Chapter 5
Phoebe
The Lord of Water’s Bedchamber—Casteltide
I come tumbling out of sleep gasping for air, like I’ve swallowed the ocean whole and am trying to cough it back out.
My chest feels tight, my throat raw from the dream-cry that hiccupped me awake.
For a beat I am still half in that impossible place—Aggie’s slick nose, the squeal of children, the fluorescent glare—before the room snaps into focus.
Silk.
Not the scratchy, hospital-ish stuff I expect, but silk that shifts under my palm like water.
The air smells of salt and something warm, like a hearth beside the sea.
My fingers find smooth sheets, and I blink at them as if they might dissolve.
The ceiling above me isn’t painted drywall, but a dome etched with drifting corals that twitch when I look at them.
Light comes in blues and golds like moonlight filtered off the ocean through something that isn’t a window—a skylight of sorts, maybe?
And there he is.
The stranger I thought I hallucinated.
He stands at the edge of the bed, that impossible silhouette made flesh.
Taller, broader than any man I’ve ever seen. His hair is a mass of dark curls, tousled and wet-looking as if he has just risen from the surf.
Two horns curve back from his head—like a ram’s. They remind me of black coral, elegant and entirely not human.
Runes crawl along his throat and collarbone, faintly luminous like tide lines.
His eyes catch the light, and they are everything my dream promised and more—storm-colored, fathomless, and somehow older than my understanding of time itself.
“Where am I? What have you done?”
The question tears out of me before I can swallow it into something less frantic.
My voice is small and cracked, a child’s voice asking the world to explain itself.
He doesn’t flinch.
He regards me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle.
For a moment, it’s like I’m a starfish in one of those tide pools summer camps take kids to learn about sea life—observed, measured, too exposed—and I hate it.
Panic flares hot and animal, but beneath it there’s a strange, reluctant curiosity.
“Be calm,” he says.
I want to yell, to rage. Who would be calm at a time like this?
But he smells so good as he draws near.
Like salt and old wood and a memory I can’t name.
“You’re awake sooner than I thought you’d be.”
His voice is low, each syllable a wave.
He doesn’t sound cruel. He sounds like an ocean that has learned to speak in human tones.
“Where am I?” I blurt before my brain can catch up to my mouth.
The sound comes out ragged, thin.
Like I’ve been holding my breath for too long.
“You are safe, Phoebe Sewell.”
Safe.
The word is ridiculous in a room that smells like salt and old secrets, spoken by a man who looks like a storm carved into flesh.
I shove the sheets back with both hands and push myself up on my elbows, because apparently dignity is the first thing I reach for when the world goes sideways.
Then I notice—my wetsuit is gone.
In its place, something soft and warm molds to my skin, a fabric that hugs my curves in a way the rental wetsuits never do.
For approximately two seconds I panic about belly rolls and whether anyone designed this silk for a body like mine, and I hate myself for the vanity of it.
Stupid, Phoebe, really stupid.
I shake my head like a dog trying to dislodge water.
My hair falls from its tie in a tangle of sand-colored waves across my shoulders.
I touch my cheeks with the backs of my hands as if I can prove to myself, I’m not still dreaming.
This isn’t the kind of bed linen you’d find in hospitals or even in my shitty little rented apartment.
This is also not a dream.
“If this is a joke, it isn’t funny,” I say. My throat wobbles. “You can’t just kidnap people. Now, where am I? Who are you? What—”
My hands fumble and land on his sleeve because outrage needs a handle, and the fabric under my palm is real and warm and absolutely not what I expected a man who could drown a city to be wearing.
“Easy, Telya.”
“What is that you keep calling me? What does it mean? Where the hell am I, buddy?”
He watches me with a look that could flatten cliffs and not get winded.
Somehow, even amusement sits on his face as if it knows how small my outrage is compared to whatever tide he’s commanding.
It’s infuriating and absurd and, I’m ashamed to admit, disorienting in how attractive he is.
“You are in Castletide,” he says.
The name lands like cold water—strange and alive.
“Castletide.” I say it aloud like I’m testing a brand-new-to-humans language on my palate, and it turns odd in my mouth.
I slide out of bed, and the room tilts. My knees wobble.
All the sensible things scream—run, call someone, find witnesses, make a list, do not accept hospitality from men with horns.
But then, this large, improbable hand clamps on my elbow with a gentleness that steadies me.
“Easy, Telya,” he murmurs.
Telya.
That alien word again.
But this time it hums somewhere low in my ribs.
It’s almost laughable.
He calls me this strange pet name while I’m mentally composing a strongly worded letter to every embassy known to humankind.
I shouldn’t appreciate being steadied.
I shouldn’t like the way his fingers brush my skin and leave a trail of heat.
But I do.
I feel steadier when he touches me, and I hate the way that honesty makes me soften.
The rest of me—thirty-three years old, practical, debt-burdened Phoebe who grew up on boardwalks and learned early how to not be helpless—clenches.
