This problem had roots deeper than Reese had thought.

  Wrenly had said Myla and Theresa were romantic with each other, it just hadn’t clicked until that moment.

  And Cillian, he had been their cover.

  He hadn’t known about it. All he knew was that the woman he had meant to wed was laying with another woman behind his back.

  Reese could only assume that when he found out it was about the time Theresa became engaged to Derrick.

  And he had stayed silent all this time.

  Through what Reese could only imagine as hurt and confusion, he hadn’t thrown her out into the open until she had rejected him yet again.

  “You two need to work it out.” Luca shook his head. “I know it’s a lot, but we’re not going to survive by holding grudges.”

  Cillian hung his head.

  Reese didn’t want to know what was going through his head. The poor man probably blamed himself for Theresa’s preferences.

  “Do this together, and we’ll work on it more as we go,” Reese said.

  “Fine.” Theresa rolled her eyes.

  She was going to be the one that would be hard to break.

  Reese couldn’t figure out why she seemed to hate Cillian so much. She could understand why Cillian would be upset; he had done nothing but love Theresa.

  But Theresa was stubborn. She had to be to survive in a world like this.

  Well, the world that had existed before the carnival.

  Reese was growing less and less sure that world still existed.

  There was nothing to tell her how long they had been trapped. No newspapers, no villages full of people to tell them what had happened.

  There wasn’t even a dock to sail away from.

  Slowly, the groups peeled away from each other in search of the things they would need.

  Piles of vines stacked up.

  Sticks for firewood and fishing poles stacked up next to them.

  Reese sat in the sand with the water lapping at her legs as she tied knot after knot into the vines they’d collected it, weaving it into a net they would hopefully be able to use to catch fish.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  A large splash caught Reese’s attention.

  Figuring one of the others was fooling around in the water, she looked up from her work.

  She scrambled back as her eyes landed on a shark that somehow wound up on shore. Its beady black eyes stared into nothing as Reese got tangled in her own net.

  “Don’t panic.”

  Reese’s head whipped up as it spoke.

  The shark had spoken?

  What madness had fallen to the rest of the world while she’d been trapped?

  Then a head popped up over the shark.

  Black hair was plastered to her face, seaweed tangled into the strands of her dripping locs. Reese’s eyes stared at her from across the unmoving shark.

  “Who are you?” Reese asked, the appearance of the stranger clarifying none of her confusion.

  “Your mother. I brought a peace offering.” The woman gestured to the shark in front of her.

  With a start, Reese realized the shark was dead.

  It was meant to be a meal.

  Because that was how it worked in the sea. It was eat or be eaten, and this large shark had lost to a remarkably small woman.

  “Why should I believe you?” Reese asked. She tried to untangle herself from the net as discreetly as she could.

  “Because I brought you food? That’s not something we do for strangers in the deep. Only the strongest survive, your father taught you that much.” The woman frowned.

  He had.

  “You left us, a long time ago, why come back now?” Reese asked.

  “Because you need me,” she said.

  “I’ve needed you before and you never came then.” Reese scowled.

  “I knew you were capable of getting through that on your own, and you did.” The woman hauled herself up over the shark’s corpse. Purple scales and fins flashed along her torso and elbows, leading down to an iridescent fish tail.

  Her father hadn’t been joking about her mother being a siren.

  “But now you suddenly doubt my capability? I’m not even alone this time.” Reese’s brain was screaming at her to take more notice of the tail, but she forced herself to keep her eyes on the woman’s face.

  “You might as well be, these land dwellers know nothing of our home.” Reese could hear the disgust in her mother’s voice.

  “You had three children with one of these land dwellers.” Reese shook her head, not understanding how she could have done that with such disdain for humans.

  “You think I did that because I loved him?” She laughed.

  “Why else would you?” Reese asked.

  “Because there are no menfolk down there. We need these miserable humans to ensure we don’t die out.” The siren shook her head full of seaweed.

  She hadn’t left because fate had forced her hand, she had left because she was cruel, and she had never loved them to being with.

  Reese stood up and backed away, her feet, still tangled in the net, tripped her and sent her back to the sand.

  “You could swim away with me, learn your place in the ocean, and leave these fools to fight amongst themselves.” The woman suggested.

  “Reese?”

  Reese heard wood clatter as Luca dropped the sticks he must have been carrying and he ran to her. Sand sprayed at her side as he slid to his knees beside her.

  “Are you alright?” His hands immediately found where her feet were tangled in the net and began to pull the vines away.

  “A human?” Her mother hissed.

  Luca flinched away from the sound, but he looked up, and locked eyes with Reese’s mother.

  Despite the scales and sharp barbs coming out of places they never would on a human, he didn’t shy away from the siren.

  “He’s not like most of them,” Reese said.

  “Them?” Luca shot Reese a confused look.

  “He is, he’s just caught by your song.”