DEEP-END

Chapter 1

Prologue

200 years ago

Ares-

Blood.

Sweat.

Pain.

I groaned out as my fingers fought to find their way to undo the chains that were wrapped around my wrists, holding me prisoner to the ceiling above. With every movement I made, my muscles ached a little bit more, my bones shattered a little bit more. I could almost feel my body deteriorating. I had to get out. I had to escape.

It’d been weeks since my abduction, the humans had found a way to lure me in and trap me and now here I was, facing nothing but torture and though they tried, day and night, they could not break me. They could not deter me from being me. I would die before I gave into them, I would kill them before they could make me give into them.

They wanted to get rid of my species so that they could be the only and most dominant species alive but they had no idea that this war that they had started would soon end them all. I would make sure of it.

Clenching my fists, I yanked on the chains with everything that I had, I could hear the chains giving in, soon enough they wouldn’t be able to hold back the power that surged through me. I’d break free and I’d break each and every single bone in those humans. I’d make them suffer, a slow and painful death.

Inhaling my rage and exhaling my wrath, I studied the room I was in. It was a dungeon, a small confined space that held only instruments of torture, had I been weak, I may have felt claustrophobic in this place with its out of date brick walls and grey stone floors. There were torture instruments lined up on the stone wall. Ones they had used on me over and over again, ones that I would repay them for tenfold.

Taking a deep breath, I listened in as I could hear footsteps outside of the door, hushed whispers and the familiar voices of my captors and then I heard something strange, someone strange. Her voice was a delicate sound of symphony, she was soft spoken and elegant and she was nervous. I could feel it and my feeling was confirmed when the door opened and in came a breathtaking girl along with my captors.

Almost forgetting where and who I was, I stared at her beauty and when she caught my eye, she held my gaze captive. There was something different about her. She was different. I could sense it in her presence, she wasn’t like them, no, she was special.

“This is the subject. Maybe you can get him to tell us where the rest of his species are hiding at. Be careful, he is dangerous. Should he try anything, hurt him.”

One of the men said to her as he left with the rest of the men. Leaving me alone with only her in the dungeon they had locked me in. She looked shy, fearful even as she slowly walked over to me, I could see the hesitance in her hypnotising silver orbs as she took slow steady strides towards me, the pounding of her heart filling up the silence of the room, matching the rhythm of mine.

“Hi… Contrary to what you may think, I’m here to help you.”

There it was again, her soft delicate voice, it made my insides churn. It made me want to rip out of these chains and cup her face into my hands and kiss those plump lips.

“I’m good at communication so they thought to use me as a last resource in order to get you to talk. Of course, they thought my looks would contribute to the factor,” she says with an awkward laugh.

Is she insecure about her beauty? That would be obscene. She is the single most breathtaking creature I have ever seen.

She fiddled with her fingers as she looked down then back up at me, she was close now, just a few inches away from me. Every part of my body wanted to take her, to touch her, the strong feeling was too overwhelming to ignore.

Her long, waist-length silver hair made it almost unbearable to not want to run my fingers through it, a part of me wanted to run my fingers through her platinum locks and feel the softness of her strands, another part of me wanted to yank on her hair as I took away her innocence.

She was short, much shorter than I, 5’2 maybe. She was no match for my 6’5 self and that excited me even more, I wanted to take her, I wanted to overpower her, I wanted to trap her beauty beneath my body and watch her squirm.

“I’m not here to help them, I’m here to help you.”

She spoke in a hushed voice, that’s the second time she said she was going to help me and I was confused. Why would she want to help me? My question was cut short as I realised why she was helping me, lifting her shirt and exposing her bare stomach to me, I watched as her soft skin changed into scales and then changed back to normal. She was one of us, she was a Siren.

“Once I free you, you need to run. Please don’t seek revenge, don’t try anything dangerous, I am putting my life at risk to free you, I beg you not to make me regret it.”

Her words sank down my chest, she really was risking her life to save me. Did they even know what she was? I didn’t think so, otherwise they would’ve never risked her helping me. After all, I was one of her kind. But I couldn’t promise I wouldn’t take revenge, even if it wasn’t now, even if it cost me my life, I would take my revenge, they dared test me and now they would have to live with the consequences.

All of my thoughts stopped, all and everything I was feeling halted the moment I felt her small fingertips trace across my stomach and from her reaction, I knew she felt it too. The hair on my skin stood at attention as I eyed the girl before me, lost deep inside her eyes, I could see myself in them. She was mine. After centuries of searching, I finally found my mate.

Trapped in the same thoughts and emotions as me, it took her a long time before she pulled her hands away from my body, instantly pulling herself together even though she was still a mess.

