Page 73 of The Kraken Bride

Because what if I didn’t?

If I continued to refuse, I wouldn’t lose him tonight, but I’d still lose. We both would. Slowly, over centuries, as Jokull destroyed our home. As innocents died and villages fell. And I couldn’t let him live through that. I loved him far too much.

Twenty-five seconds.

He’d told me, chapter and verse, from the very first night. Enemies adore nothing more than exploiting a berserker’s firebrand.

Ten seconds.

It had been a warning. Love over obligation, and everyone would suffer for it.

Now, the stone waited. The convergence crested.

Five seconds.

Four.

Three.

Finally, I made my choice. The choice he’d wanted me to make all along, and my dragon released a cry that would forever haunt me. “I give my permission.”

The light climbed up Sebastian again. There was no scream. No muscles contorted in agony. He simply stopped. The light now drew up into his chest, collecting in his heart. No, replacing his heart. I watched it happen.

I forced myself to witness as love drained from my husband’s face. As my palmprint faded the brand in my chest iced. As his eyes, those shifting, roiling, impossible eyes that had stormed and softened and burned for me since a mist-cloaked clearing in a circle of standing stones went flat.

Then still.

Then cold.

He blinked once, and the wind died. There was nothing there. Not confusion. Not pity. Not even dislike. Empty.

“Sebastian,” I whispered.

“Your obligation has now ended. You may go.”

Dismissed. A barbed lump grew in my throat. “I love you,” I told him.

He was already looking past me, at the reef, at the water, at the work. “Prepare,” he ordered his men. “Jon sent a contingent of shifters here. The worst of the worst. They are hiding. Show them no mercy.”

I wrapped my arms around my middle, tears streaming down my cheeks.

When shifters exploded from the ground and through the reefs–ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred–I stood there, unable to force myself to move. What had I done?

What had I done?

I’d let Sebastian become this… this monster. He cared about nothing except destroying Jokull. Every promise Sebastian had made about the rune had come true.

Permanent, he’d said. Unchangeable.

I’d… I’d lost him. I’d lost my husband and my friend. My best friend. My lover. My everything. I’d just given him away.

A hard thud popped my mental bubble, and the world came back into view. Battle raged all around. Shifters with unhinged jaws and row after row of fangs. Shoulders that heaved and then kept heaving, plates of gray-white cartilage cutting through skin. Arms doubling. Doubling again. Torsos that grew a mass of limbs. Six of them, eight, each tapering to hooked points that punched into rock and held, letting them pour over the reefs, faster than anything their size had any right to move.

Gunnar slew anyone who neared me.

Sebastian fought twenty feet away, cutting a lane through the horde. He didn’t look back. Didn’t care what happened to anyone. But he was magnificent. No berserker rage lived in his movements. Nor any of the terrible, beautiful violence I’d seen him wield beneath the sea when the mers came for us. Only efficiency. His tentacles, now glowing, slicing through those impossible bodies as easily as breathing.

But. And oh, was there a but. When one of his own went down beside him, gut open, reaching up for help, Sebastian stepped on him. Because he needed the angle, and the angle was there, and the man was not the objective. So unlike the king who’d once comforted a citizen after the death of their child.