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“Let me be clear.” His voice deepens, weighty with something that makes the fine hairs on my arms rise.
“Tomorrow night, under the Full Aqua Moon, the Tidal Lands will watch as I, their Lord and ruler of these lands, take you, my viyella, with the blessing of the Fates before one and all.”
I blink. “Wait. What?”
“We will have a ceremony tomorrow night, and it will bind us, Lady Phoebe,” he says, as if this is the simplest, most obvious thing in the world.
“Y-you can’t mean?—”
“You’ll be fitted for your gown at dawn.”
I actually laugh, because what else do you do when a horned Sea Lord tells you, you’re getting married tomorrow?
“Gown? Like a wedding gown?” My voice pitches high. “You’re out of your damn mind. We just met. Yesterday—literally yesterday—you dragged me through a magical whirlpool against my will!”
His jaw tightens, but his eyes don’t leave mine.
“You called. I answered. And the sea chose. The Aqua Moon waits for no one. It must be tomorrow.”
I shake my head, laughing again, but it sounds brittle even to me.
“You can’t just—what do you even call this? Bride-napping?”
His hand lifts, not touching me but close enough I feel the pull.
“Call it what you wish. But know this,Telya—” His voice is thunder wrapped in silk. “Tomorrow night, you will stand beside me. And when the tide bears witness, nothing in this world or yours will unmake what we are.”
“No, I won’t?—”
“What will you do then, Phoebe Sewell? Little human trapped in the big bad world that is Nightfall?” His voice strikes me harder than a slap.
And it hits me then.
He’s right.
Goddamn him, he’s right!
If I leave right now, walk out of his castle—how would I get back home?
And the scarier question is the one that pops unbidden into my brain—what would I be going back to?
My knees wobble, not just from the fury coiling in me but from something else.
Something darker.
Something that feels terrifyingly like want.
Chapter 10
Kael
The Great Hall—Castletide
I pace until my soles remember the pattern of the keep’s stones by heart.
Night has been a thin thing of glass since the aquarium—sharp and sleepless—and I have not stopped moving.
In the hours before dawn, I send tendrils of current into every tide pocket, every reef-watch, every gutter of water that still listens to me.
