Page 76 of The Kraken Bride

Sebastian’s eyes changed.

My back straightened. I saw that… right? On a wall, in a cave, I saw the emotionless creature my husband had become waver. The flat, dead gray broke, and for a quarter of a heartbeat the sea stormed back into his irises.

Hope sparked. The firebrand bond might be a force even the rune hadn’t accounted for.

I watched as Sebastian ended Jon in a not so efficient manner. The ground beneath the shifter king erupted. White tentacles coiled up around his ankles and sliced both his feet off in one brutal arc. Jon crashed backward, screaming, and Sebastian rose. Then he took the shifter apart. Slowly. Methodically. Thoroughly. Long past any point where Jon could have posed a threat. And when there was nothing left on the black rock but red, my husband stood over it, breathing hard, staring down at his own hands as if he could not entirely account for them.

He popped his neck, turned, already icing over. Moving forward, he issued new orders. Jokull wasn’t far now.

But hope stirred within me. Sebastian was still in there. He’d heard another man threaten to take me, and he’d slipped through the rune stone for one second like a leviathan breaking water.

I got to my feet. “I know what to do,” I said, out loud, to the cave, to the realm.

If I put myself in front of him, in danger, where he had to choose, he might break through again. Longer. Permanently. And I might be able to reach him. Or he might not break at all. But either way, I could make sure my presence advanced his mission to kill Jokull.

The wall shifted before I asked it to, revealing the manor half-swallowed by the trench, where the sea kissed the abyss, past the last membrane of the dome, past Sebastian’s territory. And inside, at the head of a dining table I’d sat at a week ago, was Jokull. Platters were laid out along the length of the tabletop. Thankfully, nothing looked human, kraken or mer.

Nearby sat Harpa, hair wild, clothing bloodstained from battle, confined in a cage that hung from the ceiling.

I pressed a hand to my throat. The walls around them glowed a dull, patient red. The rune Harpa and I had used to escape dinner was already scrubbed away, making his dome as un-enterable as Sebastian’s. I’d bet un-leavable too.

So how was I seeing this?

“How do you think?” Harpa, through the dome, met my gaze—and winked.

Air sucked between my teeth. She knew I watched them. Was she the reason I could do it? Had she allowed herself to be captured like a Trojan horse I could use to my advantage?

“How do I think what?” Jokull asked her.

“When I’m talking to you, primmy, you’ll know it,” the Raving Pearl snapped.

He pursed his lips and drummed his fingers against the arms of his chair. “I expected your grandson to reach us sooner. Does he not love you?”

“Right now, he doesn’t love anyone but the thought of your demise. But why are you complaining? You’ve been run ragged. You need time to recover.”

“I am fine,” he snapped.

He looked fine. But maybe he protested too much. Just like he’d oh, so adamantly claimed he wished only to win Sebastian’s friendship. But had he spoken true? Like called to like, ja, but I’d bet this man had other plans. When Sebastian entered, would he become trapped? A kraken to slaughter?

Something in me went very quiet and very cold. Here’s what I knew: I couldn’t kill Jokull without the rune. I had watched Harpa take his head off over dessert and watched him grow a new one and keep eating. Fire would not do the job; I’d proven that too on the island. Steel wouldn’t work. Nothing in me, and nothing in Ashmorra, and nothing in the sea would do it. Except Sebastian.

I’d felt the rune’s power. Jokull had felt the rune’s power. And yet, the primordial still believed he could circumvent a permanent death. But I—Bronwyn Drachenveil, Queen of Krakenströnd, Pirouette Princess—would not let Sebastian walk into battle alone.

Jokull expected a king with a stone heart, and that’s what he’d get. But he would also get a ballerina with fire in hers.

My dragon rose in my chest, uncoiling slowly, the way she had the night Jokull ate my finger, and she looked through my eyes at the thing at the table and said, very quietly: His end has come.

“Ja,” I whispered. And once he was taken care of, my real mission would begin: drilling through that stone to get to the husband trapped inside it.

Ready, I set both palms against the cave wall. Every rune in every stone in that ancient sea turned toward me, relieved. Even those on the dome. I knew I couldn’t travel straight to Jokull. If I could, Sebastian could, and if he could, he would have.

“I’d like to speak with Jokull,” I said. To the dome. To Harpa. “Can you arrange it?”

Blue flashed over the walls, reflecting from the waters above and below, and suddenly I felt as if I were standing in that dining room with Jokull, even though I still stood inside the cave. “Hello, Jokull.”

He frowned at me. “This is… interesting.”

Harpa yawned. “Life with me always is.”