Page 8 of Waters that Drown Us

“It makes me stronger,” she says, mostly to herself.

“Survival doesn't make you stronger, it just makes you survive,” I argue, mostly tomyself. “You work out, right? Muscles need rest and care to heal and grow. If you keep working them to exhaustion, eventually they’ll fail.”

Emily looks at me like I slapped her across the face. Something flits across the screen, but it’s not a jellyfish.

“Not everyone has the luxury of avoiding what they’re afraid of,” she bites out, something like resentment flickering across her face. I nearly choke suppressing a laugh. Yes, a life of hiding from Ilya and my father has been nothing short of opulent.

“Who said you should run from them?” I argue, my eyes catching on another spout in the distance. “There are differences between avoiding your fears, facing them, and overcoming them.”

Emily’s incredulous expression doesn’t change, like my words don’t have any meaning to her. If I hadn’t had to search for the English wordovercoming, I would have thought I accidentally slipped back into Russian.

I don’t say anything else, and neither does she. For the next three hours we watch the monitor in silence, not a single sea nettle to be found. Eventually, she looks down at her watch, and without explanation starts reeling in her ROV and packing up her materials. I put the boat in gear and let the roar of the engine fill the silence thick between us.

And when I’m roping the boat to the bollards, I remember the word I was looking for. ??????? ????. Sea snake.

Chapter 4

Emily

“Ithought you were supposed to be researching rockfish.”

My laptop is propped open on my bed, and the hotel room is small enough that I can hear Charlie’s voice from the bathroom where I’m brushing my teeth.

“My PhD advisor suggested the topic change to coincide with a climate change grant,” I yell through a mouth full of toothpaste. Charlie grumbles about how hecan’t understand a word I’m sayingas I spit into the sink and splash water on my face.

“Didn’t we give them the money for the research? Don’t we decide what you study?” Clara mutters irritably. I can tell she’s distracted because usually she would be much more bitchy about something like this.

“The donation was anonymous. And it would be pretty suspicious if I insisted on arguing with my advisor about the species of venomous animal we should spend weeks hunting down when I’m supposed to be worshipping the ground she walks on,” I shout into the main room while tugging on my cargo pants. “Plus, why do you care? We did the important part—we found the city Alisa was in and made up a reason to be here.”

To be fair, I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t going to be able to stick with the rockfish cover. Mostly because they hang out in more shallow waters than these fucking jellies.

“As long as you’re getting information out of her, you can get stung or bit by whatever you want,” Clara says. I’m fully dressed and decent, so I move back in front of the laptop so I can see them. Gwen is on her first solo mission for The Syndicate—I think Clara sent her just to see Charlie squirm—and Bea’s phone went straight to voicemail when we started the call, so it’s only Clara, Deniz, and Charlie on the screen.

“It’s been a day and a half. Let me warm up a little,” I say, trying to infuse my normal irreverent charm to hide whatever inexplicable emotion is stuck in my chest.

My first day with Alice was not at all what I expected. She was…argumentative. Almost combative. Despite over a decade of keeping tabs on her from a distance, I never expected her to be anything but docile. Particularly knowing Konstantin would never have tolerated a hostile daughter. But the realization shook me for a reason I couldn’t pinpoint until late into the night.

It took hours of laying in this bed and staring at the ceiling to accept that I hadobjectifiedAlisa. All these years, I had taken the few moments I actually spent in her vicinity and built an imaginary person on them. I know a lot of thingsabouther—her blood type, the languages she speaks, the way she prefers her coffee—but I don’tknowher.

It makes the work I have to do so much easier. She’s not this shimmering standard of beauty that I’ve been mooning over since I was a teenager. Like Clara told me all those months ago, she’s just a target.

So what if I’ve spent the last decade and a half watching recordings of any event Alisa attended in the name ofresearchto see her face again? Who cares if it felt like a gut punch whenher engagement to the eldest Andreeva brother was announced? Or that I threw up in an airplane bathroom when I heard she died?

I was mourning the version of her I created in my head. Every time I thought of Alisa over the past decade, I imagined the girl on stage, the quiet and creative excellence, the sly smile she would give her father at events, the gentle and delicate way she laughed when paraded around by Ilya. I mournedAlisa, whoever I thought she was.

But Alice? She’s nothing to me. A puzzle I have to solve to get one step closer to destroying Konstantin and avenging the attack on Lucia. Separating the childhood crush from the woman before me is necessary, for the success of my mission and for my own sanity.

I am a daughter of The Syndicate of Fate. I know better than anyone that the means will eventually be justified by the ends. Alice may be a victim of her fathers villainy, but so is Lucia. And my allegiance is to the family who has loved and protected and mentored me my whole life, not the girl I had a childhood crush on.

If I have to sacrifice her to her father, so be it.

“Emily, are you listening to me?”

Clara’s voice is no longer distracted. I shake myself out of the spiral I was falling down and focus on the screen, displaying her very pissed face.

“Sorry, no I wasn’t,” I admit, turning around to load my backpack with the equipment I charged last night. “Was thinking through my plan for the day.”

“Well I suggest you get your act together, because if you don’t confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that she’s not involved with her father,andmilk every ounce of information you can about his operations out of her, by the end of August, we will.”