Page 7 of Of Songs and Silence

His voice wraps around me, soothing all the places my body aches from its recent battle with Kane’s bruising grip and the sea.

Is this a tonic? Am I drugged?

Blearily, I force my eyes open.

My head is heavy, pounding, and I blink away the distorted image of a cave wall lit only by glowing neon coral and small green plants.

Why is the cave swimming?

I raise a hand in front of my face, but my limbs are slow, like they're moving through…water. BecauseIam underwater.

My lips part, and I expect the water to come rushing in, but it’s already there, no more intrusive to my body than the feeling of air when I’m on land. It’s not my lungs expanding, though.

I stretch out a hand to run along the skin on my neck. My pulse is beating faster, but that’s not what has caught my attention. A gentle vibration accompanies each inhale and I feel the water surging through my throat, filtering and changing. When I exhale, it’s the same.

How is this possible?

Either I’ve been on the receiving end of one of Mother’s tonics after all or…I search the small, dim space, less surprised than I should be when my eyes land onhim.

The Mayima with the perfect face.

His hair is shaved close on the sides, blue-green waves falling to his sharply angled cheekbones and framing the haunting sea green eyes that bore holes into mine with a question, like I am a riddle and he is certain the answer spells death.

At least it’s a beautiful hallucination accompanying me into madness.

He arches a dark teal eyebrow, leaning closer to me and slowly dragging his fingers along my bare arm.

My breath hitches in my throat. His skin isn’t precisely warm, but it leaves a trail of fire in its wake that crashes through my body the way lava erupts from a particularly volatile volcano, destructive and unrestrained.

My imagination can’t have concocted a reaction like this.

Though it should be insignificant, weighed against the impossibility that I didn’t drown, that I’m somehow surviving, existing under the waves of the sea, relief crashes over me.

I’m neither crazy, nor nursing some hidden desire to die. The seawascalling me.

Did Mother know? She must have. I wouldn’t put it past her to hide this just to be cruel, but for the fact that someone ordered my kidnapping.

What other secrets have you kept, Mother, and how will I pay for them this time?

“You’re softer than you should be,” Ari growls, interrupting my thoughts.

He says it while he’s touching my skin, but his words imply something more.

Does he know I see his face in my dreams? That I have counted every last one of his eyelashes and memorized the shape of his full, perfect lips?

Something in his expression, in his weighty silence, almost makes me think that hedoesknow. Slowly, he drags his hand up to my collarbone.

My lips part of their own accord. I should move away, but I don’t. He’s massive, and he moves with the grace of a predator, with strength in every motion. I have no doubt that he is more than skilled with the golden trident that is strapped across his otherwise bare back.

I could never escape him.

I tell myself that’s why I stay rooted to the spot, even as I know I don’t feel the revulsion from his touch that I do when Damian is near.

Ari freezes for a fraction of a second before he speaks again.

“Not quite Mayima, but not quite human either,” he muses.

I don’t bother to argue with him because—well, mostly because I can’t. Without my notebook, I have no way to communicate.

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