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Daphne reset her jaw gracefully. “I assume I should be honored you consider me part of that little club?”

I gripped the arm of the chair. When Daphne got snippy, I got hard.

I might have been pissed off as all hell, but my body still reacted to her the same way it had since I opened my damn eyes and realized how kind my ancestors had been. Because an arranged marriage could have stuck me with anyone else.

But I got lucky with the most beautiful, most alluring, most infuriating creature on the planet.

“She’s back,” Nikolas said, turning back toward the hallway after hitting my door two times.

I got up faster than I wanted to admit. But it had been a while since I’d seen her. Not since the end of year party my parents threw. It was hard to pull her away from university, but she tended to take a break in December when the rest of the students went to visit their families.

By the time I got to the main hall, there was a crowd hiding her from me. Everyone was fawning over her, peppering her with questions that she fielded with practiced grace.

The sea of people parted, revealing her. And I stumbled a step.

She’d always been pretty. In an objective, friendly way. But now…now my throat went dry at the sight of her. Little changed other than a few years of age, but I was seeing her in an entirely new light.

One that had distracting, impulsive lust coursing through my veins.

I had to pull myself back from the recesses of my mind.

Because beautiful or not, she’d left without a fucking word. Abandoned responsibilities. People.

“We’re engaged,” I said, cocking my head at her. She clearly needed the reminder. “I’d say you are considered part of the club.”

Daphne’s lips parted slightly. “Fine. If that’s true, then I get to have a say. And I think you should be asking Sabina.”

“No.” The table went taut. I had to consciously calm my tone. Daphne always made my heart rate kick up, now it was just in anger instead of arousal. Mostly. “Not yet anyway. We need to keep this as quiet as we can.”

“Well, I don’t know everything,” Daphne defended.

“You don’t?” The second I said it, I regretted it. Because it came out far too sarcastic. I could see it hit Daphne, could see her restrained flinch. Fuck. “We need to make sure the catches come back up before the fall. Right now, we can blame it on quantity, maybe even more activity in the water from the summer. But different fish get popular in the fall. If those aren’t fine, then we are going to have a real problem.”

Daphne took in the information, her eyes bouncing to different points in the room as she processed.

Yeah, I could only attribute the tightening of my chest to missing that look. While I was busy trying to dispel the ache, Daphne seemed to reach a conclusion.

“Fine,” she said, pausing to take a sip of her wine. “The most likely answer is that the physical distance between us was straining your power.” Straining a lot of things, but neither of us were going to admit that. A pause, then, “At least we know that ceremony did something.”

“What ceremony?” Rose asked, with the force of someone who thought she missed her best friend’s wedding.

Daphne looked at me with soft eyes. She might have wanted nothing to do with me over the past year, but at least she knew when stories weren’t hers to tell.

“The night my brother abdicated,” I began. My knee went fuzzy with the memory of a delicate hand placed there the last time I talked about this. “Daphne was with me during the power transfer. We were formally engaged, so when the power transferred, some of it went to her. There wasn’t confirmation for a while but—”

“Now we know,” Daphne said, effortlessly finishing my sentence.

Something that would have sent a flicker of peace through my chest. But now it just made me itch to leave the room. I used to crave reminders of how close we were, of the fact thatIwas the person she’d allowed in.

Now it felt like those reminders were laughing at me for being a lovestruck fool.

Even then, I couldn’t help but look up and find Daphne’s eyes. It was obvious we were both reliving that night. My mother running into my room. Me going to grab Daphne. Us kneeling together, holding hands while a priest watched as the power of the seas flowed into the veins of a second son, trained to be a soldier instead of a ruler.

“Okay, so Daphne has a smidge of Poseidon in her,” Rose said, breaking the moment between Daphne and I.

“Yeah, well, there’s gonna be a lot more in her once we get married,” I said. Dominic hid a snicker behind the rim of his wine glass.

I shot him a look that saidsay something, I fucking dare you.