Part I – The Island, 2032 Chapter Three: The Storm Wedding

The hurricane arrived on the day we decided to get married.

Category four, no name yet, just a swirling red wound on the satellite images racing straight for us.

The staff had evacuated two days earlier.

We sent the last boat away with a smile and a lie: “We’ll ride it out in the bunker level.”

We had no intention of hiding.

We wanted the sky to witness.

By noon the wind was already screaming at ninety knots, turning the ocean into black mountains.

The glass house groaned like a living thing.

Rain came sideways, hard enough to etch the windows.

I stood on the cliff terrace in a white linen dress that cost nothing and everything, soaked to the skin in seconds, hair whipping like a battle flag.

Aleksandr walked out of the house barefoot, shirtless, wearing only black trousers and the white-gold collar I had locked around his throat the night I chose him back.

In his right hand he carried the old lighthouse knife.

In his left, the pomegranate we had kept alive for a year (now split open, seeds glowing like fresh blood).

Thunder cracked overhead so loud the cliff shook.

He stopped three feet away, eyes wild, water streaming down the scars on his chest.

“Still time to change your mind,” he shouted over the wind.

I laughed. The storm stole the sound and threw it into the sea.

“I crossed three continents barefoot to find you,” I yelled back. “A little weather isn’t sending me away.”

He grinned (the same reckless grin from 1998 that had ruined me the first time).

He dropped to one knee right there on the wet stone, knife held up like an offering.

“Eden Vale,” he roared, voice barely audible over the hurricane, “will you marry me in the middle of this fucking storm so the sky remembers what forever looks like?”

I took the knife from his hand.

Then I knelt too, so we were eye to eye, rain and salt and madness between us.

“Aleksandr,” I said, loud enough for the thunder to hear, “I already said yes the night I put this on.”

I touched the collar at my throat.

“But I’ll say it again every day the world tries to take you from me.”

He opened the pomegranate with his thumbs.

Seeds spilled over his palms like tiny hearts.

He held one out.

“Eat,” he said. “Seal it.”

I took the seed between my teeth, bit down.

Juice ran down my chin, mixed with rain, tasted like iron and summer and the end of the world.

He ate one too, eyes never leaving mine.

Then he took the knife and cut his left palm, deep, deliberate.

I didn’t flinch.

He cut my right palm the same way.

We pressed the wounds together, blood and pomegranate juice mingling, running pink into the storm.

“With this blood,” he said, voice raw, “I marry you.”

“With this blood,” I answered, “I marry you.”

He sliced a strip from the hem of my soaked dress, bound our hands together tight.

Lightning struck the ocean so close the air smelled of ozone and burnt salt.

We kissed like we were trying to swallow the storm.

When we pulled apart, breathing hard, he shouted the last part into the wind:

“No gods, no governments, no empires.

Only us.

Only this.

Until the stars burn out or the sea takes the island—whichever comes first.”

I leaned my forehead against his.

“Pomegranate,” I whispered (not as a safe word, but as the vow itself).

He repeated it back like communion.

“Pomegranate.”

Thunder answered for the sky.

We stood up together, hands still bound, blood still flowing.

The hurricane reached its peak.

Windows exploded somewhere inside the house.

The sky turned green.

We didn’t move.

We stayed on that cliff for three hours while the world tried to erase us.

It failed.

When the eye passed over, everything went eerily still.

Rain stopped mid-air.

The ocean held its breath.

In that impossible quiet, he untied our hands, licked the mixed blood from my palm, then from his own.

“Mine,” he said softly.

“Yours,” I answered.

Then the back half of the storm hit and we finally ran inside, laughing like lunatics, leaving red footprints across the teak.

Later, when the generators died and the house was nothing but candlelight and wreckage, we found the bedroom somehow intact.

We made love on sheets soaked with rain and salt and each other, slow and deliberate and a little bit vicious, like we needed to prove the storm hadn’t won.

Afterward, he traced the collar at my throat with shaking fingers.

“Still no regrets?” he whispered against my skin.

I turned, pressed my mouth to the scar over his heart where my name was still inked beneath the new hurricane tattoo he would get next week.

“Never,” I said. “Not in Lagos. Not in this storm. Not when the machines come. Not ever.”

Outside, the wind began to die.

Inside, two monsters who had just married each other with blood and fruit and a hurricane as witness fell asleep tangled together, the white-gold collar warm against both our throats because we had traded it back and forth until it didn’t matter whose neck it rested on.

The island was half-destroyed.

The world still wanted us dead.

None of it mattered.

We had a marriage certificate written in storm water and sealed in blood.

And for one perfect night, the word we invented when we were seventeen finally became sacred again.

Pomegranate.

It didn’t mean stop.

It didn’t mean stay.

It meant:

I chose you when the sky itself tried to tear us apart, and I will choose you every day until there is no sky left.