“Because this isn’t saving you. Andie, he’s trying to tear the plane apart.”
Something flickered across her face. Not doubt. Something sadder than doubt, something that looked almost like grief. She held my gaze for one more second, and in that second, I saw all of it. The yacht. The curse. The collar breaking against her skin. Every Alpha who had made decisions about her body without asking her permission, including me.
“He’s giving me a chance,” she said. “A choice.”
And just like that, she let go of the doorframe. She stepped forward, the way you’d step off a curb into a street you’d already decided to cross.
Then she was falling.
I threw myself toward the open door. Helena seized my arm from behind, as did my security staff. But I was stronger than all of them, and I nearly dragged them with me. And then Helena shouted into my ear in a voice I had never heard her use.
“If you follow her, you will die. The Strait is his domain. You cannot fight Poseidon in his own waters. You can’t save my daughter if you die.”
I stopped. Not because she was right, though she was. Through the howling doorway, past the wind and the emergency lights, I could see the ocean.
It rose. A column of dark water climbed from the surface of the Strait and met Andromeda in her fall. It cradled her, folding itself around her body with the gentleness of an embrace.
Andie sank into the rising ocean without screaming. The water closed over her, and the column withdrew. The surface of the Strait settled back into its ancient, churning gray.
The storm began to die. Without purpose, the supernatural pressure bled from the atmosphere. The wind lost its spiral intelligence. The clouds thinned and broke apart against a sky that was already forgetting the violence.
Orion had what he wanted. He didn’t need to fight anymore.
The crew sealed the door. The cabin repressurized with a mechanical hiss that felt obscene against the silence inside my chest. Helena released my arm and stood there swaying in the aisle. Tears ran down her face in tracks she didn’t bother to wipe.
I sat down and put my head in my hands. For the first time since the ritual at Maracaibo, I had nothing left to burn.
20
Poseidon’s Refuge
Andie
For a body falling thousands of feet through the air, the ocean surface was the equivalent of concrete. Or at least, it should have been. In the realm of House Poseidon, something as plebeian as concrete didn’t exist.
The moment I jumped from the plane, I knew what I was doing. I could feel it, the power in that storm. It was the same power I’d touched the day I’d tried to swim away from Samos, the same pull I’d felt in the current when the dolphins had carried me to shore.“I can free you,”it said, and against my better judgment, I believed it.
I wasn’t wrong. I’d barely fallen a hundred feet when the water roared up and caught me. It cradled me close, almostgentle, more honest than Alexander had ever been. Salt filled my mouth, and the shriek of the wind vanished, replaced by a rhythmic pulse that settled into my bones.
And down below, I sensed it. The source of the storm.
“House Poseidon was born in the Strait of Messina,”my mother had told me once.“In the jaws of Charybdis itself.”
The words had been just words then—a piece of Olympian history no different from the dozens of other stories Helena had tried to teach me. I hadn’t understood it. I hadn’t known I would one day.
The Strait of Messina had once been the home of the monster Charybdis. Odysseus was said to have become the first Alpha of House Poseidon after an encounter with the legendary beast.
But the presence beneath me wasn’t a creature. It was a remnant, a vast residual energy woven into the Strait’s every current. It was old enough to have forgotten its own hunger. It pressed against my mind with something that felt almost like curiosity. I felt the moment it found what it was looking for. Some thread in my blood. Some connection I hadn’t known I carried.
No doubt, the blood of Penelope. Of House Hera.
The energy shifted. The curiosity became recognition, and the recognition became something warmer. The current tightenedaround me, not crushing but cradling, the way you’d hold something you’d been waiting a long time to touch.
I should have been afraid. I should have been thrashing and fighting for air, the way any rational person would after jumping from an aircraft into open water. But the Strait didn’t want me to struggle. The current guided my body in a slow, spiraling arc, upward and sideways, toward a dark shape above me.
The ocean pushed me up and through the surface. I broke the surface gasping, and the boarding platform of a yacht was right there, wide and solid. The water placed me onto it the way you’d set down a child you’d caught mid-fall.
I lay on my back, coughing. Salt water streamed from my hair and pooled beneath me on the teak planking. My lungs burned. Every muscle in my body was shaking with the deep, uncontrollable tremor that comes after the adrenaline crashes.