Page 56

The air shifted, something primal curling beneath my skin. Iryen tensed beside me, shoulders straightening, posture coiling like a bow drawn tight. Then, her expression changed.

Recognition. Shock.

Her head dipped slightly in reverence, voice dropping to barely a whisper.

“Your Majesty.”

What? My mother didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just stood there, letting that title settle like a blade at my throat. Majesty?

The words slammed into me like a freight train. My mother?

Pieces slide together badly, violently. Like puzzle fragments being jammed into place where they didn’t belong.

The “lost princess” Iryen had mentioned.

Those endless childhood trips to that remote island. The whispered hints about her family were always brushed aside. “Far, far away,” she’d say. Every time, with a distant smile.

I never questioned her lineage. The questions she never answered. My hybrid nature.

My hands curled into fists.

“What…” My voice came out low, gravel dragged across stone. “What do you mean, ‘Your Majesty’? ”

Silence. The air thickened between us.

Iryen stared at her as if she were staring into the eye of a ghost. My mother didn’t flinch. An unspoken and sharp battle between them. And I was the fool standing in the middle of it, furious and clueless.

“ Tell me. ” The words weren’t a request. They were a demand, fire laced with something darker, betrayal. I would not ask again.

My mother’s voice cut through the tension, crisp as shattered glass. “Not here.”

I’d never heard that tone from her before. There was iron in it. Royalty.

I stepped forward, jaw locked. “Fine. Let’s go inside.”

The lock clicked beneath my hand like a gun cocking, and the storm followed me in.

Iryen’s silence was a blade pressed to my throat, deliberate and maddening.

Her face gave me nothing. No twitch, no shift, just that cold, unreadable calm that only made the fire under my skin burn hotter.

The air between us crackled with tension, thick with unspoken truths, and it was choking me.

I could feel control slipping through my fingers like water soaked in blood.

I needed answers now, or I was going to snap and burn this whole damn secret to the ground.

Inside, the silence clung to the walls like rot.

We settled onto the couch, the balcony’s glass reflecting a version of me I didn’t recognize—tense, coiled, teeth clenched so tight my jaw ached.

I forced my breathing to even out, but it was like inhaling smoke.

The tension in the room wasn’t just thick—it was suffocating , crawling beneath my skin like a disease I couldn’t shake.

“Now,” I said, my voice rough and controlled only by sheer will, “one of you is going to explain to me what the hell is going on.” My gaze cut between them like a blade, demanding, relentless, fraying at the edge of restraint.

Iryen’s voice came softly, laced with hesitation. “It’s… not my place.”

Wrong answer, little siren.

“Then that leaves you, Mom,” I snapped. Harsher than I meant, maybe. But I couldn’t care less. Not when my world was unraveling thread by thread and they were just sitting there, wrapped in silence and secrets.

She flinched. Not visibly, but I knew her too well. Her eyes met mine, raw and glistening, and for the first time in years I saw her, not the perfect mask she wore, but the woman beneath. Haunted. Worn. Terrified .

“You almost died,” she said, barely above a whisper. Her voice cracked, and something about the way her shoulders trembled twisted the blade already buried deep in my chest. “How?”

The question hit harder than I expected. I stared at her. This woman I thought I knew—my mother—was scared. Not just for me. Of something . Of everything . The grief in her voice wasn’t new. Carved into her bones.

I glanced at Iryen. She gave a subtle nod, but her eyes said more than she dared to speak.

“ Tell her. She deserves to know.” Her voice rang in my mind.

So I did. Slowly. Carefully. But with every word I spoke about the cave, the drowning, the shift, the water obeying me like a beast beneath my skin, something in me kept unraveling.

I told her about Iryen, about the pull between us, the bond I couldn’t name but couldn’t ignore.

The power I didn’t want but now owned me.

By the time I finished, the silence had thickened again, but this time charged with hurt.

My mother looked broken in a way I’d never seen.

Not weak, shattered . Her gaze lingered on Iryen longer than it should’ve, as if she was trying to solve a puzzle she already knew the answer to but didn’t want to admit.

“I never wanted you to find out this way,” she said at last, voice low, thick with something old and aching. “Truthfully… I hope you’d never find it at all. But it seems the goddess has other plans.”

Her eyes drifted to the window, unfocused, as though she were watching ghosts and bracing for something painful.

