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I reread the letter. Each word carved deeper, until there was nothing left but rage and something far more dangerous. Jealousy.

If she chooses.

A dark laugh tore from my throat. Sharp and humourless.

I married him, Rythos. Lyra’s voice echoed through my head, haunting me.

My fingers tightened around the parchment, and it crumpled in my grasp, something vicious and unhinged clawing its way free inside me.

“The Whispering Isles,” I muttered. A name I had not muttered in many years. That’s where I had met Lyra as a Mortal. Where my ship had sunk during a storm and she had saved me from drowning.

Sea serpent scale. Siren tears. Sand from Stonebriar.

Sirens were extinct, and a sea serpent was a beast even I feared.

Even so, the bond pulsed in my chest, stronger now. It was alive in a way it hadn’t been before, fed with the most dangerous thing in the world.

I shoved Aldric, releasing my grip on his throat and letting him fall to the ground.

“If you ever withhold information from me again, I will snap your fucking neck.”

I met Solas’s curious gaze.

“Set sail for Stonebriar.”

Chapter Seventeen

Fractures in Sanity

Lyra

My lungs seized as I dragged in air, stuttering and spasming as if they had forgotten how to work. Each breath burst from me in visible plumes, ghosting into the air as I fought to keep breathing. Violent coughs speared through my body, and I rolled onto my side with heavy limbs. My movements were sluggish, weighed down as if the dark void I had escaped were trying to drag me back into its cold embrace. Memories slammed into me in broken fragments—the game, the woman with lilac hair, Kaezlyn’s death, the frantic run… drowning with Helion beneath the crushing weight of my own magic and.

A strangled sound caught in my throat as I realised what I’d done.

Helion’s fingers were inside me. Pleasure had crashed through my body while we drowned beneath the weight of my magic.

Gods, what had I done?

Shame curled viciously through my stomach, hot and nauseating. I had let myself want him. Worse, I had enjoyed it. I had betrayed Rythos, the very male who was probably tearing himself apart looking for me.

Every nerve ending in my body ignited with an agony so savage my teeth chattered uncontrollably between gasps of air.

Helion had been right about one thing: this was more painful than anything I had endured before. It was not like a whip gliding through my flesh like butter, or even like the precise cuts delivered by the priest while chains bit into my wrists. Not even transforming into a Siren compared to this. This was wrong in a way that made my skin crawl from the inside out.

Blinking against the soft light of a lantern, a groan left me as I pushed myself onto my hands and knees.

The pristine white of the room mocked me, its unnatural stillness a cruel contrast to the pain coiling beneath my skin.

Helion lay sprawled on the marble floor beside me, his chest rising in shallow, fractured breaths while his lashes trembled as though caught in a nightmare. His jaw clenched so tight it looked like it might splinter, and dark strands of his hair were plastered to his forehead. Violent convulsions tore through the hard planes of his body beneath his sweat-soaked white tunic. The damp fabric clung to him, outlining the hard lines of his body. I tore my gaze away with anger.

Why were the most dangerous things always so alluring?

Keeping my eyes trained on my shaking hands, I crawled the short distance to him.

“Helion?” I whispered, the sound of my voice sounding almost deafening in the eerie silence.

His brows pulled together before a violent cough had him rolling over onto his side, water cascading from his mouth in a waterfall with each splutter.