She didn’t go below. She walked forward, across the flooded deck, the water parting for her bare feet the same way it had carried her the night she fell from the sky. She moved past me without looking at me. She was going to him. Whatever happened next, she’d made her decision, and I wasn’t part of it.
“Andromeda, go back.” The command came sharper this time, edged with something that hadn’t been there before. She was too close. She was supposed to be below, safe, away from the fight.
She put her hands on his chest.
For one fraction of a second, nothing happened. Her palms lay flat against Orion’s sternum. Her fingers spread wide. Her face tilted up toward his, and from behind, I couldn’t read her expression.
Then the light came.
Purple-gold, violent, instantaneous, it erupted from her palms and poured into Orion’s body. It was nothing like the careful manipulations I’d seen Helena perform. This was raw and untrained and devastating. Orion let out a gut-wrenching scream, as if he was being ripped to pieces.
“What—” He tried to step back. His legs buckled. “What are you—”
The Strait went mad.
Every current reversed simultaneously. Waves slammed into each other from opposite directions, sending plumes of white spray fifty feet into the air. The yacht heeled violently to starboard. I lost my footing and slid until my back hit the starboard rail hard enough to crack something. The water that had been pinning me drained away in a chaotic rush. It was purposeless, directionless, as if the intelligence behind it had been ripped out at the root.
Orion was on his knees. His fingers dug into his own sternum, raking at the place where the light had entered. His eyes were open, but the green had drained from them. Something pale and hollow remained. The veins in his neck stood out black against his skin. The purple-gold light continued to pour from Andromeda’s palms into his body. Around us, the Strait thrashed like a wounded animal. Waves crested at twenty feet, crashing against each other with no pattern, no rhythm, no direction.
I tried to stand. The deck pitched beneath me, and I went down again, my shoulder white-hot, my ribs grinding against each other. Through the spray and the chaos, Andromeda’s face remained clear.
She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t crying. Her jaw was set, her eyes blazing with purple-gold fire. The light pouring from her was getting brighter, not dimmer. Whatever she was doing to Orion, she hadn’t finished yet.
The yacht rolled forty-five degrees to port. Seawater crashed over the rail and hit me full in the face. I clawed the salt from my eyes, but the light had consumed everything—the deck, the sky, the Strait itself. The last thing I saw before the white swallowed the world was Andromeda’s silhouette. She was still standing, still burning, her hands still pressed against the chest of a man who had promised to keep her safe.
Then there was nothing but the light, and the roar of a god’s ocean tearing itself apart.
25
Penelope’s Daughter
Andie
The day before
It was almost funny. Even though I’d been bracing myself for Orion’s betrayal since I’d first jumped off that plane, the reality of it still took me aback.
The cure is the connection that should have existed all along. 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.
What a joke. Orion wanted to bind me, too. Of course he did.
He sat across from me in the window seat where I’d spent weeks reading and pretending I wasn’t a captive. His dark eyes were soft and certain. Everything he’d just told me still hung in the air between us, waiting for me to accept it.
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.
I stared at the man who was supposed to be my savior and wondered how I’d been so stupid.
The bond was there. A low hum beneath my ribs, warm and steady, nothing like the jagged electricity of Alexander’s presence. It had been growing for days, feeding on the calm I’d mistaken for healing. Orion hadn’t needed to seduce me. He’d just needed to keep me here long enough for the Strait to do its work.
Every Alpha I had ever known wanted to own me. They just used different chains.
The thought landed like a stone in still water, and something cracked open beneath the weight of it.
The waves froze mid-crest, foam suspended like sculpture. The breeze died against my skin. The creak of the hull went silent. Even the light changed. The Mediterranean gold thickened into something amber and ancient, as though the sun had stopped bothering to move.
Orion’s mouth was still parted on his last word. The rise of his chest had paused between breaths.
“Do not judge him too harshly.”