Chapter Eleven Zephyra
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ZEPHYRA
What the shit are you doing?” I ask, though I know damn well what the warlock is doing.
He’s taking off his clothes.
“Relax, mermaid.” Arion slides deft fingers under the hem of his tunic and peels the cotton from his body slowly, the fabric sliding over six defined abdominal muscles, two perfect pectorals, and brutally broad shoulders before he pulls it over his head and enchants it past his wings.
I’m not even sure he realizes just how devastating the action is.
My stomach clenches, and a rare fire pools low in my stomach. I can’t breathe. I can’t watch.
Pivoting on my heel, I hasten to turn before I catch another glimpse of his light brown skin.
The ebony tattoos on his chest. The powerful tension straining his muscles.
Goddess help me. The silvered cord wraps around my ankle, sparkling with abominable clarity, and I loathe the sight of it all.
He may be gorgeous, but he’s still a fucking monster.
“Do you often disrobe for fun or is this something more insidious I should know about?”
A soft sphere hits me square in the back, and I glance down to see his tunic crumpled at my feet. My throat bobs with unease.
“I thought you might consider covering up,” he says in a judgmental, albeit still flat, tone. “But if you’d prefer to remain half naked, I’ll take it back.”
I turn back around, folding my arms across my chest. Sure, my own clothing has been reduced to shreds of scratchy linen thanks to my imprisonment and both of my transformations, and my hair is the only thing separating the warlock’s gaze from my breasts—if he ever dared to look below my chin—but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right.
Of feeling chivalrous. And besides, one of the hazards of being a merrow is losing one’s pants, or skirts, or dresses.
Constantly. Anytime my tail appears, the clothing around it is usually shredded to a useless pile of ribbons.
“Is my nudity making you uncomfortable, warlock?”
He arches a cold brow, gaze unwavering from my face. “You nearly fainted when you saw me shirtless.”
“I did not.”
He just stares at me silently, a knowing gleam in his frigid silver-gold eyes. “It’s okay to admit you find me attractive, mermaid. Most do.”
At that, I have no choice but to scoff. This partnership will never last. He is infuriating.
Small-minded, arrogant, and seriously disturbed.
“You’re about as beautiful as you are humble.
” I snatch the shirt off the ground and exchange it with my ruined one, ignoring that it—he—smells like honey and lemon and salt.
The black tunic falls to my upper thighs, much softer than anything I’ve been able to afford in the last six months. It reminds me of different times.
Worse times.
After sliding the remainders of my own ruined clothing to the ground, I square my shoulders. “Happy now?”
“No.” He spins around, steps over the rubble of a broken palace, and marches toward the far end of the island.
Leaving me to chase after him on shaky legs.
Now that salt water has touched me again, magic swirls in my stomach, a maelstrom of aecorian power previously dormant for half a year that begs me to throw the warlock into the sea.
To pummel him with manipulated waves and controlled currents until he understands who is really in charge here.
But I can’t.
The second I use my aecorian magic, the sorcerer will find me. He’ll come.
Already, we’re sitting ducks. It won’t be long before he sends an army to the island. Merrow warriors and sea monsters. All manners of deadly things to wrench me back to my prison.
Arion and I don’t stand a chance against the High Sorcerer of the Four Seas. No one does.
As if he can read my mind, Arion says, “We need to head for Abysses. The faster, the better. Do you have accurate coordinates or a mere approximation of its location?”
I stumble a step and almost fall on my face. “What?”
“Abysses.” He cuts me a dark glance. “The ruins of Mortem’s utopia.” When I don’t respond quickly enough, he growls. “The one place you said you’d take me if I freed you from the noose.”
Oh. Right.
The one place that doesn’t actually exist.
I skirt around the crumbling wreckage of a tower, palm sliding over the jagged remains.
“Wouldn’t you rather hole up in a cottage somewhere far, far away until Mortia is done hunting us?
The kingdom will be teeming with guards.
I’m sure a warlock resigning in traitorous disgrace will be the talk of the entire world for the next few months—”
Just like that, he pivots abruptly, blocking my path.
Though I move to sidestep him—both wary and annoyed—he seizes my elbow, and his fingers are brutal on my skin.
Hard. Unyielding. Shit. Ignoring the flush of heat that washes through me, I try to tug away my arm, but he refuses to let go.
