It was time to act. Taking a deep breath, I headed down toward the lowest level of the yacht.
The library was a small room paneled in reclaimed teak from a nineteenth-century clipper ship. Andromeda was curled in the window seat with a book open on her knees. Throughout the past weeks, her skin had taken on the warm bronze of someone exposed to a kind sun. Her wariness was still there, but it had softened into something closer to guarded curiosity.
She didn’t flinch when I sat down across from her. A month ago, she would have.
She glanced at me, her lips pressed in a thin line. “Another one?”
“Genoa.”
She closed the book and set it on the seat beside her. “How many does that leave?”
“On paper, enough. In practice, the damage compounds. Every port he takes creates delays in the ones he hasn’t reached yet. Shippers reroute. Insurance premiums spike. Partners start asking questions I can’t answer. I’d have to admit the Alpha of House Zeus is conducting economic warfare against me over a woman on my yacht.”
The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile, but close. “When you put it that way, it sounds absurd.”
“Most things worth fighting for sound absurd when you describe them accurately.”
Her scent drifted between us, rich and alluring. Pomegranate and white tea, the same fragrance that had stopped me in my tracks on this very yacht months ago. It was cleaner now. Calmer. The Strait was already in her blood. “You could let me go,” she said. “That would stop it.”
“It would.” The mere idea almost made me flinch. “Is that what you want?”
The pause lasted three heartbeats. I counted them through the vibration of the hull.
“No,” she replied. “I don’t know what I want. But it’s not that.”
Something loosened in my ribs. Not relief, exactly. More like the feeling of a current shifting in the right direction after days of dead water.
I’d been waiting for the right moment. The ocean had been telling me to wait. I’d learned long ago to trust the water’s timing over my own. But Stormwright’s campaign was accelerating, and patience had an expiration date.
“Andromeda. There’s something I need to tell you.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Oh?”
“I told you on Samos that my House honors Hera for our shared history.” I’d rehearsed this. Not the words—the words I trusted to come—but the order. What to reveal first. What to hold backuntil she was ready. “What I didn’t say is that I don’t think the bond is as close as it should be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your mother would have told you the history. Odysseus was transformed. Penelope severed the bond. Two Houses went their separate ways.” I paused. “But did she tell you it was fair?”
“I can’t say I remember the details, Orion,” Andromeda answered. A fair point. Whatever conversation she’d had with Helena must have been a long time ago.
“Odysseus didn’t choose what happened to him,” I said. “Poseidon forced the transformation. Turned a man of wits into something that couldn’t survive on dry ground.”
Through the hull beneath my feet, I could feel the Strait’s deep current shifting. “He forced himself to stay in Ithaca, in their home, in their bed. But his body rejected every breath of air that wasn’t salt. And Penelope watched him do it. She held their household together, fended off suitors, ruled a kingdom alone. And when she finally severed the bond, she did it because she loved him too much to let him keep destroying himself for her sake.”
“She was protecting him.”
“She was sacrificing herself. There’s a difference.” The distinction had haunted me for more years than I could count. “Penelope didn’t want to sever it. She wanted her husband back.But the gods had taken him from her, and no amount of loyalty or love was going to undo what Poseidon had done. So she freed him. And it destroyed her.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Orion?”
“Odysseus was violated by a god. Penelope was punished for a choice she never made. And the wound between our Houses has never healed, because no one has ever tried to heal it. House Poseidon retreated to the ocean. House Hera turned inward. Both carrying half of a fracture that was never their fault.”
She was quiet for a moment. Through the porthole behind her, a cormorant dove beneath the surface and came up holding a thrashing silver fish in its beak.
“My father died at sea.” I had never said this to anyone outside my House. The confession scraped against something raw, but to her, I could say it. “So did his father. Every Alpha of House Poseidon has lived and died on the water, because the transformation Odysseus endured bred true. We cannot stay on land for long. The ocean is the only place that doesn’t feel like suffocation.”
The words came easier now, as if telling her made them weigh less. “My House has accepted this as the price of Poseidon’s gift. But it isn’t a gift, Andromeda. It never was. It was a punishment dressed up as power. It has kept us isolated from the very people who were supposed to be our partners.”