Throw Her to the Sea（Nepheia's POV）

The sea wind hit my face carrying the smell of salt and rot, and I froze for a full two seconds.

Behind me came the coarse, menacing laughter of a man.

"Better if she's awake," he said. "Makes for cleaner footage."

The memory I had spent years trying to bury — the one my mind wanted to forget but my body never could — came flooding back all at once. There had been five of them. Seawater had risen past my ankles, cold enough to cut to the bone, yet sharp enough to remind me I was still alive. I was back in the night that had destroyed me.

The man who had just been laughing grabbed me by the hair and dragged me up from the rocks. Two others blocked the path into the tree line, one holding a camera, the other a length of rope. The memories of my past life crashed down without warning. I had been gagged and hauled into an abandoned wooden shack, the camera running from start to finish. By dawn they had dumped my unconscious body on the shore, and within three days the video had spread across every corner of the internet — while I was still beneath them, being forced into one position after another in exchange for food and water.

My entire body shook. I couldn't stop my teeth from chattering.

The man holding me laughed. "Now you're scared? Relax — we're not here to kill you." He reached out to pull at my collar. I unclipped the metal fish-tail barrette from my hair and drove it hard into the back of his hand. He cried out and let go.

I had endured too much pain in that basement in my previous life. Now, with both legs working beneath me, pain was no longer something I could afford to acknowledge. Without pausing to check what had been done to my face, I grabbed a handful of broken rock from the sand and hurled it at the second man's face. The moment he raised his hands to shield himself, I turned and scrambled toward the tree line.

I knew this terrain. When they had thrown me out in my previous life, I had crawled this same path for a long time before finding a small harbor tucked beneath the northern cliff face where a boat had been moored. If I could reach it, I would survive.

Branches whipped across my face. Behind me, cursing. The man I had wounded with the barrette caught up fast and drove his boot hard into my side. My head slammed into the wet sand and every last bit of air was knocked from my lungs.

"Stupid bitch. Koujirius handed you over himself — who the hell do you think you are?"

The name hit me like a physical blow and tore the past wide open. I could almost see Koujirius grabbing me by the hair, pressing my face down into broken glass with undisguised contempt. The fear drained the strength from my limbs entirely. The man straddled me, and every memory from the island came rushing back at once. I would not — I refused — to live through that hell a second time.

"Help!" The words came from somewhere beneath conscious thought, from pure survival instinct. There was no one on this island who would come for me. I knew that. But calling out was still better than waiting in silence to die. My whole body trembled. A taste like rust and copper rose in my throat. The coarse sand had already scraped my palms raw.

"Someone — please — help me!"

And then, as I kept shouting and refused to stop, two SUVs appeared. Their headlights hit me full in the face, cold and white. Bodyguards in dark uniforms spilled out and took all five men to the ground in seconds. A silver serpent emblem gleamed at each of their cuffs as the light caught it.

Seriomel.

The iron door of the basement. The guard's boot heel coming down. The tolling of a bell as I waited to die. It all came back in a single crushing instant.

The leader of the five recognized the emblem immediately. His expression shifted, and then he forced himself to speak, his voice strained and careful. "Don't kill us. Tell Seriomel this is a misunderstanding. This is a private matter between us and this woman. She's not right in the head — she stole from us."

"Who do you work for?"

"Koujirius."

He answered without hesitating, as if the name alone were a shield. The others started to move. At once, the sound of weapons being cocked echoed through the trees.

"Bind them. Her too. Everyone goes to the boss."

The lead bodyguard stepped forward and in a single motion brought his boot down into the back of the leader's knee. The joint gave with a muffled crack. The man screamed and went down into the sand.

"Koujirius is the Leneaux heir," he gasped through the pain. "You have no authority over us."

"You're going to throw the Leneaux name at our boss?" the bodyguard said. "He's Koujirius's elder. Don't forget that."

The man fell silent.

The bodyguards secured all five and loaded them into the vehicles, then retrieved a stretcher from one of the SUVs and carried me to Seriomel. On the way I learned that he had plans to develop this island into a private resort — he had already built a villa here.

A pair of black leather shoes stopped in front of my face. Above them, perfectly tailored dress trousers. He looked down at me from a great height, the cigar between his fingers burning slowly, its ember rising and fading.

"Throw her into the sea."

The voice was low and unhurried — and it turned my blood to ice.

I jerked my head up and finally saw his face. Strong, angular features. A kind of casual ruthlessness behind the eyes. And at the outer corner of his left eye, a single faint teardrop mole.

In my previous life, it was under his protection that Mina had ground me into nothing — kept me too broken to die, never whole enough to live. So his being here now — was it for Mina? Had he come to clean up her mess, to throw me and those five men into the sea and erase all of it?

The stories I had heard about Seriomel — what he was truly capable of — closed around my heart like a fist. I shrank back without meaning to. My palm dragged across a sharp fragment of shell and opened a deeper cut. The pain brought me back to myself.

"Please," I said. "Please — let me go."

I dug my fingers into the edge of the handwoven wool rug and pressed down until my nails bent back, blood seeping into the intricate pattern. The villa around me was obscenely opulent. That a man could build something like this on an abandoned island said everything about the kind of power he held. I could hear my own voice shaking. My teeth wouldn't stop.

"I — I only got lost. That's all."

"Lost?"

Seriomel let out a quiet, humorless sound. He bent slightly at the waist, the cigar still held between two fingers, and exhaled a slow stream of smoke directly into my face. "Thirty nautical miles from the mainland, on an abandoned island, surrounded by five men carrying hallucinogens and a camera — and you're telling me you got lost?"

My heart was slamming against my ribs. Could I tell him the truth? Tell him this had all been Mina and Koujirius's doing — that those five men had been sent by his beloved nephew and the woman he protected above all others? But in my past life he had shielded Mina without question. The moment her name entered the conversation, this man became something inhuman. His influence, his reach into the grey world where law meant nothing — all of it had been the ladder Mina used to climb over everyone else. Going to him for help was like reasoning with a trap. And look — he hadn't even moved to punish those five men yet. Maybe he was simply waiting for me to say something inconvenient so he could dispose of all of us together and call it justice.

I bit down on my lower lip until I tasted blood. Then I forced the tears out — real enough to be convincing — and made my voice go small and desperate. "I'm not lying to you. I truly lost my way and ran into those men by accident. Please — given that our two families are about to be joined — please let me live."

Something in Seriomel's eyes went cold and flat. He straightened up, dropped the cigar to the floor without looking at it, and ground it out beneath his shoe.

"A lying fool."

He turned to the bodyguard who had brought us here, his voice carrying no more weight than if he were ordering dinner. "Put her back where you found her. Along with the other five."