Page 21 of A Spark in Time (A Knights Through Time Romance #21)

T he deck pitched beneath Bebe’s bare feet, salt spray stinging her eyes like tears she refused to shed. Three days since Kassander had fallen. Three days since she’d watched him smile that infuriating, beautiful smile one last time before the sea swallowed him whole.

Things that hurt worse than dying: living when everyone you love doesn’t.

Captain Marcos had given her privacy on deck—probably figured a grieving woman was bad luck below. Smart man. She felt like bad luck incarnate, wrapped in a sailor’s cloak that smelled of tar and regret.

The Mediterranean churned black beneath a moonless sky, waves building like her rage—slow at first, then all at once. Lightning flickered on the horizon, nature’s telegraph tapping out a message she didn’t want to read.

From the scrap of fabric she’d tied around her waist months ago— years? centuries? Who was counting anymore? —she pulled out Helen’s Tear.

The diamond caught what little light existed, transforming it into something cold and hungry.

Even now, after everything, it was beautiful.

Beautiful the way poisonous flowers were beautiful.

The way doomed love was beautiful. The way Kassander had been beautiful with blood blooming across his chest like poppies.

“You kept that cursed thing?” she could almost hear him saying, a grin on his face.

“Shut up,” she told the ghost of his voice. “You’re dead. You don’t get opinions anymore.”

The ring pulsed in her palm, eager as a living heart. It had brought her here, ripped her from 1926 and dropped her into this ancient nightmare. It had promised escape and delivered only loss.

First Lysias, who chose Athens over her. Then Kassander, who chose her over living.

Thunder cracked directly overhead, and the rain began—not gentle drops but a deluge, as if the gods themselves were weeping. Or laughing. With Greek gods, it was hard to tell the difference.

She thought of her mother’s bitter wisdom about love and cages. Thought of all those Merriweather women who’d come before her, trading freedom for security, passion for propriety. At least they’d had the luxury of slow suffocation. She’d gotten on the express route to heartbreak.

The ship bucked like a wild horse, and she grabbed the rail with her free hand. The ring cut into her palm, drawing blood—always blood with this damned thing. The crimson mixed with the rain and the salt, dripping onto the deck in patterns that looked almost like words.

No more.

The thought came from somewhere deeper than consciousness, from the place where curses are born and hearts go to die.

“You want an offering?” She screamed at the sky, at the sea, at whatever sadistic forces had orchestrated this cosmic joke. “Fine! Take it!”

She held the ring up to the storm. Lightning illuminated it, everything in stark relief—a woman on the edge of madness, hair already streaking silver from grief, dress plastered to her body like a shroud.

“I name you!” The words tore from her throat, raw and ancient, in a voice that didn’t sound entirely her own. “I name you false promises and broken hearts! I name you the death of love and the birth of cynicism!”

The wind howled approval or protest—who could tell?

“Every woman who carries my blood,” she continued, the vow spilling out like blood from a mortal wound, “every daughter born of my line—may they be torn from their time as I was torn from mine! Cast adrift in ages not their own, searching through centuries for what I’ve lost!

May they love warriors and rogues, dreamers and rebels—men touched by destiny and doomed by it!

Men who burn bright and die young, or live long enough to break hearts!

May their hair turn silver while they’re young, marking them as mine, as cursed, as women who love like drowning! ”

The storm reached a crescendo, waves tall as buildings, rain horizontal in its fury.

The ship groaned, boards screaming in protest. Somewhere below, the sailors prayed to Poseidon.

But Bebe was beyond prayer, beyond gods, beyond everything but rage and pain and the terrible power of a woman with nothing left to lose.

“Let them be brilliant and broken! Let them be fearless and foolish! Let them choose passion over prudence every damned time, and let it destroy them the way it’s destroyed me!”

She thought of future daughters, granddaughters, great-great-granddaughters who’d never exist now because she’d die in Egypt or Rome or wherever this ship was headed. But the curse didn’t care about logic. Curses never did.

“But let their suffering have meaning! Let each broken heart pave the way for the next, until one of my blood learns to love without losing, to choose without destroying! And may this cursed stone find them, guide them, teach them what I could not learn—that love is worth the risk, even when the risk is everything!”

The ring burned ice-cold in her bloodied palm, as if it were sealing the deal, notarizing her pain into cosmic law.

With all the strength left in her body—which wasn’t much after three days of refusing food, of crying until she dry-heaved, of reliving Kassander’s death in technicolor memory—she hurled Helen’s Tear into the raging sea.

For a moment, one impossible moment, the storm stopped. The wind held its breath. The waves froze mid-crash. The rain hung suspended like crystal curtains.

The ring hit the water with a sound like a bell tolling—too loud, too clear, too final.

Then the storm resumed with doubled fury, as if the sea were swallowing her offering, digesting her curse, spreading it through currents that would touch every shore where a Merriweather woman might ever stand.

Bebe collapsed on the deck, wood splinters digging into her knees through the wet chiton.

Her hair—when had so much turned silver?

—hung in her face like seaweed. She looked like what she was: a woman who’d loved deeply and lost, who’d traveled through time only to discover that heartbreak was universal, eternal, inescapable.

Congratulations, Bebe, she thought with bitter humor that would have made Kassander proud. You’ve just invented generational trauma. Mother would be so proud.

Captain Marcos found her there at dawn, curled against the mast like discarded sail. The storm had passed, leaving the sea glassy and innocent, as if it hadn’t just swallowed a curse that would ripple through centuries.

“Lady?” His voice was gentle, worried. “Lady, you live?”

“Unfortunately,” she croaked, throat raw from screaming at gods who probably weren’t listening, anyway.

He helped her stand, noticed her silver-streaked hair with the carefully blank expression of someone who’d seen too much to be surprised by anything.

“Egypt soon,” he said. “Two days, maybe three.”

“Good.” She pulled the cloak tighter, though she’d never be warm again. “I have a new life to build on the ashes of the old one.”

He didn’t ask what she meant. Smart man.

As he helped her below deck, she caught her reflection in a polished shield—silver hair, hollow eyes, the face of someone who’d learned the price of wishes.

Every Merriweather daughter, she thought. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

But she wasn’t, not really. Because at least they’d know love, even if it destroyed them. At least they’d choose their own destruction instead of having it chosen for them.

That was something. That was everything. That was the curse and blessing both, wrapped in silver hair and broken hearts, sailing toward Egypt while behind them, Helen’s Tear sank into darkness, taking its cold light into the deep where all curses wait to be born.

The sea remembered everything.