He stared out the huge picture window behind us, but I knew he wasn’t seeing the ocean. He was seeing a lifetime ago, long before I was even born. The thought weirded me out a little. For the first time I think I began to understand what it meant to be with someone who was two centuries older than I was, even if he only looked about eighteen.
“But she didn’t stay a baby. She grew up and she was beautiful—my dad’s guards had a hard time keeping all the merboys and selkies away from her.” He snarled when he said merboy. “She never noticed them, though. She only had eyes for Sabyn. Which we still laughed about, until one day, when she was looking at him, I caught Sabyn looking back.
“I told him she was off-limits—he was too old for her, too powerful, too dark. I mean, we’d been friends a long time and I knew what he was like. He went through the maids like they were candy.” His laugh was bitter. “Hell, they were candy for Sabyn. Something to keep him amused for a few days before he found someone else. He’d never hurt any of them at that point, at least none that I’d heard about. Anyway, he agreed, promised me he’d stay away from her.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. They started dating and it got pretty serious, pretty quickly. I was pissed about it and I acted like a total ass to both of them. Maybe if I hadn’t, she would have come to me. She’d always come to me before when she had a problem, always trusted me to fix it for her. But not this time. This time she confronted him on her own.”
“He was cheating on her?”
“Of course. He could say he loved her, but Sabyn isn’t capable of loving anyone but himself. I never blamed him for that, not with the way he was raised. But she was my sister, you know? There were a million mermaids out there who would do anything to be with him. Why couldn’t he just leave her alone?”
He wasn’t asking me, but I answered anyway. “Because he’s a selfish prick with no impulse control?”
Kona laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Yeah. Pretty much. She followed him one night, caught him with some mermaid from an Australian clan. They had a huge fight and he hit her. She came home with a whole side of her face bruised and swollen up. She didn’t tell me it was him, but I knew.
“I went after him, beat the hell out of him. It was my job to protect her, you know?”
“I know.” I smoothed my hands through his hair, pressed soft kisses along his jaw. Did anything I could think of to soothe him. His eyes were wild now, dangerous, and he was shaking so badly I thought he was going to fly apart.
“Maybe if I hadn’t, things would have ended differently. They would have been okay.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. But Sabyn, he’s got a really bad temper. He keeps it under wraps most of the time, but it’s there, never far from the surface. And it turned out he’d been pissed all along that I didn’t think he was good enough for Annalise. Absolutely furious. And he wanted revenge, but he’s such a coward that he didn’t come after me like a normal person would. Like I thought he would. He went after her instead.”
I thought of Sabyn’s power, of how he’d slammed me into the dirt again and again, like it was nothing to him. Imagined how much worse it would have been if I didn’t have as much power as I do. Suddenly, I was terrified to hear what else Kona had to say.
“She didn’t stand a chance. He turned on the charm, apologized, promised her it would never happen again. She wanted to believe him, no matter what I said, so she did. That was her mistake, her stupidity. But she didn’t deserve to die for it, you know? She didn’t deserve—”
He stood up abruptly, like he’d forgotten I was on his lap, and nearly dumped me on my butt.
“Sorry,” he said as I scrambled to put my feet on the floor, but I just shook my head. Now that he was getting the story out, I didn’t want to interrupt. He needed to finish or all that poison was going to end up destroying him.
“He said she’d fallen trying to get away from Tiamat and her goon squad, had even managed to kill a few of them to make it look good. But I saw my sister’s body, saw the bruises around her throat and on every inch of her.
“Sabyn and I were friends for over a century. I know how he fights, know what it looks like when he hits someone with all that power behind it. Hell, I’d fought him myself. There’s no doubt in my mind that he killed my sister. I couldn’t prove it, though, and no one wanted to listen.”
I thought back to what Hailana had said, about how she’d made it sound like Annalise had simply had an accident. “No one wanted to believe that it was him and not Tiamat,” I said.
“No one wanted to believe that one of the most powerful mermen in existence, a prince of the most powerful clan in the Pacific, could be such a monster,” he answered bitterly. “So we burned my sister, scattered her ashes, and that bastard, that sick, twisted son of a bitch, acted like it was nothing. Like she was nothing. And now, now he’s started on you, and I can’t just sit there and wait for him to kill you too.”He whirled around, lashed out so quickly that I never even saw it happen. The huge, decorative mirror that hung on the breakfast nook wall shattered, pieces raining down everywhere, hitting the wood floor while blood streamed from a hundred different cuts on Kona’s fist.
Chapter 21
“Going somewhere?” my dad asked as I tiptoed into the kitchen. He was slumped in a chair, a huge mug of untouched coffee at his elbow.
“Visiting hours start at eight. I don’t want to be late.”
My mother’s grandfather clock chimed out the hour with five deep gongs. As the last one slowly faded, my father smirked. “Yeah, because it takes three hours to get to Linda Vista.”
“It could. With traffic …”
“Come sit down and talk to me.” He patted the chair next to him with a pointed glare. “You look like hell.”
That’s because it had taken me hours the night before to get Kona—and the mirror—cleaned up. To get him calmed down enough to sleep. And then I’d spent the whole rest of the night tossing and turning, long after I heard my father come in a little after midnight.
“You don’t look much better, you know,” I told him.
“Yeah, well, you’re the one I’m concerned about.” He hugged me, brushed a kiss on the top of my head. “I missed you, kid.”
“I missed you guys too.”
He nodded, and his throat worked a little, like he was trying hard not to cry. “Moku’s going to be okay.”
“I know.” I reached for his coffee, took a sip. Tried to swallow despite my tight throat and nearly choked to death.
After he finished patting me on the back, my dad said, “I’m really glad you’re home.”
I nodded again. It was all I could manage.
“How long are you here for?”
“I don’t—I can’t—”
“Okay, then.” He put a hand over mine, calmly waited until I stopped babbling. “We’ll take it one day at a time.”
“That would probably be a good idea.” I paused. “Rio’s still asleep. So will you tell me the truth? What do the doctors really say?”
Long seconds passed and, as I watched him watching me, I wasn’t sure he was going to be completely honest with me. Maybe he couldn’t, for his own peace of mind. The thought had the ball of fear and self-loathing twining tighter in my stomach, until it took every ounce of concentration I had just to sit still.