“I…”

She whispered, clearly trying to come up with something to say, anything but came up empty

“Mine”

I could see that my statement had caught her off guard as she looked at me in shock. She wasn’t expecting to find her mate when she came in here to help me escape but here we were and now that I’d found her, I wouldn’t let her go. Once I was out of these chains, once I took my revenge on the shallow humans, I’d come back for her, I’d take her and keep her, for she was, she was everything that I’d been searching for.

And I’d die,

Before I let her escape me.

Chapter 1

Present

Aphrodite

“Papa?” I call out tentatively, walking into my father’s chambers. I glance around, confused when I don’t see him.

I want to ask him to go on a swim with me so I can be in my element for a while, and he doesn’t like me going out alone in the case I get caught in a storm and can’t out-swim it.

When he doesn’t respond I make the most rebellious decision in my two hundred and forty nine years of life. I decide to go out on my own.

I can prove to him that I don’t need him. That I don’t always need supervision while swimming. That I can go out on my own and be safe.

Swiftly hurrying out of the castle, I cast a brief glance around the beautiful island I call home. Being hidden in the Arctic Ocean, it almost always has at least a light dusting of snow on it. But now, in the dead of winter, I can only thank the gods for a Siren’s innate ability to preserve body temperature. We’d all be dead without it.

Smiling at some onlookers as I walk down the street leading to the ocean, I marvel at how technologically advanced we are. Humans thought they invented transportation first—they were wrong. Siren’s did everything first. We created ships that could travel at the speed of light just a few decades ago—not that we needed them, since we can swim quite fast on our own.

I suppose having a tail helps with that.

I think back to the first time I remember going for a swim. I was walking down this very street, hand in hand with my mother and father.

My mother.

The most sweet, kind, and caring being known to this earth. The gods decided we didn’t deserve her when she was caught under a shipwreck and killed. I was only 20 years old—still a baby by our standards.

Even now, being almost two and a half centuries old, I’m considered a child in comparison to the many millennia’s most others of my kind have lived.

I smile as the beach comes into sight, wishing I could see the sand under the snow.

As soon as I come up to the water, I feel the lower half of my body start tingling in preparation for the transformation.

Not wanting my legs to turn into a tail on land, which has unfortunately occurred a few times, I hurry into the water. My body doesn’t register the freezing cold like a human does—to me, the freezing water feels room temperature. Quickly discarding my skirt on the snow, shortly followed by my shirt. All female sirens wear something of a bikini instead of a bra in case we decide to go for a dip. The only difference between a human bikini and ours is that ours doesn’t slip or fall off. The material fits like a second skin—a material that we synthesized in the late 1800’s. My current bikini is silver—the same color as my eyes. Diving into the water I revel in the feeling of my legs changing into a tail. It feels like pleasant tingles that start at my feet and continue until my hipbone, and before I know it my legs are gone-replaced with my silver, slightly scaley tail.

I come up for a mouthful of air before resubmerging myself in the water.

Like fish, sirens can absorb oxygen from the water around us just fine—only needing to come up a few times a day for air, and that’s honestly just personal preference.

I get lost in the ocean, simply allowing myself to swim on and on. I’ll know the way home as long as I stay in the Atlantic, and even when a siren manages to swim out of bounds, we let the stars lead us home.

Losing track of time, I only slow down when I hear thunder and lightning far above me. Though I know I shouldn’t resurface, I can’t help myself. I’m dying to see the symphonies of light that Zeus creates whenever he feels like it. It only takes me a few minutes to resurface, and as soon as I do, my breath leaves me. The waves are crashing down around me, telling me that Poseidon is working alongside Zeus by creating massive waves, ranging from twenty to fifty feet. I narrowly avoid each one by diving a few dozen feet below surface before it crashes down.

As I resurface for the dozenth time, I’m frozen in place. At least a hundred lightning bolts decorate the sky at the same time, shocking me to the point of stillness.

Shocking me to the point where I don’t pay attention to the seventy foot wave that crashes into me, causing my body to limp.

My mind isn’t completely gone, but I know I must’ve snapped my spine because my tail won’t move. My arms will barely move as I’m forced beneath the surface, before the tide begins to have its way with me.

I know I’ll heal soon—sirens can heal even fatal injuries within a few hours. But a cracked spine won’t take the few minutes a cracked bone normally does, it’ll take at least an hour. An hour might be long enough for me to be swept out of the arctic and into the pacific with how far I strayed.

I panic internally, not wanting to crash on somebody's territory and stir trouble. If I crash on human land, I can compel them into doing what I want through song. But another tribe? Athens, the tribe that resides in the pacific? If I was a commoner, they would kill me for trespassing. Being the princess, they might torture me for the hell of it.

Falling deeper and deeper into the panic due to the fact that I can’t move, I barely noticed that I’ve washed up on a shore until it’s too late. Until I see him.