She intones the old blessings, saltwater sprinkling like quick rain across our joined hands.
It felt holy and absurd all at once — a ritual for two strangers and a crowd, an old world threading itself through something that still smelled faintly of fluorescent lights and hospital coffee in my memory.
Then came the toast: a tiny, toasted sliver of sea-bread, spread with a sweet prawn paste that gleamed under the lantern light.
The priestess broke it gently between us and offered the halves like a pact.
I accepted without thinking, as naturally as breathing.
The first bite was strange—salty and bright and somehow buttery—but the second mouthful flattened confusion into delight.
It tasted like an upscale lobster roll—like something I’d never had.
Familiar in form, utterly new in the sea-sweetness that lingered on my tongue.
I chewed and, for a ridiculous second, thought of home and the aquarium and the absurd continuity of my life.
One minute boring monotony, the next, I was neck deep in myth.
Kael watches me eat like a man who fears he’ll break the moment by looking too long.
I should feel self-conscious, but I don’t.
Oh, but the way he looks at me—like he’s cataloguing the lines of my face, the small crinkle at my left eye when I smile—makes my stomach do a silly flip.
He is unbearably beautiful. The kind of smoking hot that never paid attention to me back in Jersey.
His features seem carved by tides themselves.
He’s all high cheekbones and eyes the color of deep water.
That he sometimes seems to fold into something impossibly sad, like a sky that keeps a bruise hidden in the clouds, stuns me.
I want in that hungering, utterly human way, to smooth whatever hurt lives behind that sadness.
I want to make him laugh so hard his sternness cracked and let him be small if he needed to be.
This strange, surreal Demon Lord who took me has a way of holding himself that speaks of centuries of seaside magic.
He tries to be so serious, but I see those tiny betrayals of tenderness in him.
The way he leans in when I speak.
The protective set of his shoulders when the crowd cheers.
The unbelievable spark of possessiveness when I smiled at that sailor.
And the almost-childlike relief in his eyes when I met him halfway on that toast.
Those things make me ache with a strange, new affection.
I wonder what he’s like without all that armor—not the literal kind, but the practiced distance he presents to the world—and the idea felt like sacrilege and mercy at once.
When the priestess finishes, Kael’s hand closes briefly over mine. The runes etched into his skin glow, and I feel heat radiating from them.
His hand tightens briefly.
It’s casual, but it anchors me in a way that makes the rest of the world blur.
