Josephine's voice kills any man who hears it-except for the assassin sent to capture her for the king that's been chasing her all her life...but what happens when he decides he doesn't want to hand her over and keep her for himself instead?
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My dreams were filled with haunted melodies that grew desperately loud in my ears as I sat up on the seat of the carriage.
I was unsure when I had fallen into a fitful slumber that had caused the cloak to have fallen completely off of my body while my limbs shook from the force of the nightmare, but the sun was nowhere to be seen as I blinked open groggy eyelids.
The nightmare was a horrid rendition of the memory I'd flashed back to in my rage from earlier the night before, but with Oren bearing my father's face as he shook me and bade me to remember, but I couldn't remember if there was nothing there.
Birds sang their canary songs into the crisp almost-morning air, and I shuddered while I tried to put those memories to bed.
They had no business muddying up my mind when I'd fallen asleep with a beast for a kidnapper, both literally and figuratively.
Yes, Oren had saved me from drowning in the pool with the Siren, but there had been an undeniable connection between the two of us, as if she shared a part of me that I didn't yet know existed.
As she sang the story of her capture to me, I felt her grief, her rage, her anguish.
Though dusk did not yet paint the sky in its ethereal violet and magenta rays, there was still an alabaster glow that set the rocks around me awash in a light that was sufficient to stumble around the rock pit in without tripping, though knowing me, I would find something to trip me sooner or later.
A pull was still tugging me back toward the pool, though.
Back to the Siren who had been wrongfully entrapped and doomed to spend eternity in agony.
Sirens did not die.
It didn't matter if they had no food source, no light, no anything—their curse was immortality and the gift of song to defend themselves so those who knew the secret to truly kill them would not be able to go about their journey of violence without meeting some resistance.
The Siren in the hot spring pool had fought her captors despite her song being useless on their ears.
She had fought and clawed, just as I had in the brothel where my sister was almost brutalized, on the old schooner ship where the sailors had torn my clothes from my body and almost ravaged me on the deck smelling of putrid old fish and littered with rusted nails.
Marlisa hadn't escaped them in time—I had.
It was time to allow the Siren that chance, as well.
Maybe it was the fact that with a deadly Siren at my side, I could take Oren down and escape from him once and for all.
Maybe it was the fact that when our eyes connected in the water, I suddenly didn't feel so damn lonely, or maybe it was because I felt a twisted kinship with the Siren.
