removed that weakness before it could destroy you. "

"You killed her."

"I freed you." His eyes burn with the phoenix fire, with the absolute conviction of someone who believes their own lies.

"Those wolves wanted you broken, controlled, leashed by your love for a mortal woman.

I gave them nothing. I gave you nothing to grieve that you wouldn't have grieved in a few decades regardless. "

For the first time in millennia, I break. Something deeper fractures, something I did not know could still shatter after so many ages. My closest friend has murdered the woman I love and stands before me claiming it is a gift.

The dragon inside me roars.

I hold Saoirse's body against my chest, my fingers gentle against her skin, and feel the rage build like storm surge, like magma rising through ocean trenches, like the primal fury of creation demanding destruction.

"I trusted you," I say quietly. "For lifetimes, I trusted you."

Mikhail opens his mouth to respond. I do not wait to hear what fresh poison he will speak.

The transformation takes me in an instant. Silvery mist and thunder, the crack of displaced air as my body shifts from human to dragon in the space between heartbeats. I lay Saoirse's body gently on the cliff where she loves to watch the sea, and then I launch skyward on crimson wings.

I do not hunt the wolves who have been Mikhail's tools. Pawns do not matter. Only the one who moves them.

Mikhail's compound sprawls across the southern headlands, built from stone and ambition. He has spent ages gathering power, making alliances, positioning himself as a broker between supernatural factions. An elegant, strategic, untouchable fortress of ambition.

I reduce it to glass and ash in minutes.

Dragon-fire pours from my jaws, white-hot and primordial.

The kind of flame that burns before the earth cools, before mortals walk, before phoenixes learn to die and be reborn.

The stone melts beneath the heat. The sand fuses into twisted sculptures of glass.

Everything Mikhail has built over lifetimes of careful cultivation burns away like morning mist.

He fights back. The phoenix fire meets the dragon flame in the sky above his burning territory. We have sparred before, friends testing each other's strength. This is not sparring.

I could kill him. Should. But phoenixes are nearly impossible to destroy permanently, and some part of me still remembers who he has been. Who I thought he was.

So I break him instead. I break his wings. I break his territory. I break everything he values and leave him bleeding in the ruins of his ambition.

When the rage finally burns itself out, I hover over the devastation and see what I have done. The headlands are unrecognizable. The beach below has transformed into a shore of black glass that will never wash clean. Smoke rises from the ruins in columns that will be visible for miles.

I have done this. An ancient dragon with millennia of control, and I have reduced a landscape to slag because I loved and lost.

Mikhail's voice reaches me from the rubble below, broken but defiant. "You will regret this. One day you will understand I saved you from yourself. And when that day comes, old friend, I will be waiting."

I do not answer. Do not acknowledge the promise in his words. I simply turn and fly back to the cliffs where Saoirse's body lies still and quiet.

I cannot stay here. Cannot remain on an island where her memory will haunt every stone, every wave, every storm. Cannot trust myself around others when I have just proven what I am capable of when my control shatters.

I wrap Saoirse's body in my cloak and release her from the cliff edge to the sea below, a burial in the way of her people. Then I dive after her.

The transformation from air-breathing dragon to the hybrid form adapted for deep water happens automatically. Gills open along my throat, lungs seal, scales shift to shed water resistance. The pressure suits me perfectly, a predator without equal in the trenches that most creatures fear to enter.

I descend past the shallows into darkness. Past the continental shelf where the sea floor drops into abyssal trenches. The pressure here crushes mortal flesh. No light reaches this deep, and the water sings songs older than memory.

Here, in the deepest places, I can speak to whales and ancient things. I can patrol the abyssal plains and guard the sleeping secrets of the ocean floor. I can exist without loving, without trusting, without risking the devastation of loss.

I stay here in the crushing dark where nothing can reach me, where I cannot reach anyone. Alone is safer. Alone cannot betray.

The darkness of the deep swallows me whole, and I let it.

Let the pressure and the absolute silence become my world.

I descend until even the bioluminescent creatures disappear, until only the song of the earth itself keeps me company.

And there I stay, speaking to no one, trusting nothing, a dragon who has learned that the only safe heart is one frozen solid.

Behind me, on the shore I abandoned, the glass glitters under the moon like frozen rage.