Escaping the Siren Prince

3:17 AM

Zero pleasantries. No hello. No nice to meet you.

Cora raised an eyebrow. "Good morning to you too."

"I saw you walking back," Luka said.

His English was flawless, touched by an accent she couldn't immediately place beyond this part of the Adriatic.

Cora glanced at Marija.

"You invited someone here to interrogate me?"

"I invite nobody," Marija said immediately.

Luka's jaw tightened.

Interesting.

"So you just appear at guesthouses before breakfast to question tourists?"

"I came because you were somewhere you shouldn't have been."

Cora stared at him.

Then she laughed once.

"You don't know me."

"No."

"Then where I go at midnight is really none of your business."

Something flickered across his face.

Anger.

Not embarrassment. Not annoyance at being challenged.

Actual anger.

"You were in the water."

The certainty in his voice erased Cora's smile.

"I thought you said you saw me walking home."

"I did."

"Then how do you know I was in the water?"

Silence.

Marija looked at Luka.

Luka looked at Cora.

For the first time since she'd stepped onto the terrace, he appeared to realize he'd made a mistake.

Cora folded her arms.

"That's what I thought."

Luka's gaze sharpened. "Your clothes were wet."

It was possible he noticed her walking back with wet shorts and damp hair.

Still, she didn't like how quickly the answer arrived.

Cora pulled out the chair opposite his and sat.

"If we're apparently doing this, I need coffee."

Marija muttered something in Croatian and disappeared inside.

Luka remained standing.

"You shouldn't have gone there."

"I've gathered."

"I'm serious."

"So was everyone else."

"And you ignored them."

Cora leaned back. "I'm beginning to understand why you're angry. You have control issues."

His eyes narrowed.

She smiled sweetly.

Marija returned with coffee.

Cora took it gratefully.

For several moments, Luka said nothing.

Cora took a sip and studied him over the rim.

There was something strange about him beyond the fact that he had appeared at her guesthouse to reprimand her. He seemed tense in a way that didn't match the conversation, his attention fixed too closely on her.

As though he were waiting for something.

Cora lowered the cup.

"Did you hear it?"

Luka went still.

The reaction was immediate, and Cora noticed.

"Hear what?"

Too fast.

"The singing."

Whatever she expected, it wasn't the complete transformation that passed over his face.

The irritation disappeared and so did the arrogance. For one naked second, Luka looked alarmed.

Then his expression closed.

"What singing?"

Cora stared at him.

"The singing at the cove."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do."

His jaw flexed.

Cora leaned forward.

"There was someone singing from the water. A man. I couldn't see where it was coming from, and before you tell me it was someone on a boat, there weren't any boats."

Luka's gaze shifted briefly toward Marija.

That was all Cora needed.

"Oh my God. You both know."

Marija crossed herself.

Cora blinked.

"That's reassuring."

Luka stood so abruptly his chair scraped against the stone.

"You need to leave."

Cora stared up at him.

"Excuse me?"

"Tomorrow morning. Take the ferry."

A laugh escaped her, mostly because the alternative was becoming genuinely unsettled.

"You cannot be serious."

"I am."

"You show up uninvited, interrogate me about where I went last night, pretend you don't know anything about the singing, and now you're telling me to leave the island?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Luka's eyes held hers.

"Because you heard it."

The terrace went silent.

Cora felt something tighten beneath her ribs.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Luka seemed to realize what he'd said.

He stepped back from the table.

"Take the ferry tomorrow."

"Not until you tell me what happened."

His expression hardened.

"You won't like the answer."

"Try me."

For one long moment, neither moved.

Then Luka turned and walked away.

Cora watched him disappear down the narrow stone street.

She looked at Marija.

Marija immediately became extremely interested in rearranging the breakfast plates.

"Absolutely not," Cora said.

Marija sighed.

"What is going on?"

"Eat."

"Marija."

"You leave tomorrow."

Cora stared at her.

Apparently, that was all anyone planned to tell her.

Unfortunately for them, they had now made the mistake of giving Cora Langley a mystery.

And Cora had never been particularly good at leaving mysteries alone.

That night, Cora stayed inside.

Not because Luka Varek had told her to. She wanted that distinction to be extremely clear, even if she was currently the only person arguing it.

She stayed inside because walking back to the cove after what had happened would have been objectively stupid.

