“And you think you can fix that.”
“I think you and I can fix that,” I replied. “Your mother’s curse doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It feeds on the absence of what should have been. The bond between Odysseus and Penelope was the original design, Andromeda. It’s why the curse can’t reach you here. The connection between our Houses is still alive in the water, dormant but intact. Your presence in the Strait has been waking it up.”
She stared at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “Waking it up how?”
This was the part I’d held back. The part I was afraid of.
“The Charybdis energy in the Strait has been forming an incipient bond between us. Since the night you arrived. The longer you stay, the stronger it becomes.”
The yacht creaked around us. Through the hull, the current pulsed once, deep and slow.
“You’ve known this the whole time.” The warmth that had been building between us over the weeks went cold in an instant. “You expected it. You wanted it.”
“Yes.”
“You kept me here knowing that the water was bonding me to you.”
“I kept you here because the water was helping you. The incipient bond is the reason the curse can’t touch you in the Strait. It acts as a counterweight. Remove it, and the curse comes back.”
“So it’s another cage.” She glared at me, and I couldn’t help but think that she’d never been more herself than in that moment. “A prettier one. But still a cage.”
“It’s a tool. The Charybdis bond isn’t a trap. It’s the mechanism by which the fracture can be healed. Restore the connection between our Houses, and the curse loses its foundation. Not suppressed. Not contained. Gone.”
“You’re saying the cure for the curse is you.”
“I’m saying the cure is the connection that should have existed all along.” I had laid everything bare. Every secret my House had guarded for centuries, every private grief, every calculation I’d made since the night she fell into my waters. If she said no, I would have nothing left to offer. “I’m asking you to choose this, Andromeda. Not as a patient accepting treatment. Not as a prisoner accepting terms. As a woman deciding her own future.”
She didn’t answer right away. The book sat closed beside her, and the morning light had shifted from bronze to white as the sun climbed above the Strait.
I waited. I was good at waiting. The ocean had taught me that—the patience of tides, the slow certainty of currents that carved coastlines over centuries. Andromeda needed time, andtime was the one thing I could give her that cost neither of us anything.
“Andromeda?”
She blinked. Something in her expression had shifted, though I couldn’t place what. A stillness that hadn’t been there before. A weight behind her eyes that looked less like hesitation and more like resolution.
“Yes.”
My chest contracted. “Yes?”
“I’ll bond with you,” she said steadily. “But I need something first.”
“Name it.”
“Alexander.” Her eyes locked on mine, and what I found in them was calm and absolute and terrifying. “He’ll come for me. You know he will. His campaign won’t stop at the ports. Eventually he’ll come himself, and when he does, it needs to end. Not with politics. Not with paperwork. It needs to be finished.”
“You want me to fight him.”
“I want you to kill him.” There was no hesitation. No tremor. She could have been discussing the weather. “As long as he’s alive, the curse has an anchor. As long as he exists, some part of mewill always be tethered to him, and I can’t live like that. I won’t live like that. Not anymore.”
I studied her face. She was asking me to kill the Alpha of House Zeus. The political consequences would be catastrophic. Julian Solaris would intervene. The Council would fracture. Every alliance House Poseidon had built over centuries would be tested. And Stormwright was no weak opponent.
But she was also asking me to free her. And I had told her, the night she fell from the sky, that her freedom was the only thing that mattered. I had meant it then. I meant it now. If freedom required Stormwright’s death, then Stormwright would die, and I would handle what came after.
“Very well, Andromeda,” I replied. “Stormwright will die. For you.”
She nodded once. Then she picked up her book, opened it to the page she’d been reading, and turned toward the porthole. The conversation was over.
I left the library. The corridor was quiet, the teak panels warm beneath my bare feet. On deck, the morning sun hit my face. The Strait spread out around me in every direction, brilliant blue and alive with the movement of a thousand creatures.