I shouldn’t like the way his fingers brush my skin and leave a trail of heat.
But I do.
I feel steadier when he touches me, and I hate the way that honesty makes me soften.
The rest of me—thirty-three years old, practical, debt-burdened Phoebe who grew up on boardwalks and learned early how to not be helpless—clenches.
My hands curl into fists until the knuckles blanch, because being calm won’t get me back to Jersey and it won’t get the animals I left behind, like Aggie, out of their concrete and steel cages.
“You brought me here,” I say, accusation like a rope flung across a dark sea. “You just took me from the aquarium. Who are you? Why did you take me?”
He doesn’t answer like a politician.
He answers like a tide.
“I am Kael. Lord of Water. And I took you because you are mine, Phoebe Sewell.”
His eyes flick to my face, catching the faint blush that crawls across my cheeks, and then he steps closer.
Even in my fury I feel his gravity—the pull of him isn’t only muscle but a slow, inexorable draw, the kind that rearranges marbles into constellations.
He reaches out a single hand, and there’s a slight hesitation in it. Not because he doubts his right, but because he is honoring what he has done as if it were something delicate. Something purposeful.
“I don’t understand what that means,” I say, the truth a small, brittle thing.
On what planet would someone like me belong to someone like him?
“It’s simpler than you think. But if you want truth, then I will start with this one simple thing, Telya.”
He lifts my chin with two large fingertips and forces me into his storm-colored eyes.
There’s no malice there. Only an awful, earnest gravity.
And I feel it—right down to my bones, I feel it.
“You are in Nightfall under the protection of the Lord of Water. You are my intended. And I mean to claim you as my viyella.”
“Viyella?”
“Mate,” he explains.
I repeat both words under my breath. Each syllable feels ancient and dangerous in my mouth.
My heart knocks like a swimmer in a riptide—fast and panicked and impossible to still.
Part of me wants to berate him, to spit rules, and the logistics of consent and human laws.
The other part of me is parking the sensible arguments and watching the way his mouth moves, the way his fingers rest at my jaw, the soft ember of interest in his expression that is decidedly not about laws or leverage.
I can’t say I’m not aware of how absurd this is.
I’ve been kidnapped by a sea-god who calls me by a pet name and plans to just keep me.
Plus, I’m in the middle of being ridiculously, irrationally—dangerously—drawn to him.
My body remembers the whirlpool, his hand closing over mine, the way his mouth tasted of salt and promise.
Lust is a very inconvenient, very human thing to feel when your life just got rewritten.
