They spoke in unison through their black mouths, as Eusia’s voice echoed through my skull. “Home. Home. Home.”

Eusia had sent them to mock me. To tell me once more what she’d been trying to tell me from the start. To tell me what I’d tried so hard to ignore.

“I know.” I hoisted my clinging skirt and turned toward the shore. The water curled up my shins as I strode out of the sea. The nekgya still chanted their taunt, even as my wet slippers met dry sand. Everyone gaped, Theodore included, as I kept moving up the beach. When I reached Lachlan, I stopped. “I’ll need a ship to escort me to Seraf when I wake.”

“When you wake?”

“Yes.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the severing draught so only he could see it.

He gave me a grave nod. “I’ll see it done.”

Head hung, I moved past Eftan and Agatha, clutching my dripping skirt in my hands. Eftan made a sound of protest as Theodore crossed the sand after me. “Your Majesty, leave her.”

Theodore had left Halla drenched and shaking behind him. “We need to speak.” He reached for me, and though it cracked me in two to do it, I stepped back from his touch. “Will you come with me, Immy? Please.”

“Go to your fiancée.”

“Eftan will look after her.”

“She’s yours to look after,” I said. “See to your duty, Theo. And I will see to mine.”

Theodore flinched like I’d struck him across the cheek. “Imogen… I refuse to lose you—”

“You were meant to lose me from the start.” My voice was shredded and weak. “I gave you my word in Nemea’s fort. Please, let me keep it.” I clutched the draught in my fist and turned away from him, hurrying toward the stairs to put distance between us.

This isn’t the end, I lied to myself as I wrestled the cork from the vial. We’d have more time. We’d tease one another again, and fight, and I’d feel again the deep timbre of his voice reverberating through me when we lay chest to chest. I told myself he was still mine, even as I set the bottle to my lips and tilted my head back.

“Imogen?” There was anguish in Theodore’s voice. “No.”

I picked up my speed. The sludgy draught slid over my tongue and stuck in my throat. At the stairs that led up to the garden I fought to swallow it down. It tasted like rot, black and thick as tar. The pain came a beat later. A hot dagger that sliced slowly through the middle of me. My knees buckled on the first step. My vision blurred. My head rocked like a club had struck it.

There were strong hands on me. Sounds that were muffled by a high ringing in my ears. I could only focus on the rushing ache in my chest. The liquid that was filling my lungs.

I tried to breathe in and a gurgling sound came from my throat. “I can’t… I can’t breathe.”

“Imogen.”

I knew that voice. It pierced through the pain, through the heartache.

My chest burned and swelled. You cannot drown, I told myself, trying to ease my panic, but I was drowning. Someone carried me and I gasped and gasped. There was a blur of color in my periphery—flowers. Bubbling in my throat. Metal on my tongue. Liquid, hot and thick, rolled over my lip and down my chin. It filled my nose. I blinked and I could feel it, sticky in the corners of my eyes.

My body jostled, cradled within those strong arms. I coughed and felt the liquid spray and fall over my cheeks. As my vision left me and my lungs scorched with the anguish of drowning, I felt the sun.

Theodore.

His power.

Hot and unwavering, it poured through me like molten gold. It tried desperately, determinedly to beat back the darkness.

But the darkness won.

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There was nothing in the darkest, deepest part of the sea but pressure. The kind that morphs a living thing into a grotesque, slanted version of itself.

And that was where my body lay. Under all that water. Moldering. Changing.

An unbankable heat hollowed out my stomach. It was not a heat like Theodore’s, gentle and warm as daylight. It was hellfire. It boiled my blood, scalded my veins. My sight was gone, my hearing muffled, and I was being emptied. Theodore was leaving me, one drop of glistening Gods’ blood at a time.

I’d never known the sea without his power stitched through me. I’d never known the sea with only my bond to Eusia lingering in my gut.

Theodore’s absence would bring me more than heartache. For awful things filled empty spaces. And it was in the darkest, deepest part of the sea that monsters were made.

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I sucked in a breath like I’d broken the surface of the water. My body was overwarm, covered in a clammy coating of sweat. I stared up at a ceiling I didn’t recognize. It was unadorned—no gilded trimming or painted vines. It didn’t smell of vetiver soap and summer, like Theodore’s room did, but of dull mint and lavender flower and the sharp note of nepenthe.

For a moment, I wondered if I was still in the palace at all, and it felt like my chest collapsed in on itself. The narrow bed creaked as I sat up and let my legs fall over the edge. My entire body was sore as a swollen, beating bruise. The thin gray sleeping gown I wore was rough against my tender skin.

I scanned the little room, my mind stuck in a thick fog. There was a glass of water and small bottles of medicine on the shelf beside the bed. A washbasin sat below the window where glittering beams of afternoon sunlight sliced through the glass and pooled on the floor.

My eyes stung. The damned shafts of light reminded me of Theodore. I was empty, scraped clean of the warm spot where our bond had resided, but he still lingered. He was everywhere. On my skin, in my body. I could still hear the echo of his voice in my ear.

It was bitter determination that forced me to stand. That forced me to bite back my tears and set my mind to my task. I could not sit alone in a nightdress, weeping at sunlight, or I would fall apart entirely. I had to get to Seraf. Nemea held the answers I searched for.

I made for the washbasin and paused at a new weight that hung around my neck. I reached up and tugged a long gold chain from where it rested beneath my clothes. It was finely made, with a little diamond set into the clasp, and at its end hung my engagement ring. The stormy gray spinel. My teeth clamped. I let it fall against my sternum, then set to scrubbing my skin with the frigid water.

There were folded clothes on a bench at the foot of the bed. My gaze stuck to the dark trousers and tunic. They were folded into neat, small rectangles and wrapped tightly in twine, just the way Theodore had folded our clothes while we’d traveled through the wildlands. A pair of lovely black boots sat beside them. When I noted the second pile of clothes, I stilled.

It was a gown. Black as night, but the rich fabric held the faintest sheen of iridescence. Like Siren wings. I let my fingers play over the deep V of the neckline. Tidy little stitches of midnight thread depicted a scrolling vine. It curled up to the shoulders, the splay of leaves and star-shaped blooms beautifully rendered. My fingers froze. Tucked into the vines, so the eye could not tell where one ended and the next began, were feathers.

I pulled a breath through my tight throat. He’d had a binding gown made for me. Black to resemble the endless blood bond, when the boundaries of two faded to nothing and they became one. I tried to douse the flare of hope that lit in me. I picked up the gown to shake out the skirt, and something small fell from its folds. It landed on the wood floor with a ping. My joints rioted as I bent to retrieve it.