Chapter 2

Marisol

They were smiling.

That was the last thing I saw before the water swallowed me whole — Julian and Celeste, leaning over the open window, their faces bright with the kind of relief you only wear when you think a problem has finally solved itself. They watched me fall like it was nothing. Like I was nothing.

I smiled too, painfully, as the sea closed over my head.

I had told Julian once that I couldn't swim.

“I loved the sea,” I'd said, “I just couldn't survive in it,” and he'd taken that and built us a house right along the shoreline because of it.

"So you can always safely be close to what you love," he'd told me, pressing a kiss to my forehead. It was also convenient for him, of course. The house was closer to the company building, so he could get home faster to me, the wife who worshipped the ground he walked on.

At least, I was wise enough to keep the truth from him. I feared that he would see me as a freak if I had told him my true origin, he wouldn’t love me anymore. And thankfully, he never bothered to ask.

But, I see now that he never cared enough to ask me anyway, and if he'd known the truth — that I didn't fear the water, that the water was mine — he wouldn't have built me a house by the sea. He would have handed me over to a lab table somewhere and let men in white coats pick me apart to understand what swam beneath my skin.

So I let him believe I was fragile. And now the very lie I told to keep his love was the reason he assumed I'd sink like a stone and never surface again.

My legs fused the moment the salt hit them, tail unfurling beneath me, and I hung there in the dark water for one long, silent moment, still trying to process that the man I married had just tried to kill me. Then the sound came.

A horn. Low and mournful, rolling through the water in ripples that hit my chest harder than the fall from the window had. Every mermaid in the kingdom knew that sound. It was only blown for one reason.

A royal had died.

Panic seized me, and my whole body started moving. I swam faster than I ever had in my life, faster than the day I fled to the surface at nineteen with my heart cracked open and Julian's name on my lips, faster than grief should allow a body to move.

I told myself I was wrong. I told myself I would get there and find her sitting up, annoyed that someone had sounded the horn over nothing.

I felt her fade before I ever reached the palace gates.

Something in my chest went cold and hollow, like the tide pulling back from shore and never quite coming in again.

Kalon was standing at her bedside when I burst through the doors, his broad shoulders bowed in a way I'd never seen on him before. He turned when he heard me, and the look on his face told me everything I was refusing to believe.

"Mama." I dropped to my knees beside the bed, gathering her hand between both of mine. It was cold. Too cold. "Mama, please. Wake up. I'm here now, I came as fast as I could, please just—" My voice broke apart entirely. "Please wake up. I'll come and stay with you now. I’ll listen to you again. Please. I'll do anything, I swear it, just open your eyes and tell me you're angry with me. Tell me anything. Please."

I had missed her last moment. I had been up there playing devoted housewife to a man who threw me out a twelfth-floor window, while my mother slipped away down here alone. Even this — even her last breath — Julian had stolen from me.

"Kalon." I turned to him, desperate, clawing at whatever hope I had left. "Tell her to wake up. Tell her I said please. She listens to you, she always has, just—"

His hands closed gently over my shoulders, and I saw it then, the grief sitting heavy and raw in his eyes, the same grief that had no business looking helpless on a man built like a wall.

"This isn't a joke, Princess Marisol." His voice cracked on my title, like it physically pained him to use it right now. He paused, and I watched him force the words out like they were made of glass. "Your mother… is dead."

The world tilted sideways and went dark.

—

I woke up a week later, in my old chambers, the globelight I hadn't seen in years filtering weakly through the water above the palace dome. Thalassor was in the deeper part of the sea, so, we had a globe light, shimmering with power and life to mimic the sun’s energy.

“Was it…” I sat up and glanced around the room, my eyes settling on Kalon who was already making his way to me. “Please, tell me it was a dream.”

He evaded my question instead. "You've been out for a week, Princess." His voice was rough, and I caught the movement of him clenching his jaws. “I was scared I'd lost you too."

I tilted my head at him, the grief consuming me.

“How are you feeling?” He asked, his voice as soft as his gaze. Kalon was looking at me like he feared I was going to break into pieces anytime soon.

In a way he was right. I didn’t break, but the seal did. I recognized it in the faint gold light pulsing just beneath my skin, humming like it had a heartbeat of its own.

The Abyssal Grace. The power I had locked away at nineteen so I could love a human boy with my whole heart and nothing held back, sealed so tightly I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to carry it. It was back.

Grief had cracked the seal wide open, and I understood with sudden, terrible clarity that my heart had reached for the one thing strong enough to survive what had just happened to it.

Kalon's jaw tightened as he watched the light flicker over my knuckles, and his voice, when it came, was low and cold in a way I'd rarely heard from him.

"I'm going to destroy them. Every single one of them." Not a threat. A promise, stated as flatly as fact.

"Kalon, don't." I reached for his arm.

He pulled back, hurt flashing hot across his face. "Are you still protecting them? Defending the humans who did this to you?" His voice rose, cracking with something rawer than anger. "They killed your mother, Marisol. They almost took you from me again! For good this time."

“What do you— How did they kill Mother?” He didn’t have to answer me. He simply pulled out a crest from his general’s pouch archive, slinged around his torso.

“See for yourself.”

My anger reached a boiling point. The gold light pulsed and shone brighter in my veins till vengeance set in my mind and hatred had poisoned my heart towards them. I’ll make every single one of them pay.

"My good friend." I said it softly, holding his gaze so he'd know I meant every word. "Trust me. I will not let them get away with this. But I can't harm my husband now, can I?"

His expression softened and I caught a flash of jealousy and hurt in his eyes. "How long am I going to be just a friend to you?"

I didn’t know what to say to him, so instead, I leaned in and pressed a kiss to his cheek, letting it linger half a second longer than friendship required.

"Meet me at the shore," I told him, "in five days."