Page 75 of The Kraken Bride

Honestly, he was a magnificent commander. He deployed his warriors across the outer reefs with perfect precision to battle the shifters. No wasted men, no wasted hours, every position chosen for reasons that only became visible three days later when Jokull’s mers came at the exact angle Sebastian had already covered.

He remained in contact with this cave. Not appearing, but connecting with it, soaking in its intel from a distance. I felt him every time he did it, his icy essence dropping the temperature at least ten degrees.

Like me, he didn’t sleep. Never ate unless someone put food in front of him, and then he ate all of it, quickly, without seeming to taste it.

On the fourth day, a soldier failed to hold his position. Forty men died, and Harpa was captured and carried away. I saw her go down. She laughed as she put her back to a reef arm and slew at least ten shifters and mers before others got a net over her shoulders. But even then she was laughing.

They carted her off, and the wall showed me Sebastian, now forty men down, watching his grandmother disappear into the dark.

He didn’t go after her or order it done. He looked at the greenhorn fighter who’d broken formation for two full seconds. Reassigned him to the rear supply lines, where failure would cost less. And turned to the next battle. Because he felt nothing. He simply recalculated.

Saving Harpa was not the objective.

I didn’t worry for her. Much. She was brilliant and resourceful and Jokull didn’t want her dead. Plus, she would figure it out like she’d done with everything else. The real question was, would I figure out my own impossible task? How was I supposed to win over an emotionless robot?

He hunted Jokull without mercy. Village by village, reef by reef, always marching forward. He took the primordial’s forces apart. Mers, shifters, anything that came out of the trench to feed. He never lost a battle. But he did lose plenty of men. And still, he just kept going.

On the fifth day, Gunnar approached him wearing grief like a winter coat, begging him to find another way. “You need your wife. Let me bring her to you.”

Sebastian merely canted his head at the man he’d once called friend. “I’ll hear no more talk of her. Either you are with me, or you are against me. Those against me die.”

I shook my head. This wasn’t my Sebastian. I still had no idea how to reach him.

On the sixth day, he found Jon. They met on a black ridge above the trench, at the ragged edge of everything, where Sebastian’s own dome thinned to a membrane and the abyss opened its mouth below.

Jon was fully shifted, a towering, plated, serrated nightmare of endless hooked limbs. His remaining shifters, still a staggering number, spread out behind him in a wall.

I pressed my hands to my churning stomach as Sebastian walked into the midst of them with Gunnar on his heels. Battle erupted.

I’d witnessed a great deal of violence since coming to this realm, but I had never seen anything like my husband on that ridge. His shadow tentacles came out of him, glowing white—rune-white—and they sliced through shifters like a blade through smoke. He didn’t hurry, didn’t stop, didn’t miss, and in a matter of minutes, he took a hundred shifters apart.

Gunnar fought at his back the way he’d fought at mine. Until he didn’t.

I saw it coming three seconds before it happened. Three whole seconds—enough time to scream, but it did him no good because I was a hundred miles away watching from a glowing wall.

Jon came at Sebastian’s blind side while he was mid-strike. Gunnar was closer, and he didn’t hesitate to stop it. Of course he didn’t. He was the mountain man, and he put himself in front of his king. The shifter’s shadow engulfed him, and Gunnar vanished. Just for a second, but when Jon released him, Gunnar, who had carried me through a burning forest, who had bowed to me in a hallway and called me my queen, was nothing but bone shards.

Agony tore at me.

One day. That was all the time between “let me bring her to you” and this. He had asked for me, and been told that those against his king died, and he had stayed anyway. He had stood at Sebastian’s back until there was no more back to stand at.

Anyone who harms you will die screaming. Gunnar had said it the day we met, so matter-of-factly he might have been remarking on the weather. I had laughed and told him I’d rather he didn’t do any dying.

That’s on you now, isn’t it?

On the ridge, Sebastian stepped over him. The same stride he’d used on the soldier at the reefs, as if it cost him nothing, because Gunnar wasn’t the objective either. Forty years of my king, my king, my king, and my husband did not look down.

I toppled to my knees and pressed my forehead to the cave floor, releasing a broken sound I’d never made before. Fresh tears rained over my cheeks.

I only looked up when battle sounds came again, Sebastian taking Jon head-on.

He let the shifter king grab him. He didn’t move as a shadow tentacle came out of the wreckage, wrapped around his throat and yanked him to his knees. Impact cracked the ridge beneath him.

“Remember when we used to share everything?” Jon said, his monstrous mouth splitting into a grin. “It’s time to revive that old tradition. Jokull says I can have your firebrand when you’re dead.”

Sebastian didn’t speak or struggle. I saw the wheels turning in his eyes. He was measuring the angle of Jon’s stance, the distribution of his weight, the position of his own hands.

Jon was too drunk on his supposed victory to realize he was about to lose everything. “I want you to know. Jokull will take your grandmother.” Jon reared back. “Today, I’ll take your throne, and I’ll take your queen⁠—”