A group of teenagers sat on a row of benches on the boardwalk, laughing and having fun, but all I could do was scowl.

What exactly had gone wrong tonight?

Eva and I had the best day together, and I had thought our night was even better. She’d finally confided in me about her past, and I had thought we’d shared something intense and real.

She had wanted me to kiss her. She’d asked me to kiss her.

And that kiss…

It still had my heart racing even an hour later. I’d been walking around town, trying to make sense of it, but there was no explanation for why she’d just run off like that.

I knew she’d felt the same thing I had. Fate. Destiny. Whatever you wanted to call it, the kiss we shared was full of it. She couldn’t still want to leave Willow Harbor after that kiss.

Could she?

The question made me want to turn back around and head to the Willow Harbor Inn to ask her myself, but the Finnygoods would have their claws into her by now. They were great people, but they were also old-fashioned. A gentleman caller this time of night would be frowned upon, to say the least, and they would send me away with a harsh look and few strong words.

I would have to just trust Eva would be true to her word about at least staying for the festival tomorrow. I needed to talk to her about what had happened tonight and how we were going to deal with it now that we both knew there was something real between us.

That kiss had me completely mixed up. We belonged together, and yet I knew as well as anyone you couldn’t force someone to be with you if they didn’t feel the same way. If she wanted to stay and find a way for us to be together, that would have to be her choice.

And then there was the issue of Selena.

I still hadn’t told Eva about the siren who held my shackle. I hadn’t told her who I really was or how I’d ended up here in Willow Harbor. I couldn’t imagine how horrible her life had been in Vegas, but she was finally free. She might not want the added complication of a siren right now.

Not that I could blame her.

What we needed was a way to both be free of our troubled pasts. But how?

No matter how much I tried to come up with a solution, my mind couldn’t work through the puzzle. Eva was free for now, but how long would that last?

Willow Harbor might be a tough place to find, but if the demon in Vegas was as determined as she said he was, it was only a matter of time before he came here looking for her. And if he was as smart and manipulative as Selena, it wouldn’t take him long. I was guessing he probably had some way of tracking her, even if Eva wasn’t aware of it.

I knew from experience once someone like that viewed you as their property, they didn’t intend on ever letting you go.

And as for Selena, well, that was a puzzle I’d been trying to figure out for the past ten years.

No one had ever found a way to escape from her. The only way was to convince her to let me go, but she wasn’t exactly the type to just say yes because someone asked nicely.

By the time I got back to Drifter’s, I wasn’t any closer to a solution than I had been for the last decade. Frustrated, I threw open the door, ready to rant to Drifter about Selena like I’d been doing for years when a familiar face turned to stare at me across the nearly-empty bar.

“It’s about time you showed up, brother.”

I groaned. I really didn’t need this right now.

“What are you doing here, Leonidas?”

My younger brother, Leonidas, stood and crossed the room. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, and there was a good reason for that. We weren’t exactly best friends, he and I.

“You don’t look too happy to see me, Nikolas,” he said. “Is it a bad time?”

“Isn’t it always a bad time?” I asked.

I passed by him without a second look and tapped the top of the bar. Drifter chuckled and poured me a beer and a shot of whiskey before he gave me a look and headed back into the kitchen to give us some privacy. Luckily, there was no one else here tonight.

I downed the shot first and chased it with a good long pull on the beer. After the night I’d had, I needed it just to get through this conversation, which was bound to be another lecture about how I’d let the family down.

“I’ll ask again,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Leo shrugged and walked casually back to sit at the barstool next to me.

“Can’t a guy just want to come visit his brother to say hello?” he asked.

“Not usually,” I said. “Usually you have some other agenda, like telling me for the hundredth time what a mistake I’d made and what an embarrassment I am to our father, the mighty king.”

“Well, yes, all that is true, but tonight I’ve come for a different reason,” he said.

Great. This should be interesting.

“And what is that?” I asked.

“To tell you that our sister, Aurelia, is getting married,” he said. “And for some strange reason, she wants to invite you to the wedding.”

I nearly choked on my beer at his words. “Married?” I asked. “To who?”

“To Anders Shellborn,” he said. “If you can believe it.”

“That guppy?” I asked. “Since when is our father going to give approval to that kind of match? Anders isn’t even from a high-born family.”

Leo sighed. “Since he lost his first-born son to a siren,” he said, his voice filled with sorrow. “He misses you like you wouldn’t believe, Nik. We all do.”

The emotion in his words caught me off guard. It wasn’t like Leo to be so honest or sentimental. What was really going on back home?

“I know I give you a hard time, but the past year or so, I think it’s finally truly started to sink in that you aren’t coming back to us,” he said.