Instead, he walks forward—forcing me to walk backward, stumbling like an idiot and almost falling if not for his ironclad grip—until my back presses into the ruins of the tower.
Until his chest brushes mine and my breath catches.
Shit, shit, shit. This is not good. A chipped seashell slices my elbow as I press farther into the stone, desperate for space between us, but he doesn’t give it to me.
Leaning low, he asks in a dangerously soft voice, “Where is Abysses, Zephyra?”
Alarm bells peal in my head at the glint in his eyes.
It’s the first true hint of emotion I’ve seen from the warlock, and again—not good.
When I swallow, those eyes drop to my throat, and I can see the fantasy playing out in his gaze: his hands wrapping around my neck almost tenderly, caressing the soft flesh, kneading, squeezing, until my eyes bulge. Until I cannot breathe.
I inhale a careful breath. Just once. Just in case. “Shouldn’t we think about survival?” I ask quietly, imploring him to see reason before I crush his hopes and dreams. “Personally, I’d prefer to avoid the sharp end of a blade right now.”
“You said, ‘beneath the sea.’” That tightly leashed fury builds in his chest now, and his hand—the one not clenched around my elbow—curls into a fist beside my head. “You said you know where it is.”
“I was hanging from a noose. You can’t expect me to have—”
“Where?” he demands, and the boom of his voice reverberates like thunder over the island.
The ground quakes. The tower at my back shudders.
Though I startle, cringing, and try to slide out from under his arm, he wraps that fist around the silvered cord with lightning speed, tethering me to him. Trapping me.
Unable to do anything else, I jerk up my chin to meet his black gaze.
Refusing to cower. To plead. Because if he doesn’t know I’m a liar by now, he deserves the shock of another revelation.
“It doesn’t exist, okay? Abysses is a pipe dream, Arion.
Mortem destroyed it, and no one has seen it since.
The merrow pass down legends. We know the stories, but it’s not…
it’s not still there. We can’t find it.”
Magic explodes from his fist as searing blue flames, and the effort it must take him—the sheer force of it—knocks the wind from my lungs. “Zephyra,” he says through his teeth, “are you telling me I saved your life and condemned myself for no reason?”
His control is slipping rapidly now. Those flames scorch the tower, burning through crushed bits of shell and mollusks. He doesn’t notice. He doesn’t look anywhere but right at me.
Shit.
He might kill me over this. He might kill us both over this.
I stare back at him, my thoughts spiraling as the cord sparkles between us. An ever-present reminder that I can’t outrun him. Your blood is my blood. The only way I’ll earn true freedom is if I save his life and repay the debt. Then I can flee. Or I can kill him.
But until then, we have no other choice.
We are as one.
“I don’t know where it is.” I hasten to sweep my hair over my shoulder to avoid him singeing it off. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t find it together. We can search the four seas. So long as we avoid any unnecessary attention”—and I don’t bleed or use a lick of my powers—“we should be safe.”
Even as I say it, hopelessness curls tight in my gut.
It must do the same in his, because he glowers at me. “I don’t have time to frolic around the world with a gods-damned mermaid. I need to find Abysses, and I need to find it now.”
“Why?” Frustration pulses through my chest at his single-minded intensity.
Like a goddesss-damned dog with a bone. “Why are you so desperate to venture to a place that doesn’t exist?
” And on that note—a seed of unease blooms through my frustration—why did he save a mermaid from the noose for it?
Humans hate merrow, and Arion has made it very obvious that, even winged, he is no different.
What’s in this fabled utopia that he wants so damn badly?
He glares at me, at the bond shimmering between us, until the fire finally dies slowly in his hand.
Then he exhales a harsh, bitter breath, and says, “I am searching for the heart of Mortem, God of Death and Great Ruler of the Fathoms. It is buried somewhere within Abysses, where a mermaid carved it from his chest.”
I stare at him, waiting for the punch line.
It frightens me that Arion said it with a straight face.
He does not smile, or chuckle, or even twitch.
Which is almost as much a joke as his words.
Believing in Abysses is one thing, but searching for Mortem’s heart?
I can’t help it—a bubble of laughter bursts from my lips.
He is absurd. He shoves away from me, and I double over, unable to contain myself as he snaps, “I’m being serious. ”