All Chapters of Drowned in the Past: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The day I went in for questioning, I brought the painkillers and a walnut-wood box.The box was carved with a pattern of lotus flowers joined at the stem, a token of love he had given me when we were first together.Now it held records of everything he and Vicky had done over the years.The people from the Federal Ocean Authority were fairly reasonable.The lead investigator read through the records. His face turned iron-gray."What do you want?" he asked.I sat across from him and said:"I want a good bottle of painkillers."He stared at me for a second.He clearly hadn't been expecting that.The one real surprise was the painkillers themselves.Ryan had lied to me.The bottle contained a compound with sedative effects on mermaids, harmless to humans, but it would leave a mermaid in human form sluggish and docile, easier to control.By then my energy was draining faster and faster. The pain came and went, like someone was wringing something out inside my chest. There were moments when

Ryan threw another fit.He moved Vicky into the main house and made a big production of the party preparations.The living room blazed with lights and balloons hung from every corner.The music was loud. Guests came and went.All noise, all warmth, all color.In the side room it was cold and quiet. The sound of the party filtered through the wall, muffled and distant, like noise from another world.And to make everything worse, there was a treatment plan but the medicines hadn't been fully sourced.My condition was deteriorating, the pain coming more and more often.The caretaker tried to go out and buy what was needed. She was turned back at the door.The steward stood in the entrance and tossed over a flat remark: "No one leaves without the mistress's permission."That mistress being Vicky.Ryan had put her in charge of the household to spite me.When the pain had me curled up on the bed, I asked the sprite how much longer before I could go.The sprite hesitated.“Probably soon now.”

Ryan locked himself in the lab for three days and three nights without eating or drinking.The caretaker brought food. She never got through. She could only hear things being smashed inside, loud and irregular.On the third day, the door opened.He came out with deep bruising under his eyes, lips cracked, research coat sleeves rolled to the elbows. There were a few half-healed cuts on the back of his hand, untreated. He was carrying a small vial with a pale blue liquid inside, like diluted seawater.In those three days, he had read through every piece of research Vicky had ever produced, all of it, and he had taken notes. Annotations on every page. Every toxin formula broken down. Every side effect cataloged with dosage responses. On the very last page he had written one line: "This formula can be reversed, but requires deep-sea spirulina extract as a carrier." And the deep-sea spirulina extract, he had left it out.He was coming down the hall with the vial in hand when Vicky appeared.

It didn't take long for someone to find out what he had done to Vicky.When the people from the Federal Ocean Authority arrived, he was sitting on the rocks, holding a packet of candy, still unopened.They showed him the documents. Criminal charges. Intentional assault. Causing permanent disability.He looked them over, nodded, stood, and walked with them. Before he left, he placed the packet of candy on the step and set a nearby stone over it to hold it down.Before all of this, Vicky had already had her lawyer leak the surveillance footage taken when he had treated her.In the footage, Elena lay there unconscious. The blue scale markings that covered her skin had surfaced fully in her unconscious state, vivid as if someone had drawn them onto her. That color had no business being on human skin. You could see at a glance that something was wrong.It ignited the professional community. The Federal Ocean Authority opened an additional investigation into him. Had he known? Had he been co

The caretaker came the day before he was discharged.She told him about the cost of coming ashore. Long periods away from water drain your strength and the scales can surface at any moment. Every so often, she had had to slip away to the tidal flats, put her feet in the water, and replenish her energy."Every time she said she wanted to go to the beach for a walk, she was actually going to recharge. She liked sitting on those steps because the water was right below. Having her feet in it let her hold on a little longer."The caretaker told him about the treatment plan."She stared at it for a long time back then. I think she knew even then. Then she handed it to me and said, let's follow this. I didn't understand what that meant at the time. I just did what she said."She covered her mouth and cried out loud. "I'm sorry, sir, I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I really didn't know—"Ryan raised a hand and gestured for her to stop. His arm hung in the air for a moment, then fell.The hospital