Chapter 30
Phoebe
The Lord of Water’s Private Chambers—Castletide
I wake to the soft press of Kael’s arm around my waist, the bed barely moving where he holds me like I might drift away.
Outside, the tide murmurs against the walls of Castletide.
Inside, the keep breathes slow and steady, as if the whole place is finally exhaling after the night’s violence.
My gaze lands on him.
Kael. Titan Lord of Water. My viyen.
The lanterns are low, throwing the room in shadows and a pearly wash that makes him look unreal—storm-dark, dangerous, and utterly mine.
“Kael?” I whisper.
“Mm?” His voice is rough with sleep and whatever else he wore into the night.
“Will you tell me?” The question slips out before I can smooth it.
It tastes like an ache in my throat.
But I need the truth. Need him to put the jagged edges of the evening back together.
He shifts.
I feel the warmth of him move against me as he fits me to him, his arms wrapping around my back.
“I will tell you anything, my love. If you will tell me why you went out on the dock alone. Tell me what happened.”
His stormy eyes glow in the dark when he lifts my face to look at him, and I gasp at how beautiful he is.
His eyes are hypnotic. They glow with the colors of the sea before a storm.
There’s something fierce and terrible in them now—like he’s bracing to take a blow.
“That’s funny,” I say. “Because the two things are connected—you see, she—”
“Who?” He’s already tense, like a line pulled tight.
“An old woman,” I say, because the words have weight and I can’t make them lighter.
“She claimed she was the mother of Maureen of Old Ridge. She—”
My breath catches. I watch Kael’s jaw clench in the dim light, and my chest squeezes at the sight.
“She said you were the reason her daughter—”
I falter. The words hang between us like broken glass.
It’s already too much, too cruel, and I want to swallow them back down.
But I can’t. I have to push through the pain of it.
Because the truth is this. Kael did take me from my world.
He pulled me from the only life I knew and dragged me across realms into this one.
It was rash.
Reckless. Terrifying.
And wonderful.
He said I called out to him—that the sea itself answered, carrying him across the veil to me.
I laughed it off, convinced it was some Demon Lord obsession, an excuse to steal me away.
It was easier to call him mad, or arrogant, than to admit the alternative.
That maybe, just maybe, I had been desperate enough to cry out.
To whisper into the void without even knowing it.
To beg the universe, anyone, please, take me away from the monotony. From the cold, gray nothing I was living.
And he heard me.
He came.
So yeah, maybe Kael was right all along.
Maybe my heart did call for him.
The thought makes me tremble. Because if that’s true, then everything has been Fate, not folly.
That means the bond between us isn’t an accident, isn’t just magic or madness—it’s real.
I don’t know how to explain it, not even to myself. But Nightfall is mine now.
This world. Its seas and storms. Its glittering shores and looming shadows—I belong here.
And I belong with him.
Which means I can’t hide. I can’t leave these things unsaid, not if we’re going to have any kind of future.
I lift my chin, forcing the words out even though they scrape my throat raw.
“She said you were the reason her daughter drowned herself. And she wanted me to follow.”
Kael’s breath hitches like I’ve struck him, and the storm in his eyes flares brighter in the dark.
My heart aches at the sight, but I don’t look away. I can’t.
We both need this truth, no matter how much it hurts.
“She said Maureen killed herself because of you. She wanted me to drown and disappear in the sea with her daughter. It was—terrible.”
For a moment, the only sounds are the distant tide and the erratic thud of my own heart, like a trapped bird beating the cage.
The words spin in my skull and then settle like cold stones.
Kael’s fingers close around mine—warm, fierce, grounding—and the world steadies a fraction.
“Fuck! Oh my gods,” he breathes, voice ragged. “I’m so sorry, Telya.”
He’s rigid with something fierce and terrible, but he doesn’t pull away.
Instead, he wraps himself around me tighter, as if binding me to him will stitch whatever’s broken.
The pressure of him is fierce and oddly holy.
I feel held, claimed, and protected all at once.
A sick, hollow thought claws up through me.
What if that shove had turned to nothing but water and weight and death?
What if Kael never whispered the word breathe to me?
The idea tilts something in my chest—everything I have feels suddenly fragile.
Like a candle in a storm.
If she had succeeded, there would be no more mornings, no more tempestuous nights, no more conversations about magical creatures, no more chances to learn everything I can about Kael.
Like his favorite curse words. Or favorite foods.
No more chances to see him laugh.
I would be gone.
I would cease to be.
I cling to him like a child to a parent who has just promised the night is theirs to keep.
A sob rips through me, jagged and useless, and he holds me tighter, his breath hot against my hair.
“I would not have that happen to you for anything,” he says again, each word a rock under my trembling feet. “I’m so sorry.” He swallows, the sound small but steady. “If you allow me, I’ll tell you everything now.”
His offer hangs in the steam-heavy air between us—an offering of truth, of reckoning.
My chest still stabs with fear, but the safety in his arms steadies me enough to nod.
I need to hear it from him.
I need the raw map of what he did and what he feels and what old ghosts still haunt him.
If we’re to keep building whatever this is, there’s no more sheltering—not from him, not from me.
“Tell me,” I whisper, and my voice trembles but holds.
The sea murmurs beyond the walls as if listening.
I don’t think I want to hear it.
The old woman’s cackle echoes in my head like splinters.
The image of her shoving me on the slick dock still prickles along my skin.
But something else—an insistence that has nothing to do with pride and everything to do with the bond threading tighter between us—makes me shift.
I push up from where I’ve been curled against him until I’m sitting, knees bent, heart hammering.
I force myself to face him.
Kael doesn’t resist.
He mirrors me, lowering his broad hands into his lap as though to keep them from reaching for me, from shielding me from the weight of what he’s about to say.
His restraint unnerves me almost as much as his stormy eyes do.
The bond thrums like a taut string, glowing between us, tugging at my chest. His need for me hums through it—steady, insistent, like a lighthouse sweeping a storm-dark sea.
It steadies me, even as it threatens to break me.
I nod, throat tight.
I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.
Somehow, the truth feels safer from his lips, even if it hurts, than from rumors whispered by frightened mouths or spat like venom from bitter ones.
“Tell me,” I whisper.
The word trembles out of me, both a surrender and a demand.
He drags in a breath, long and heavy, as if gathering centuries of weight into his chest before he lets it out again.
His eyes stay locked on mine.
“I will tell you all of it, Telya. But you must save your questions until I am finished, yes?”
The formality of his tone rattles me. I nod anyway, my palms damp against my thighs.
“Yes.”
He watches me a beat, then he dips his chin—his acknowledgement we’ve agreed.
My heart pounds so loudly I can barely hear him when he begins.
“There was a woman,” he says slowly, his voice careful, deliberate, as if each word is a blade and he must choose where to cut.
“No, I must start further back. Once, long before either you or I were born, there was a courtship. A betrothal contract between noble families in Nightfall.”
His mouth hardens into a grim line.
“And when it ended, it ended badly.”
A chill ripples over me, despite the warmth of the room.
I frown, the image forming in my mind like a storybook come to life.
Not the sugar-coated kind, but the old kind—the original fairy tales with jagged edges and endings that always bleed.
And suddenly I’m afraid—not of him, not of us, but of what’s waiting in the rest of this tale.
Afraid of what it will mean for me, for us, once he finishes.
Because if the past is still reaching its claws into tonight, what happens when he lays it bare?