Page 100 of Rise of the Siren Queen
“Then that leaves you, Mom,” I snapped. Harsher than I meant, maybe. But I couldn’t care less. Not when my world wasunraveling thread by thread and they were just sitting there, wrapped in silence and secrets.
She flinched. Not visibly, but I knew her too well. Her eyes met mine, raw and glistening, and for the first time in years I saw her, not the perfect mask she wore, but the woman beneath. Haunted. Worn.Terrified.
“You almost died,” she said, barely above a whisper. Her voice cracked, and something about the way her shoulders trembled twisted the blade already buried deep in my chest. “How?”
The question hit harder than I expected. I stared at her. This woman I thought I knew—my mother—was scared. Not just for me.Of something. Ofeverything. The grief in her voice wasn’t new. Carved into her bones.
I glanced at Iryen. She gave a subtle nod, but her eyes said more than she dared to speak.
“Tell her. She deserves to know.”Her voice rang in my mind.
So I did. Slowly. Carefully. But with every word I spoke about the cave, the drowning, the shift, the water obeying me like a beast beneath my skin, something in me kept unraveling. I told her about Iryen, about the pull between us, thebondI couldn’t name but couldn’t ignore. The power I didn’t want but now owned me.
By the time I finished, the silence had thickened again, but this time charged with hurt. My mother looked broken in a way I’d never seen. Not weak,shattered. Her gaze lingered on Iryen longer than it should’ve, as if she was trying to solve a puzzle she already knew the answer to but didn’t want to admit.
“I never wanted you to find out this way,” she said at last, voice low, thick with something old and aching. “Truthfully… I hope you’d never find it at all. But it seems the goddess has other plans.”
Her eyes drifted to the window, unfocused, as though she were watching ghostsand bracing for something painful.
“When I met your father,” she began, her tone distant, almost hollow, “someone was trying to kill him on the beach. I was young. Stupid. I disobeyed my parents constantly and snuck to the surface world more times than I can count. I liked the feel of the sand under my feet. The quiet of the human night.”
She paused. And then—
“One of those nights, I saw a man stab your father. And I felt it. Not just the horror…his pain. But deeper than that, something tearing in my soul. I knew right then he was mine. My mate.”
I blinked. The word felt loaded. Heavy.Fated.
She continued, almost in a trance. “The man kept stabbing him. Over and over. And with each slice, I was unraveling. Ineededhim to live. Tobreathe. I didn’t think, just acted. Using my powers, I drowned the man without hesitation.”
Her voice dropped, and her eyes looked far away.
“I would’ve killed a hundred more if I had to.”
The thought of my father almost dying before I was even a flicker of existence clawed at something raw inside me. A twisted knot coiled in my gut, sour and heavy, and nausea crept up my throat like bile.We never got along,not really. He was cold, political, always thinking ten moves ahead, even for his own son. But knowing he might’ve bled out on some goddamn beach before I, or my sister, ever breathed?
That hit differently.
It was like staring down a version of my life that had never existed. One wrong turn, one second too late, and I would’ve beennothing. Not born. Not broken. Notthis.
I inhaled slowly, trying to steady the chaos twisting beneath my ribs. “So… he knows?”
My mother’s lips pressed together before she answered,her voice low with memory. “Imagine his shock,” she said, eyes flicking somewhere distant, “watching as waves, nine feet high, rose out of the sea. Arms made of water coiled around the man, stabbing him and dragging him under like he was nothing more than driftwood.”
She paused, and I could almost see it—the chaos, the raw desperation. “He saweverything, Adrian. I didn’t care. I hadn’t learned to hide it yet, and I was too terrified to even try.”
Her voice cracked. But there was something more behind it, something reverent. Almost…holy. “The secret of my ancestors, our ancestors, guarded with blood and silence, was suddenly in the hands of a human. And I should’ve panicked. But I didn’t.” Her voice dropped, nearly a whisper. “Because he didn’t look at me with fear. He looked at me as if I weredivine. Like I was something sacred.”
Unlike you.That nagging voice inside of me whispered.
A chill danced down my spine. There was a strange ache in my chest, a mix of awe and something darker. I couldn’t tell if it was regret or envy. Maybe both. She looked at me then, really looked, and softened in a way that made me want to punch something.
“That’s why I took the risk, son. I left it all behind. My crown. My bloodline. I am a spiritual siren. I could hide from the scouts my father sent to drag me back.”
“King Orion of Erythion,” I muttered, and her eyes snapped sharply toward Iryen like knives unsheathed. “Yeah, Mom.My grandfather. I know.”
Her jaw tightened, and she dragged a hand through her hair as though she were trying to pull the tension out by force. “They would never have accepted a human mate. They would have forced me to reject him.”
She looked away then, toward Iryen, and the emotion that passed between them was so thick I could barely breathe through it.Something cracked in my chest as I saw it:pity.
