The sooner I get out of this city, the better. The windows look out over Aqualis, and I see Mer people swimming far below, going about their daily business. My hands are clasped behind my rod-straight spine, trying to portray ease before the King.
I don’t think it’s working.
Gods. The sooner I can get back to my ship, the better.
“You heard me,” the Ice Mer King says gruffly.
He is sitting at a large mahogany desk that is more than double the size of my body. His bare upper body highlights powerful, gold-clad arms that are resting atop the desk. His fingers are steepled as he looks at me. The bands glint in the spell light, and his muscles tense as he leans forward with a penetrating stare. I suppress a shudder and swallow hard.
The King’s long gray hair is streaked with the deepest blues and greens. It swirls in the surrounding water like seaweed after a storm. A diadem made of pearlescent seashells rests on his head. It is imposing and reminds me of his importance.
I can’t peel my eyes from the diadem, imagining for one moment what it would be like to add something like that to my own pile of treasure.
I ask, “Isn’t your daughter—”
“Enough!” he roars, rising from the desk. His deep gray, almost black tail flicks back and forth. It takes everything in me to hold my ground.
A beat passes and the most powerful Mer goes preternaturally still. His eyes pin me in place as he looms over me. When he speaks, power laces every word. “It is not your place to ask questions. You have no rights here,human. Need I remind you of the reason you stand before me at all?”
I clamp my jaw shut, shaking my head. There is no need for that. As if I could ever forget the reason my life is no longer my own.
It hasn’t escaped my notice that the one time I played hero, my public chivalrylanded me a life debt to the royal Ice Mer family. That was definitelynotmy intention. All I had wanted to do was spare an Angel from the disgusting advances of the Ice Mer Crown Prince, Henrick Proteus.
Everyone in Aranthium knew Crown Prince Henrick had a penchant for taking the lives of his conquests. He had left more than a few bodies in his disastrous wake.
Had, because he finally met his match in the Winter Fae Queen’s Consort two years ago. Prince Nathaniel of the Winter Court had killed Henrick in an arena filled with Ice Mer. Ballsy. They say the wimpy Fae did it to demonstrate his passion for the stone-cold badass, Queen Elvira, or something. But I’m sure he didn’t know that he was saving untold numbers of women from a horrid fate at the Ice Mer’s hands.
My arrangement with Henrick had been pretty standard after I had saved the Angel. I gave him a percentage of everything I earned from my raids. Enough to make him happy, but not enough to bankrupt me. At least, that’s how it had worked until he had gone up and gotten himself killed. Instead of finding freedom after the bastard’s death, things had become much worse for me. Henrick’s cruelty had nothing on his father.
Within a month of his son’s death, King Phelix had tightened my reins, took a larger cut of my raids, and invoked an archaic law.
A life for a life.
Because I had saved the Angel’s life that night on the docks, I was duty-bound to take a life. Any life of the King’s choosing. I had thought for sure it was a joke.
But no.
The Northern Court values brutality and strength. Such a place leaves little room for my morals. I had consulted multiple experts on the Northern laws, but each of them had come to the same conclusion: I am bound to King Phelix and stripped of my agency.
It shouldn’t matter, right? Smuggling goods and stealing wealth is a deadly endeavor. I have taken more lives than I could count, for the gods’ sakes. My soul has always been as black as a starless night. My soul was stained long before Phelix took over my debt.
But right now, here in Aqualis. King Phelix is asking me to kill his own daughter. The female is—at least presumably—innocent.
Just like that, I realize just how much it matters.
I don’t kill innocent people.
Not for the first time, I find myself wishing I had ignored that modicum of conscience that still resides deep within me, even after two decades of pirating and pillaging and death. I try my best to atone for my sins and weaknesses, but I know the truth. Even when I saved the Angel from being raped, I had known. The black marks on my soul were already so dark, there was no saving me.
The small acts of kindness I do are for others, not myself.
If I had just ignored the nudge of morality, I could have hopped back on my ship. I would have sailed away from Angel’s Landing, none the wiser. It’s not as though saving one Angel from a night of harm would reach back through the threads of time and saveher.
But instead, I am receiving orders to kill the new heir to the Ice Mer throne. This underwater land is going to run out of eligible heirs pretty soon at this rate.
As the Ice Mer King explains the mission, my mind hangs on one word: Helena.
I have never met the Ice Mer Crown Princess, but I’ve heard rumors about her.