It’s a weird feeling to size up your mom like this. I decide it’s so weird, so unnatural, that I don’t give it any more thought. So I can’t stall my mom here. The opportunity will present itself again, I’m sure. Some how, some way, I will put her face-to-face with Galen again. And I will find out the truth. I stand. “They’ll find us, you know.”

“We’ll see about that.”

4

GALEN PEERS into the rearview mirror at Rayna and Toraf in the backseat. They’re leaned up against each other by their temples, sound asleep. Must be nice.

But even if Galen didn’t have to drive, he still wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not with Grom here. Grom, wearing human clothes. Grom, buckled up in an SUV. Grom, cocking his head slightly toward the speaker in his door, trying to listen to the human music without appearing too interested.

Grom, who hasn’t said a single word since they left Emma’s house.

“She thinks you’re dead,” Galen tells his brother without looking at him. “She thinks she killed you. Why would she think that?” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Grom glance in his direction. Still, he’s not expecting it when his brother actually answers.

“She’s probably blaming herself. For the explosion.”

“So, she came to land because of a guilty conscience?”

“She was always hoarding the blame for things that weren’t her fault.” Then his brother actually smiles. “Most things were her fault, mind you, but even when they weren’t, she wanted to keep the blame all to herself.” After a moment, he says, “I would have loved to see her tie Rayna up. When she was bent on something, there was very little that ever got in the way of doing it.”

This takes Galen by surprise. Up until now, Grom had always struck Galen as … well, as old-fashioned. Not that his brother ever had a choice—he was always destined to mate the firstborn third-generation heir of the Poseidon house. It didn’t mean he had to enjoy his union with Nalia, but by the looks of it, he was fairly smitten. Which doesn’t sound like the Grom Galen knows. Most Syrena males seek out docile females for their mates. It seems that noble Grom had fallen for the exact opposite. Nalia is the definition of feisty. And if she’s even a fraction of the feisty that Emma is, then Grom had his hands full all those years ago. And apparently, he liked it that way. Join the club, as Rachel always says.

“Was the explosion her fault?” Galen said as an afterthought. He regrets the question as soon as it leaves his mouth. But Grom doesn’t seem affected.

“Oh, I’m sure she thinks it was. But it was my fault. Only my fault.” His brother laughs, a sharp gust that sounds more like disgust than humor. “You know the irony in all this, little brother? The whole reason we were arguing that day was because she wanted to explore land. She had a fascination with humans. And as soon as she opened up to me about it, I took it upon myself to crush her dreams. To protect her.”

The silence that follows is noisy with the past, with memories that belong solely to Grom and Nalia. Their last day together. Their last words. The explosion. Galen can tell his brother is reliving the emotions, but still storing the details inside, where he’s kept them all these years. It feels like seeing a shipwreck from afar through murky water. The outline is there, the damage is visible. But the specifics of how it sunk, how it came to sit on the bottom of the ocean, are still unknown to all except those who experienced it.

Then all at once, Grom clears the murk. “I refused to explore land with her. But I didn’t just stop there. I also forbade her from doing it anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“She’d been keeping a supply of human clothes on an island close to land. She changed into them on the island, then took a rowboat to land and actually walked among the humans. She even brought things back to Mother, for her collection of human relics.”

Galen’s mouth almost drops to his lap. “Mother knew she was breaking the law?”

Grom snorts, then shakes his head. “She knew and encouraged it. You know how she loved her human relics.”

Galen did know. She’d left behind an entire cave full of them when she died—and Rayna had picked up where their mother had left off. Are daughters always so much like their mothers? Rayna takes after their mother in almost every way. And apparently Emma takes after Nalia in many aspects. For instance, Galen knows forbidding Emma to do anything is the best way to get her to do it. “So that made her angry and she fled from you,” Galen says, almost to himself. He imagines Emma doing the exact same thing. And it almost chokes him. “Into the mine.”

“Oh, not directly into the mine. She allowed me to chase her all over the territories first. Of course, I could have stopped. I could have let her go, let her calm down for a while. It might have saved us from making such a Royal spectacle. But the look in her eyes did not settle well with me. The disappointment there clearly said I’d failed an important test.” Grom adjusts in his seat, so he can face Galen. “And you should know that she didn’t set off the explosion in the mines. The humans did. At the time, it seemed humans all over the world were at war with one another, and they brought their disagreement to our territories. They built giant ships that could go underwater instead of skim on top of it.”

Galen already knew this. When he’d first told Rachel about what happened and how long ago, she’d researched it for him. According to human history records, Nalia had disappeared in the middle of what came to be called World War II. It was not a good time to be human. He wonders if Nalia knew the condition of the human world at the time before she decided to become part of it.