“I will tell you anything, my love. If you will tell me why you went out on the dock alone. Tell me what happened.”
His stormy eyes glow in the dark when he lifts my face to look at him, and I gasp at how beautiful he is.
His eyes are hypnotic. They glow with the colors of the sea before a storm.
There’s something fierce and terrible in them now—like he’s bracing to take a blow.
“That’s funny,” I say. “Because the two things are connected—you see, she?—”
“Who?” He’s already tense, like a line pulled tight.
“An old woman,” I say, because the words have weight and I can’t make them lighter.
“She claimed she was the mother of Maureen of Old Ridge. She?—”
My breath catches. I watch Kael’s jaw clench in the dim light, and my chest squeezes at the sight.
“She said you were the reason her daughter?—”
I falter. The words hang between us like broken glass.
It’s already too much, too cruel, and I want to swallow them back down.
But I can’t. I have to push through the pain of it.
Because the truth is this. Kaeldidtake me from my world.
He pulled me from the only life I knew and dragged me across realms into this one.
It was rash.
Reckless. Terrifying.
And wonderful.
He said I called out to him—that the sea itself answered, carrying him across the veil to me.
I laughed it off, convinced it was some Demon Lord obsession, an excuse to steal me away.
It was easier to call him mad, or arrogant, than to admit the alternative.
That maybe, just maybe, I had been desperate enough to cry out.
To whisper into the void without even knowing it.
To beg the universe, anyone,please, take me away from the monotony. From the cold, gray nothing I was living.
And he heard me.
He came.
So yeah, maybe Kael was right all along.
Maybe my heart did call for him.
The thought makes me tremble. Because if that’s true, then everything has been Fate, not folly.
That means the bond between us isn’t an accident, isn’t just magic or madness—it’sreal.
