Chapter 2

The first morning bell rang as I finally wiped away the last stain. When Ronan opened the cabin door, I was trying to hide the bloody sailcloth beneath my skirt. His boots stopped in front of me. “Where's all that blood coming from?”

I drew my shoulders in, afraid of staining his trousers. He crouched and grabbed my wrist, then immediately loosened his grip. “I asked you a question.”

“It's clean now.” I clutched the cloth. “I'll go.”

He watched me with something almost wounded in his eyes. Time after time, I'd let that look make me forget who'd taught me to be afraid of him.

Meg's voice carried across the deck. “She traded me a tear pearl for a needle yesterday. Said she wanted to mend the captain's old wristband. Anything to get back in his good books.”

Another woman laughed. “She picked up that little trick fast enough. His parents don't even have graves, thanks to her, and she's still trying to get into his bed?”

I closed my eyes. Ronan's fingers tightened around my wrist again.

He took me to the interrogation cabin beside the powder magazine. A black iron cage hung above a tank of electric eels caught in the Storm Sea. Fine copper mesh enclosed the bars. My legs shook at the sight of the crank.

“Tell me the route,” he said, locking the cage door. “If you won't tell me where they are, at least tell me when you last saw them.”

I opened my mouth, but the tide oath tightened around my voice, bringing blood into my throat.

I'd sworn it three years ago to keep his parents alive. Until the sealed tide ended, I couldn't reveal whether they lived or where they were to any human who still hunted merfolk. If I spoke, wrote it down, or even led a hunter to the refuge, its protection would break. The tracking curse buried in his parents' bodies would burn them to ash before anyone could reach them.

I'd tried explaining, even writing a letter. All I'd left on the paper was blood from my fingertips.

“Wait for the Blue Tide.” I gripped the bars and looked at him. “Ronan, please. Two more days.”

The last of the patience left his eyes. “Another two days? Lila, I've been waiting three years.”

He turned the crank. The copper net snapped tight, and the current tore through my wet wounds. My body jerked against the bars. I struck my forehead on the iron, unable even to scream as the barely healed flesh over my chest split open again.

He threw the crank back almost at once, wrenched the cage open, and caught me. His shaking hand couldn't hold the back of my neck. “Breathe. Lila, look at me. Take a breath.”

My mouth worked without sound, like a fish dumped onto dry land. He pressed his ear to my chest and stayed there until, finally, he let out a shuddering breath. His lips touched my temple. “I don't want to do this to you. Just tell me. Please.”

I raised a hand to his jaw and felt the stubble he hadn't shaved. “Then stop.”

He didn't answer. I let my hand fall and turned my face away.

Someone brought a sharkskin case to the door. I saw the White Reef crest engraved on its corner and went still. Those were the tidehearts I'd entrusted to a vendor in the harbor. The souls of my dead kin slept inside them. If I could get them home to our trench, they might still wake.

Ronan opened the case and took out a deep blue pearl.

“Don't touch it!” I lunged forward, the chain tearing through the flesh around my ankle. “Whatever you want, do it to me. Give it back!”

He watched the sudden strength in my hands, his face hardening. “So there is something you care about.”

He put the pearl beneath his boot. I heard it break and flung myself onto the floor, digging my nails into the seams between the boards. The blue light drained out of the scattered pieces.

“Whose was that?” He crouched and tipped my face up. “Your father's? Your mother's?”

My lips shook too badly for me to answer. His thumb swept a tear from my cheek. His own eyes were red, but he kept the rest of the pearls out of my reach. “I'd like to know if mine begged someone the way you're begging me.”

“Ronan, I wish I'd never met you on that beach.”

He kissed me so hard it felt as though he meant to force the words back down my throat. I didn't fight him. I didn't kiss him back, either. He only stopped when he tasted blood. “Don't say that.” He rested his forehead against mine. “You can't take that from me, too.”

I'd been six that summer, and he'd been nine. Merfolk children practiced taking human form in the shallows. The first time I grew legs, I managed fewer than ten steps before falling straight into his lap as he sat mending a fishing net.

He refused to let go of me. He asked Captain Evelyn if he could take me aboard and marry me when we grew up. Laughing, she lifted me out of his arms and told him he'd have to learn to ask what I wanted first.

After that, whenever the Black Sail came into port, he brought me a glass bottle. Sometimes it held candy from the harbor, sometimes a red ribbon or a cheap silver ring he'd found at a market. I kept every one.

The merfolk hunters began appearing when I was seventeen. My father forbade me to go near the coast, but I slipped away at low tide to see Ronan. He was waiting at the bow. He pulled me into his arms and introduced me to his crew as the girl he'd been waiting for.

He didn't call me a siren. He didn't call me a monster. As long as he was there to catch me, I'd believed there'd always be somewhere on land where I belonged.

When I was twenty-three, his parents represented Grayhaven's fleet at the signing of a treaty with White Reef's royal family to end the hunts. Their ship caught fire that night, and neither captain was seen again. A survivor said the last thing he'd witnessed was me pulling them into the sea.

That much was true. The rest of the truth had been locked inside me by the oath.

Ronan took up his parents' captain's seal, and his hunting ships began sailing into White Reef. I boarded his ship alone for the second time in my adult life, hoping I could make him stop. He cried when he kissed me. I thought that meant I could still bring him back to me.

The tide shackles he'd fastened around my ankle had never opened again.

“Lila?” He lifted me off the floor, then looked down at his sleeves. My blood had soaked through them and was dripping from his elbows.

I watched, almost wanting to laugh. “Don't bother wiping it off. In two days, I won't be making a mess anymore.”

His arms tightened sharply. “Get the ship's doctor!”

The neck of a bottle struck my teeth. He poured sea-witch medicine into my mouth so fast I choked, then wiped my face with his own sleeve as I coughed.

Vivian had appeared in the doorway. In a gentle voice, she suggested a salt bath. Merfolk healed faster in salt water, after all. Ronan unfastened the chain from its ring in the wall, leaving the shackle on my ankle, and lowered me into the copper tub the doctor had prepared. His hand stayed beneath my head.

The bleeding stopped almost immediately. Then a gray-white film began creeping over every scale the water touched. I smelled the bitter tang of powdered sea glass. It sealed wounds, but it also sealed the gill slits a mermaid needed to breathe.

“Change it.” I caught his wrist. “There's something wrong with the water.”

He bent to examine my wounds, as if he couldn't believe the medicine he'd given me wasn't enough to save me. “Don't be afraid. Let it close first.”

Behind him, Vivian put a finger to her lips. Looking straight at me, she silently mouthed, “I won't let you live long enough to see the Blue Tide.”