Chapter 15— Prisoner of the Heart

  “Please don’t go after him. He’ll come back.” Celeste reached out, her fingers brushing the elder’s dark red scales as the siren prepared to lung after him.

  The elder didn't move. Instead, she whipped her tail around, the force of the displacement nearly knocking Celeste off her feet. She leaned in close, her pale eyes narrowing until they were just thin, predatory slits.

  “And if he doesn’t?” the elder hissed, the vibration of her voice rattling Celeste’s teeth. “He is not just a freak, little stray. He is a vessel. We do not let the Heart’s power drift into the dark alone. What if he rots? What if he takes that strength to another nest?”

  She bared her teeth, a row of needle-sharp points that caught the light. “If he is not back by the time the tide shifts, I will go find him myself. And I won’t be bringing him back in one piece.”

  “He will. I’ll make sure,” Celeste pleaded, her voice shaking. “He just needs a little time alone. Please…”

  The elder gave her one last, lingering look of disgust before letting out a strange, shrill chattering noise. It was a command. With a powerful snap of her tail, she took off in the opposite direction, and the other sirens followed in a synchronized blur of shimmering scales.

  The silence they left behind was heavy. Celeste stood alone in the pulsing blue glow of the temple, watching the last of the red fins disappear into the murk.

  Something about the way they moved, the sharp, clicking calls and the aggressive speed told Celeste they weren't just leaving. They were going on a hunt.

  As soon as the temple was empty, a familiar, agonizing heat bloomed in her gut. The hunger was back, and it was sharper than before. It felt like a physical fire spreading through her core, a burning void that made her hands twitch. She wanted to go with them so badly. The instinctual urge to join the pack, to find something living and tear into it, was almost overwhelming.

  She couldn't even remember the last time she’d had her stomach full. It felt unreal, like a lifetime ago. The emotional baggage and the constant, frantic run for survival had masked the physical need for a while, but now there was no hiding from it.

  She needed to find something. But before she gave in to the hunger, she had to talk to Rowan. She turned toward the dark corner where he had disappeared, her movements sluggish from the lack of energy. She had saved his life, but had also broken his spirit, and the silence coming from his end of the bond was the loudest thing in the ocean.

  Just as she was about to drift out into the darkness where the Heart’s glow couldn't reach, her body went completely numb. It was a terrifying, instantaneous transition—one moment she was gliding, and the next, her muscles were as unresponsive as stone. It was as if her nerves had been severed at the spine.

  She tried to kick, to lunge, to even twitch a finger, but she couldn't. It felt like an invisible, freezing chain was wrapped around her throat and tail, anchoring her to the temple floor. Panic crashed over her, thick and suffocating. She strained against the void, her mind screaming at her limbs to move, but they remained locked in place, held by a force that didn't care about her will.

  Desperate and gasping, she tried to lean backward, retreating just an inch into the temple's territory—and suddenly, the sensation returned. The numbness vanished the second she moved toward the Heart, her pulse thundering in her ears as her body became her own again.

  Blown away by whatever sorcery this was, she still refused to believe it. She fixed her eyes on the darkest corner where Rowan had disappeared, her heart aching to reach him. She took a deep breath of the briny water and tried to take off with everything she had, but the moment she hit that invisible boundary, her body locked up again.

  She tried to scream, but only a frantic, silvery cloud of bubbles covered her face and muffled her terror.

  “Rowan!” she shouted into the bond, her mental voice clawing at the silence. “Rowan, please!”

  But the bond was dead. He had built a wall around his mind that she couldn't scale. Whether he was doing it on purpose or he was just too far gone in his own head, she couldn't tell.

  Fuck.

  The burning in her stomach flared up again, a white-hot, gnawing reminder that her body was reaching its limit. The hunger was eating her from the soul out. Between the magical lock on her movements and the hollow, shaking void in her gut, a dark realization settled over her.

  If she couldn't get to him, and she couldn't get to food, she’d die right here in the beautiful, mocking glow of a hungry god.

  Tears of frustration blurred her eyes, stinging against the salt water. She felt exhausted, completely done with the relentless wave of shit that kept raining down on her. Every time she gained an inch, the world—or the water—took a mile.

  “What do you want!” she screamed at the Heart. Her siren voice was a deep, piercing shrill that vibrated the stones of the temple floor. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

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  The Heart didn't pulse in response, but the System chimed right on time, the familiar blue interface flickering in her vision.

  [System Alert: Your energy is tied to the Abyssal Heart.]

  [Current Status: Geofenced. You cannot leave the Heart’s glow until the Heart reclaims the energy it bestowed upon the new Vessel.]

  Celeste stared at the words, her breath hitching. The Heart wouldn't give anything without taking something in return. It had reached into the void to pull Rowan back, stitching his soul into a new skin, but it hadn't done it for free. It had used her as the tether, and now it was holding her hostage until the debt was settled.