My hands curl into fists until the knuckles blanch, because being calm won’t get me back to Jersey and it won’t get the animals I left behind, like Aggie, out of their concrete and steel cages.
“You brought me here,” I say, accusation like a rope flung across a dark sea. “You just took me from the aquarium. Who are you? Why did you take me?”
He doesn’t answer like a politician.
He answers like a tide.
“I am Kael. Lord of Water. And I took you because you are mine, Phoebe Sewell.”
His eyes flick to my face, catching the faint blush that crawls across my cheeks, and then he steps closer.
Even in my fury I feel his gravity—the pull of him isn’t only muscle but a slow, inexorable draw, the kind that rearranges marbles into constellations.
He reaches out a single hand, and there’s a slight hesitation in it. Not because he doubts his right, but because he is honoring what he has done as if it were something delicate. Something purposeful.
“I don’t understand what that means,” I say, the truth a small, brittle thing.
On what planet would someone like me belong to someone like him?
“It’s simpler than you think. But if you want truth, then I will start with this one simple thing, Telya.”
He lifts my chin with two large fingertips and forces me into his storm-colored eyes.
There’s no malice there. Only an awful, earnest gravity.
And I feel it—right down to my bones, I feel it.
“You are in Nightfall under the protection of the Lord of Water. You are my intended. And I mean to claim you as my viyella.”
“Viyella?”
“Mate,” he explains.
I repeat both words under my breath. Each syllable feels ancient and dangerous in my mouth.
My heart knocks like a swimmer in a riptide—fast and panicked and impossible to still.
Part of me wants to berate him, to spit rules, and the logistics of consent and human laws.
The other part of me is parking the sensible arguments and watching the way his mouth moves, the way his fingers rest at my jaw, the soft ember of interest in his expression that is decidedly not about laws or leverage.
I can’t say I’m not aware of how absurd this is.
I’ve been kidnapped by a sea-god who calls me by a pet name and plans to just keep me.
Plus, I’m in the middle of being ridiculously, irrationally—dangerously—drawn to him.
My body remembers the whirlpool, his hand closing over mine, the way his mouth tasted of salt and promise.
Lust is a very inconvenient, very human thing to feel when your life just got rewritten.
But feel it I do—electric, hungry, and more than a little frightened by how willing my skin is to answer him.
“Mate?” I echo, part challenge, part dare—because if I’m going to be captive, I’ll at least make him earn the rest of my outrage.
“Like a friend?” I add, because apparently my reflex is sarcasm when terrified.
“No, Telya. Much more than a friend,” he murmurs, and the way he says it makes the word heavy, like a promise or a prophecy.
“How much more?” I ask stupidly, because my mouth always thinks faster than my brain.
“You will enjoy being my viyella. I promise you that.”
Something in me flips. My body answers on autopilot—heat crawling up my neck, a bloom behind my ribs like someone lit a private lantern there—but my brain slaps on the brakes.
This is ridiculous, Phoebe.
You were dragged through a whirlpool by a horned man who smells like sea-salt and old storms.
You are not on a romantic holiday.
You are probably the subject of an incident the aquarium will report as a missing person.
Yeah. Priorities.
My palm finds the hollow of his throat, exactly where those pale runes pulse like little moons.
I press there—not hard, just enough to say hello, to remind the universe that I am not entirely a passive thing.
He watches my hand with a gentleness that would be terrifying if it weren’t so absurdly, embarrassingly tender.
He smiles then, small and sheepish, like the sea itself is blushing.
“You will not force me,” I tell him.
I mean it.
I need that to be true like I need the tide to come in.
“No, Telya. I will not force you. I won’t have to,” he says, voice low and sure, dark as deep water and almost hypnotic in the way it curls around vowels.
Those words should be mercy. They should be a balm.
Instead, they are the opening move in a dangerous negotiation neither of us fully understands.
He speaks like a man who believes the world can be rearranged with a look and a command, but the way his gaze slides over me—not possessive so much as reverent—makes me dizzy in a not-entirely-unpleasant way.
I stare at him, the storm in his eyes reflecting some private constellatory map I don’t have access to, and something fragile and foolish stirs in my chest.
Fear is still a steady drum—loud and sensible—but threaded through it is a brittle, electric hope.
Maybe he chose me because his prophecy needed a conduit.
Maybe he chose me because the tides whispered my name.
Or maybe—terrifying thought—he chose me because he couldn’t help himself.
That thought is as dangerous as the whirlpool that stole me, and I know better than to let it bloom without watching closely.
But my skin remembers his hand, my lungs remember the way his kiss gave me air, and my mind, traitor that it is, keeps inventing ways I might stay—not because I’m noble or brave, but because the idea of saying no to him now feels impossibly heavy.
So I breathe.
I let the words hang between us like a rope bridge.
I will fight him if I must. I will bargain. I will test the truth of his promises.
But under all that armor, a tiny part of me—dangerous, ridiculous, stubborn—wants to know what it might feel like to be chosen for more than my usefulness.
What if he took me simply because he wants me?