“When I met your father,” she began, her tone distant, almost hollow, “someone was trying to kill him on the beach. I was young. Stupid. I disobeyed my parents constantly and snuck to the surface world more times than I can count. I liked the feel of the sand under my feet. The quiet of the human night.”

She paused. And then—

“One of those nights, I saw a man stab your father. And I felt it. Not just the horror… his pain . But deeper than that, something tearing in my soul. I knew right then he was mine. My mate.”

I blinked. The word felt loaded. Heavy. Fated .

She continued, almost in a trance. “The man kept stabbing him. Over and over. And with each slice, I was unraveling. I needed him to live. To breathe . I didn’t think, just acted. Using my powers, I drowned the man without hesitation.”

Her voice dropped, and her eyes looked far away.

“I would’ve killed a hundred more if I had to.”

The thought of my father almost dying before I was even a flicker of existence clawed at something raw inside me.

A twisted knot coiled in my gut, sour and heavy, and nausea crept up my throat like bile.

We never got along, not really. He was cold, political, always thinking ten moves ahead, even for his own son.

But knowing he might’ve bled out on some goddamn beach before I, or my sister, ever breathed?

That hit differently.

It was like staring down a version of my life that had never existed. One wrong turn, one second too late, and I would’ve been nothing . Not born. Not broken. Not this .

I inhaled slowly, trying to steady the chaos twisting beneath my ribs. “So… he knows?”

My mother’s lips pressed together before she answered, her voice low with memory.

“Imagine his shock,” she said, eyes flicking somewhere distant, “watching as waves, nine feet high, rose out of the sea. Arms made of water coiled around the man, stabbing him and dragging him under like he was nothing more than driftwood.”

She paused, and I could almost see it—the chaos, the raw desperation. “He saw everything , Adrian. I didn’t care. I hadn’t learned to hide it yet, and I was too terrified to even try.”

Her voice cracked. But there was something more behind it, something reverent.

Almost… holy . “The secret of my ancestors, our ancestors, guarded with blood and silence, was suddenly in the hands of a human. And I should’ve panicked.

But I didn’t.” Her voice dropped, nearly a whisper.

“Because he didn’t look at me with fear.

He looked at me as if I were divine . Like I was something sacred. ”

Unlike you. That nagging voice inside of me whispered.

A chill danced down my spine. There was a strange ache in my chest, a mix of awe and something darker. I couldn’t tell if it was regret or envy. Maybe both. She looked at me then, really looked, and softened in a way that made me want to punch something.

“That’s why I took the risk, son. I left it all behind. My crown. My bloodline. I am a spiritual siren. I could hide from the scouts my father sent to drag me back.”

“King Orion of Erythion,” I muttered, and her eyes snapped sharply toward Iryen like knives unsheathed. “Yeah, Mom. My grandfather . I know.”

Her jaw tightened, and she dragged a hand through her hair as though she were trying to pull the tension out by force. “They would never have accepted a human mate. They would have forced me to reject him.”

She looked away then, toward Iryen, and the emotion that passed between them was so thick I could barely breathe through it. Something cracked in my chest as I saw it: pity .

“You do not know what that does to a siren,” she murmured, her voice hollow and tired. “What that kind of rejection costs. ”

I swallowed hard. My mother—Princess, liar, traitor to her kingdom, savior of my father—had once drowned a man and betrayed her crown…

all because some stranger looked at her like she wasn’t a monster.

And now I was standing here, the product of that choice, staring into a future that felt more like a void.

I looked between them, my gaze flicking like a blade between mother and mate, if I could call her that. A slow, sinking weight dragged in my gut, cold and corrosive.

“What a rejection does?” The words tasted bitter in my mouth. I turned toward Iryen, who had been a goddamn statue through this entire conversation. “What would it do to you ?”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t flinch. She didn’t even look at me.

Just shifted her gaze to some point on the far wall like it held all the answers she refused to give. My chest tightened, breath catching in the space between rage and heartbreak. That silence… it said too much. And not enough.

My mother exhaled slowly, her voice laced with something jagged.

“If a siren survives a forced rejection, her powers weaken. Her soul…” she paused, eyes hollowing out like she’d lived it, or watched someone else die from it.

“Shatters. What’s left is a shell. Breathing, moving, but barely alive. Haunted. Empty.”