“I tried to tell you that a decade ago,” I said, sitting down, the weight of it all feeling so heavy on my shoulders.

“All we could see for the longest time was that you’d made a bad decision that had cost us all and was a scar to our family name and honor,” Leo said. “But lately, we’ve been talking and started to realize how hard this must be on you, too.”

“What’s really going on, Leo?” I asked, finally turning to look my brother in the eye. This wasn’t like him at all, and his sadness worried me a hell of a lot more than his usual anger.

He shook his head. “Father is not well,” he said. “That’s part of why I haven’t been to see you in a year. Shortly after my last visit, our kingdom was attacked by a group of leviathans. It was completely unexpected, and even though we fought hard, there were a lot of casualties. Father nearly died himself, trying to protect the kingdom. He’s never fully recovered, and his health has been declining rapidly ever since.”

A lump formed in my throat, and I tried to swallow it down with the last of my beer, but it stayed there, refusing to disappear.

I had told myself I didn’t care about that life anymore. It was a part of my past and would never be a part of my future, but the news of my fellow tritons dying in an attack I wasn’t there to help defend made me feel sick to my stomach and ashamed to my core.

“I should have been there,” I said.

“Yes, you should have been,” Leo said, the familiar anger rising in his voice. “But after that attack, I think we all realized our pride has been misplaced all this time. We were once mighty beings, rulers of the sea, but we’ve grown complacent over the years. Lazy. We haven’t been training our warriors to defend us, because we believed we were invincible. That’s part of the reason why we were all so angry at you for being captured by a siren’s song. You were supposed to be stronger than that. Smarter. We all were. But the attack made us realize that maybe we are all more vulnerable than we wanted to admit.”

His words chilled me to the bone. Things must be really bad for him to be saying these things, and I couldn’t help but feel guilty for abandoning them the way that I had, even if that had never been my intention.

At the same time, my guilt made me even more determined to find a way to break free of Selena’s hold on me. There had to be a way.

“I wish you could come home,” Leo said, his words echoing my thoughts. It was the first time in ten years he’d told me that, and whether I wanted to admit it or not, it meant a lot to me.

Despite our differences and our arguments, he was my family. I hadn’t forgotten that.

“I do, too,” I said.

I touched the silver shackle on my wrist, more determined than ever to make it more than just a wish.

---

Long after my brother had gone back to the kingdom under the waves, I sat in bed looking out at the vast ocean. The moon was nearly full, and its light shone across the water like diamonds scattered across glass.

I’d lived here in this room above the bar for almost ten years, staring at the ocean and feeling so disconnected from it that it broke my heart every time I looked at it. It was my home and yet I didn’t belong there anymore.

I had disgraced my family and my people by falling for a siren’s lure. All this time, I had believed that even if I managed to find my way back home someday, they would shun me and send me away.

But now, after talking to Leonidas, I realized that had all been a lie I told myself. I believed I wasn’t worthy of their love anymore, because my choices were simply unforgivable.

The truth was their anger was more about their sadness than their hatred and disappointment.

My father was dying. My sister was getting married. The kingdom was now training all tritons to be warriors who could defend our lands under the sea from all predators.

I was the one who was supposed to be there, leading at my father’s side. Instead, I was here on land, living out my days as a drug-runner and a simple fisherman. I was so far from the prince I once was I hardly recognized myself.

I was ashamed that I had given up so easily. That I had lost hope so quickly and accepted my fate rather than fighting for my freedom.

Staring out at the water, I realized Eva’s presence in my life at this exact time was no accident. Fate had brought her here to show me that there was still something worth living for.

And in the brief time I had known her, she had also taught me that freedom was worth fighting for, no matter the cost.

She told me she’d spent the last thirteen years coming up with plan after plan of how she would escape Dominic. Every time a plan would fail, she would go right back to the beginning, determined to try again.

If she’d simply given up like I had, she would still be in Vegas, locked away in some tower suite staring out at an ocean of neon lights. Instead, she kept going until she had escaped. Somehow, against all odds, she had made it all the way across the country, barely stopping for several days until she crashed here of all places. Just as I was standing there to see her and help her.

That was no coincidence. I understood that now.

For years, I had heard people talk of the magical willow tree and how sometimes its whispers stretched for hundreds of miles, bringing the right people here at just the right time. I believed in magic, but I had never seen the magic of the tree—of this town—until Eva.

She had awakened hope inside of me, but it was more than that. She had awakened the warrior inside of me.

I didn’t care how long it took, I was going to find a way to be free of Selena. And if I could, I would find a way to make sure Eva was safe from Dominic.

That night, I slept better than I had in ages. And in my dreams, for the first time since I’d come to Willow Harbor, I was a triton again.