Page 70 of Siren Problems
“No,” Nerida agrees. “But she might be your undoing in a better way.”
A pause.
“Are you willing,” she asks, “to let her hear who you really are?”
I close my eyes.
And for once, the silence inside me doesn’t feel like safety.
It feels like a prison.
I don’t go straight back to the surface.
Instead, I let the ocean hold me—suspended in cold, heavy quiet beneath Nerida’s grotto. The pressure wraps around me like weighted cloth. Not crushing. Just... insistent. Like even the sea itself knows it’s time I stop hiding from what I am.
There’s a ridge here I used to come to after battles. When I was younger. Angrier. Drenched in salt and shame and the kind of grief that doesn’t make noise—it just hums beneath your bones. I used to think the silence down here matched me.
Now I see it mirrors the prison I built with my own hands.
Not one spellbound by Lysira’s curse—but one I reinforced every damn time I swallowed my truth and pretended it didn’t hurt.
Gods.
I don’t even know when it started, this obsession with keeping everything buried.
Maybe it was after I saw the first human drown and did nothing.
Maybe it was the day I used my voice to drag a ship away from the rocks, and realized what it felt like tosavesomeone instead of seduce or destroy.
Maybe it was the day I met Luna—loud, brilliant Luna—who didn’t shrink back when I growled, who pushed harderwhen I snapped, who cracked me open without ever asking for permission.
She doesn’t know it, but she’s already undone me in more ways than the curse ever did.
She looked at me like I wasn’t monstrous.
Not pitiful, not broken. Just...frustrating.Complicated. Worth figuring out.
And for someone like me, that’s more terrifying than any curse.
Because I’ve clung to the belief that silence is control. That if I just kept my distance—physically, emotionally—I’d never be dangerous again.
I’d never hurt anyone.
But Luna makes mewant.
To be known. To be forgiven. To be held without consequence.
I drift lower, toward the old trench where Sirens once gathered to mourn. Coral bones twist from the rock like pale fingers. It smells like time down here—dark and deep and endless.
This is where I used to scream underwater.
When the curse first took hold, I would dive so deep my ears rang, and scream with everything I had. Soundless. Ineffectual. Just pressure in my throat and fire behind my eyes.
Back then, I thought silence was punishment.
Now I know it was a wall.
And behind that wall was the part of me that still believed I had something left to say.
