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The butterflies in my stomach were doing somersaults. Hell, it was a veritable Cirque Du Soleil in my gut.

Even if I wasn’t drowning in gratitude, and even if I wasn’t so flooded with relief that I wanted to take life by the horns and ride the hell out of it, my answer would have always been the same. When it came to Tobias, it was always inevitable.

My smirk turned into a full-on grin that I couldn’t contain if I tried. “Yes.”

Chapter 34

Tobias

One would think that after a lifetime of perfecting the art of bottling up my emotions, I’d be an expert at it, but as I walked Arya to her room, acting calm and rational was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done.

I wanted to hunt down the three sea witches and burn them to a crisp. I wanted to go back to the Simulation Room and use my dragon fury to destroy it so that it could never threaten Arya again. I wanted to encase Arya in a bulletproof straight jacket so that no harm could ever come to her again.

But I didn’t do any of those things.

I somehow maintained my composure until Arya was safely inside her room, assuring her that I would see her tomorrow night for our date.

I hadn’t actually meant to ask her out. Honestly, when I did, I wasn’t even thinking about Arthur’s damned ultimatum. I was only thinking about her, how grateful I was that she hadn’t gotten hurt, how much she clearly needed my protection. That the more I could be around her, the safer she’d be.

And now that she had finally closed the door, I needed to find a way to vent my overwhelming emotions before they burned their way out of me and took the entire school with them.

I strode back to the gym, shoved my earbuds into my ears, and blared the angriest heavy metal I could find while I turned my murderous rage on a punching bag.

Tonight had made me aware of three very big problems, and I didn’t yet have a clue what to do about any of them.

Problem number one: Arya had no idea how to defend herself.

My knuckles cracked against the leather as I threw an uppercut, and my blood began to pepper the bag as I continued to punch it.

I’d seen dozens of mers beat that sim before on their first try. Granted, most students weren’t assigned to the Simulation Room until several months into their defensive training, and every mer that had ever gone in had been an expert at their shifter skills since birth.

Arya had a few handicaps, being that she only just found out about her true nature a week ago and she hadn’t figured out how to control her shift, which was its own problem.

But I watched Arya on the screen for those seconds before I managed to shut the damn thing off. That vampire had snatched her so quickly. Just in that short burst of time, I’d considered half a dozen ways she could’ve evaded his attack. But she didn’t know those techniques. She was nowhere near prepared for that scenario.

Which brought me to problem number two: if Aryawasthe siren from the prophecy, she was more vulnerable than I realized.

My fist hit the bag, sending bits of charred leather and stuffing flying around it. I paused to look at my hand. Tendrils ofsteam and smoke were wafting upward from it. I scowled in frustration.

Caesar wasn’t going to be happy that I’d ruined one of the punching bags, and now that I’d scorched a hole into it, I couldn’t exactly keep abusing it. I didn’t want to make a bigger mess for myself to clean up.

So I trudged over to one of the treadmills and started running, the pent-up energy still threatening to incinerate me from the inside out.

The fact that vampires had attacked Arya’s house and killed her mother couldn’t have been a coincidence. Vampires don’t just kill people in their homes. Usually, their attacks are random, and always in the open, in secluded areas like alleys, tunnels, and under bridges.

They could still be hunting for her. She didn’t know how to shift, didn’t know how to control her powers. And if that weren’t bad enough, she couldn’t physically defend herself against a low-level vampire. One that technically wasn’t really trying to kill her.

And if she really was the siren from the prophecy, she’d have to stand up against Hadrian and the entire vampire army.

I smelled the smoke before I saw it. I slowed my run to a jog so I could look down. My uniform shirt was burning from the heat of my skin, holes forming in random spots and eating away at it as the material turned to ash.

Growling, I tore the shreds of my shirt the rest of the way off and discarded the charred bits to the floor beside the treadmill before kicking into a sprint.

Maybe she wasn’t the prophesied siren. Maybe the vampire attack on her mother had nothing to do with Arya but her mother instead.

It would be better if she wasn’t, if she turned out to be just a lost mermaid. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about vampires hunting her down. I wouldn’t have to worry about what my father would do with her if she was. He would turn her into a weapon. He’d take all of her goodness and squash it and mold it until she was the perfect soldier. Just like he’d done to me.

A hand suddenly waved in a wide arc in front of me, making me jump so hard that I almost tripped face-first onto the speeding belt beneath my feet.