Page 8

The distance. The sense of direction. It was all committed to memory from her last time on the island.

Marina could appear any moment and resume where they’d left off.

While she was aware of such a fact, Naia couldn’t conjure up enough motive to care. She was drenched and cold in her torn wedding dress, sticky with sand, mentally exhausted from her constant state of anxiety leading up to her wedding.

She could feel her cuts and scrapes healing and her stamina rebuilding.

The downpour eased to a light dabble, and the sudden shift of the storm only piqued Naia’s suspicions.

She lifted to sit up on her knees and stared across the endless darkness of the rolling waves.

Mira could not step foot from beneath the sea, but she would send others in her place.

The snap of a twig sounded from the shadows of the trees.

Naia jumped to her feet and whirled around with her arm raised. Wren’s pointed end positioned in her grasp like a dagger.

Please don’t be a nightrazer.

Keeping her eyes peeled for the night to come alive around her, Naia’s body stiffened.

She waited with bated breath.

Moonlight speared through the storm clouds. A dusky glow cast across the shore. From its luminosity, Naia saw clearer, finding nothing before her but a grove of palms and papaya trees and various shades of wild greenery.

Perhaps it’s only an animal.

After several long seconds, she took a cautious step to investigate, hoping to spot something small and fuzzy. Her eyes scanned the groundcover and slowed over the tropical ferns and fallen breadfruit.

Her gaze connected to a stranger’s face.

Naia gasped. The muscles in her arm tensed as she gripped Wren tighter.

A man stood a few yards from her on a dirt pathway leading through the forest. Hands in the pockets of his black trousers and eyes wide, as if he’d stumbled upon a ghost.

God or mortal?

It had to have been well past midnight. Humans slept. What was the slim chance one was out in the late hours of the night, taking a stroll?

The man lifted one hand from his pocket, mouth parting, and took a step towards her.

Frenzied desperation shot through her system with one thought on loop: I will not go back.

She lunged over the tropical ferns in her path and tackled him to his back before he could come any closer to her. With his torso pinned beneath her thighs, she drove her palm flat on his chest to hold him down. Any sudden movement and she could crush his ribcage.

She drew Wren to his throat with her other hand. “Tell me who you are.”

The man made no move to fight against her, but there was a boldness in his deep-set gaze. “Are you going to slice my throat if I don’t?”

Naia’s resolve faltered, not expecting such a blunt response from him. A contradiction to the thrumming of the wild stride of his heartbeat beneath her palm.

She edged Wren’s needled tip against the bulge of his throat. “Do you want to die?”

While she didn’t have the heart to kill, she could bluff. And if it wasn’t for her senses loathing the crimson sap filling the veins of all living things, she would’ve drawn blood to prove her point.

“At the hands of a beautiful woman like yourself would be a decent way to go. Better than a car accident, or when I’m old and gray and can’t piss by myself.”

Naia gaped at the man, horrified by his indecency towards such a grim subject. “How can you be so indifferent when it involves your death?”