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Time. There was something about this . . . time. My gaze drifted to the blood moon overhead. Crimson and horrid. It appeared, and the battles began. Like Davorin was somehow attached to the omen, it appeared in his presence.

The coward had yet to show his face.

I spat beside the fallen sea fae woman and took up my blade. There was more blood to spill.

Twenty paces away, Kase lifted his palms, inky shadows coiled around his fingers. He pulled his arms toward his chest. Sea fae trudged toward the shore, water dripping from the scarves over their heads, the rings pierced in their ears. They were a damn infestation.

“Dagny! At your back!” Luca’s voice roared over the crash of blades and angry seas.

My heart stuttered in my chest. Near a low stone barrier on the water’s edge, Dagny fought to be free of the crushing waves, but there were two sea fae with curved swords approaching her from either side.

“No, Dag! Kase, hurry!” I shouted, desperate, a little delirious, as though something inside knew I was too far from her. Kase was too far.

I sprinted for the water. The ring scorched over my skin, hot and sharp like embers in a new flame. My mesmer swirled inside my veins until the surface of my skin ached like someone had taken a torch to my flesh.

Sea folk came close. I used my open palms, mere touches, and they cried out, clutching their heads. Thoughts were too wild, too hurried; I didn’t know if I robbed them of their recollection to breathe, to sleep, to fill their bellies? Perhaps they forgot their blood hailed from the sea. It didn’t matter, the beauty of my mesmer since claiming the queen’s ring was that the initial attack was always disorienting.

It always robbed folk of their wits for a moment.

Trouble was, it drained my own strength. Already, the muscles in my legs barked their fatigue as I carved through the waves. I cursed as I fought to keep pace, but I was passed by Luca. He ran for his wife with a desperation I knew too well. A desperation when the heart knew danger and death awaited the one you loved.

I’d lived it. I’d watched Kase die in my arms.

It was the kind of desperation no lovers should ever experience.

Luca cut down a spindly looking sea fae with a beard to his chest and leapt over a few white capped waves.

Dagny shrieked, slicing her knife at the sea fae, but she stumbled. The sea bastard raised his blade, ready to land the killing blow.

“Dag!” Luca lunged for her.

Time went still. A dagger—or a pain just as wretched—found my heart when Luca covered his wife with his own body and the point of the sea fae’s blade thrust deep into his spine.

Without mercy, the sea fae wrenched his blade free and made a rush for the shore as though Luca were nothing more than an obstacle—as if he were simply . . . nothing.

“Luca!” Kase’s frantic voice was mere paces behind me. Kryv called for their brother, for the man who’d kept them safe from Ivar as children.

Tears blurred my sight as I cut through the waves.

Dagny’s head surfaced and she sobbed as waves struck her over and over. Luca’s hand trembled as it reached for her face.

She gave him a small smile. The sort of smile one gave when it was the last. When your heart knew it would be the final thing another soul might see.

“Dagny, no!” I shouted. “Move!”

The second sea fae remained. A second blade. A second enemy.

Dagny hugged Luca’s head to her chest and lifted her gaze over his tousled hair. The same damn smile she’d offered her husband, she now pointed it at me.

“Tell him we love him,” was all she had time to say before the fae at her back lowered his sword against her throat.

“No!” I doubled over. A reckless move in the middle of battle, but the pain was too consuming. Agony, bitter and sour, robbed the air from my lungs as I watched my friends, my family, fall into the bloody waves.

I couldn’t draw in breath. I couldn’t bleeding see through the tears. Rage, unlike any I’d felt, sifted through the pain. As though the loss of everyone I loved gathered like a furious knot in my chest, I blamed them all on this wretch, this monster, who’d polluted our kingdoms with his hatred.

For the pain of losing Kase to a cruel masquerade.

For Hagen’s lost family.