Page 8 of In Rising Tides

They formed a spearhead, leaving her and Drystan protected in their center.

“Waywardprincess?” she shot at him, raising her shackled hands and shaking them so that the chain sang.

Drystan cast his attention around them to the guards that hovered just out of earshot. “You were on land for quite some time, were you not?”

Lyra bit down on her tongue fiercely enough that the taste of copper flooded her mouth. She choked on the rage that fluttered untethered before locking it away and heaving a breath.

“It was not at my request that I stay on land.”

Drystan slipped his hand under her arm, pulling her body against his. He led them back into the safety of the guards’ perimeter. “That’s not what the kingdom believes, and who am I to sway their opinion?”

“Are you not the king?” Lyra’s voice chilled with contempt.

“Not yet,” the guard with the silver tail muttered under his breath.

His words bordered on disloyalty, and Lyra watched as Drystan’s chin rose with arrogance.

“Yes, well. My bride-to-be has returned. The wedding will commence.”

Lyra struggled to pull her arm from his grip. “There will be no wedding.”

The looming horror of a betrothal to Drystan had the fear she had locked away vibrating in her chest.

She could not—would never—marry him. Not if the entire world crumbled to dust at her feet could she ever imagine tying herself to him.

“Without a wedding,” Drystan purred in her ear, and she flinched at the nearness of him, “there will be no one on the throne, and no one there to protect you.”

Protect her?Lyra’s brows knitted together.

“The kingdom will fall without a ruler,” he tacked on louder, sensing her confusion.

“Then maybe it should,” she hissed.

Atlantis was no paradise. The subjugation of half of its population long boiled her blood, and it was the reason she sought her own life outside of its grasp.

Drystan heaved a sigh and shook his head. The golden coif of his hair did not move.

“You do not know of what you speak. There are worse things than me on the throne, I can assure you that.”

Captain Brine led them around a large boulder, its northern side crusted with bioluminescent algae that cast the water in an eerie glow.

Several more clusters of large sea rocks dotted their path as they kept close to the seabed.

Lyra snorted at Drystan’s words. She couldn’t imagine anything worse.

Her father had been awful, but Atlantis knew peace, not only within its borders but with other realms.

Lyra glimpsed the hunger in Drystan’s eyes when he talked of power. That sort of voraciousness would be limitless.

He would conquer anyone and anything that stood in the way of what he wanted, and what he wanted was everything.

“A lot has changed during your misfortune, princess.”

“Misfortune?” Lyra hissed. She shivered in the shadow of a shipwreck, the water cold outside of light’s reach. “You had me?—”

Drystan cut off her retort. “Shh. You’ll wake the beasts.” He waved his trident around, encircling the surrounding land.

Blood roared in her ears at his arrogance, but she could have sworn something shifted in the shadows outside the lurid glow. She fell silent, not condemning his behavior as she tried to focus her eyes.