  She looked toward the darkness where Rowan was hiding. He was the Vessel now, and the energy he was using to breathe, to move, to exist in this trench, was being siphoned directly from the Heart through her.

  Her stomach cramped again. The Heart wasn't the only thing that needed feeding. If the Heart didn't get its energy back, it would keep her trapped here. And if she stayed trapped here, she couldn't hunt.

  She was being starved by the very thing she had begged to save him.

  "You're a parasite," she whispered, her voice trembling as she looked at the pulsing, rhythmic glow of the Heart. "You're both parasites."

  She wasn't sure if she was talking to the Heart or the boy in the shadows.

  She felt her energy slowly oozing out of her, an invisible transaction she was now hyperaware of. Every rhythmic pulse of the Abyssal Heart felt like a straw dipped into her marrow, sucking her dry.

  She floated there in the weightless white-blue glow for god knows how long, reminiscing about her time in the water without missing a single detail. She went over every narrow escape, every moment of loneliness until she’d found Rowan. What was all this? What was the purpose of this life that had been thrusted upon her? She used to be the kind of person who believed "everything happens for a reason," but staring at the indifferent, pulsing heart of the ocean, she didn't really know anymore. It felt less like a destiny and more like a cruel joke.

  When she realized her vision was swimming, not from the water, but from the darkness creeping in at the edges of her sight, she started to slowly lower herself onto the stone floor. Her limbs felt like leaden weights. Her cheek pressed against the cold, ancient rock, and the last thing she saw before her eyes drifted shut was the mocking shimmer of the Heart.

  She didn't know how long she was out. Time in the trench was a blurred, liquid thing. She might have been asleep for minutes or hours, drifting in a dreamless, hungry void.

  Then, a flicker of warmth sparked in the cold center of her mind.

  “Celeste.”

  Her eyes snapped open, though her body remained pinned to the stone by exhaustion. It was Rowan’s voice. It wasn't angry this time; it was quiet, tentative, and vibrating through the bond with a clarity that made her heart ache.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The words should have been a relief, but instead anger flared from deep within, white-hot and sudden. It was the only thing giving her the strength to move. She pushed herself up from the stone floor, her body trembling as she hovered just above the rock.

  Rowan was close—too close. She didn't think twice. She lunged, her fists thudding against his chest in a desperate, weak rhythm.

  “Look what you made me!” she hissed through the bond, her voice cracking with exhaustion. “You are at least able to roam around in the water, but I’m stuck! And all I get is you hating me for helping you stay alive?”

  Rowan’s hands shot out, wrapping around her wrists to break the hits. His grip was firm, a reminder of the strength he now possessed, but his expression had shifted to a look of startled confusion.

  “What does that mean?” he asked, his voice echoing in her head. He looked past her at the water, then back at the way she was shaking. “What do you mean you’re stuck?”

  Celeste let out a choked, bitter laugh that sent a spray of bubbles toward his face. “The Heart. It gave you the energy to change—to live—and now it’s taking that energy back from me. I can't leave this light until it’s done with me. While you were off hiding in the dark, I was being drained dry.”

  She slumped against his grip, the brief flash of anger leaving her even more hollow than before. Her stomach cramped so hard she winced.

  “What do you mean you can’t leave? What happens if you try to?”

  Rowan’s voice was thick with disbelief, his grip on her wrists loosening just enough for her to pull away. He looked out into the vast, yawning blackness of the trench and then back at the pulsing pale blue center of the temple. To him, the water was just water, an open road he could finally navigate. He didn't see the bars.

  “See it yourself,” Celeste whispered.

  She didn't explain. She didn't have the breath for it. Using the last of her adrenaline, she turned away from him and dived toward the darkness. She moved with a sudden, desperate burst of speed, aiming for the jagged line where the Heart’s glow finally flickered out into the abyss.

  She almost made it.

  The moment her head crossed that invisible threshold, the world vanished. Her body didn't just stop; it seized. Every muscle locked into a rigid, stone-like paralysis. She hung there, suspended in the water like a fly in amber, her eyes wide and staring but unable to blink. To Rowan, it must have looked like she had hit a brick wall made of nothing.

  She couldn't even flinch. She just drifted, a statue of violet scales and tangled hair, held in place by a tether she couldn't break.

  After a few agonizing seconds, the current of her own momentum pushed her back an inch toward the light. The spell snapped. The numbness receded like a retreating tide, leaving her gasping and shivering as she curled into a ball, floating right on the edge of the safety zone.

  She looked back at him, her chest heaving, her gills working double-time to find oxygen in the brine.

  “It’s like I’m a fucking prisoner,” she choked out through the bond. “It’s keeping me here to pay for you. So go ahead, call me a monster again. But at least you can swim away. I can’t even go find a goddamn fish to eat even if I die here starving.”