At ten thirty, she locked her door.

At ten thirty-two, she checked the lock again.

She closed the shutters despite the heat, placed her phone on the nightstand, and left the bathroom light on because she was twenty-three years old and perfectly capable of admitting when an unexplained man emerging from the Adriatic had temporarily altered her relationship with darkness.

Sleep took longer than usual.

When it finally came, she dreamed of water.

She stood somewhere beneath the sea, though she could breathe as easily as if she were standing on land. Blue light moved around her in shifting columns, descending from a surface impossibly far overhead.

Someone stood ahead of her.

A man.

She felt as though she knew him even before he turned.

Luka.

Except he looked different here. His dark hair floated around his face, longer than it had been that morning, moving weightlessly in the current. When his eyes found hers through the water, Cora felt the same strange pull she had experienced at the cove, an unsettling recognition she couldn't explain.

Cora tried to speak.

No sound came.

Luka reached toward her.

She moved closer.

Then his face changed.

Not dramatically. Not enough for her to understand what was wrong.

His cheekbones sharpened. His eyes seemed darker. The familiar line of his mouth became something else.

It was Luka.

And it wasn't.

It was the man from the cove.

The thought moved through her dream with absolute certainty.

His hand closed around hers and somewhere in the distance, someone began to sing.

Cora woke cold.

Not the faint chill of an open window. This cold felt different. It pressed against every inch of exposed skin, carried on damp air that smelled unmistakably of salt.

Her eyes opened slowly, and for several disorienting seconds, she couldn't understand what she was looking at.

Stars stretched above her.

Thousands of them scattered across a black sky, impossibly bright without the lights of the village competing against them. Cora blinked several times, waiting for the ceiling of the guesthouse to come into focus, but there was nothing above her except the open night.

She pushed herself upright.

Smooth stones shifted beneath her palms with a quiet scrape.

Cora froze.

The sea stretched out in front of her, black and endless beneath the night sky, its surface catching thin ribbons of moonlight as waves rolled gently toward shore.

Her stomach dropped.

"No."

She scrambled backward instinctively, pebbles shifting beneath her as she tried to put distance between herself and the water. Something sharp pressed into the sole of her foot, and the sting finally made her realize what else was wrong.

She was barefoot.

Cora looked down at herself. She was still wearing the oversized T-shirt and shorts she'd gone to sleep in, her bare legs dusted with sand and pale stone. There were no shoes beside her, no bag thrown carelessly nearby, and no key tucked into one of her pockets.

Nothing that suggested she had intentionally left the guesthouse.

Her pulse began to climb as she instinctively searched for her phone, only to realize her fingers were already curled around it.

Cora stared at the device in her hand.

She didn't remember falling asleep with it or picking it up.

A sick feeling gathered in the pit of her stomach as she pressed the screen awake. The sudden light was painfully bright against the darkness, illuminating her fingers and casting a faint glow across her bare knees.

3:17 a.m.

For several seconds, Cora could only stare at the numbers.

Then she lifted her head and looked at the sea.

Recognition came slowly, followed by a rush of dread as her gaze traveled over the dark cliffs rising on either side of the beach and the familiar rocky outcrop extending into the water.

The northern cove.

She was back at the northern cove.

Cora's breathing grew shallow as she tried to reconstruct the hours that had brought her here. She remembered returning to the guesthouse. She remembered getting ready for bed and locking the door behind her. More than that, she remembered checking the lock twice because apparently one encounter with an impossible man in the Adriatic had been enough to turn her into someone who checked locks obsessively.

She remembered climbing beneath the sheets.

She remembered closing her eyes.

She remembered the dream.

Luka beneath the water. His dark hair drifting around his face. The strange moment when his features had seemed to shift into someone else, someone familiar despite the fact that she had never truly seen him before.

And then there was nothing.

No memory of waking.

No memory of getting out of bed or unlocking the door. She couldn't remember walking down the narrow stone street, crossing the sleeping village, or following the path through the cliffs.

She remembered none of it.

Yet somehow, barefoot and dressed in the clothes she'd worn to bed, Cora had traveled all the way from her locked room to the one place on the island she had promised herself she would not return to.

And she had no idea how she'd gotten there.

Cora slowly rose to her feet.

The Adriatic moved quietly before her.

And somewhere beyond the moonlit water, a man's voice began to sing.