He finds her with Freya, sitting on the outer rocks of The Crag, the deep chasm etched into the sea floor, where you could swim down for hours and never touch bottom. They’re both peering over the edge of the cliff, as if they’re actually contemplating going down there.

“Don’t even think about it,” Grom says. “Your lionfish spike won’t work on a giant squid.” He’s amazed how natural it feels to settle down next to Nalia and hang his fin over the ledge.

She smirks up at him. “We waited for you. You’re slow.”

He laughs. Freya would have sensed him for a while before he arrived, but did Nalia? Can she sense me as strongly as I sense her? “Some things are worth the wait.”

“You’re slow and delusional,” she says without bluster. She peeks back down into The Crag. “I want a tooth from a dangle fish.”

Grom shakes his head. Dangle fish live in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean, where they dangle a light in front of themselves as a lure to attract unsuspecting fish. Their teeth are as long as his hand. The Crag is a good place to hunt for dangle fish. “What could you possibly need that for?”

She scrunches up her face.

Grom raises a brow at Freya, who sighs in defeat. She has gotten used to this game. “She wants it to make a gift for you. For your mating—Ow! Poseidon’s teeth, Nalia, he’s a Royal!”

Nalia points her finger in Grom’s face, almost up his left nostril. “You need to stop bullying her. Sometimes it not your business.”

Grom captures her hand and uses it to pull her closer. Her eyes go wide as she glances at his lips but she doesn’t squirm, doesn’t try to move away. He feels himself melt a little at her touch. His bones feel like the water around him. “You were making me a gift?” He glances at Freya. “Freya, how rude would it be if I asked you to—”

Freya shrugs, then spirals up and over them. “Some Triton Trackers found a new human mine,” she says, winking at Nalia, who flinches as she passes by. “Guess I could go help them set it off.” Freya says that whenever the Trackers come across a mine, they set off the explosion from a distance, using rocks they hurl from the surface. She says when one of the floating metal balls burst, they all do.

“That sounds exceptionally fun,” Grom calls after her. When she’s gone, he grins at Nalia. “Don’t tell me you’re all of a sudden shy, princess. We’ve seen each other every day for the past month.”

Nalia lifts her chin. “I heard you feel the pull for me.”

That is unexpected. From the sound of her voice, she doesn’t like the idea. And he takes slight offense. Suddenly the tiny pearl in his hand feels like a burning rock from the hot beds. “Is it so bad for me to want to be your mate?”

“That’s just it. The pull is mindless. It tricks your feelings. It’s not what you want, it’s what the pull wants. To make stronger offspring. But I want something real.”

A whirlpool of relief swirls through him. She wants something real—from me. “But you have to mate with me, pull or no pull. What does it matter if the feelings are real? There could be no feelings at all, and we’d still have to mate.” 

“I’d rather there were no feelings at all, than be tricked by the pull.” She crosses her arms. He’s spent enough time with her to know this is her gesture when she’s unsure.

“And if I don’t feel the pull for you?” He caresses her lips with his eyes.

She swallows. “Don’t you?”

“Hmmm,” he says. “I’m not sure. Wouldn’t you feel the pull toward me, if I felt it toward you?” He’s hoping his mother knows what she’s talking about, hoping that she didn’t just make this ridiculousness up.

She considers. “I suppose so. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.”

“And?”

“And I suppose it would make sense for us to be pulled together.” She tucks a short piece of hair behind her ear. “First born, third generation Royals, right? To pass on the Gifts of the Generals to our fingerlings. If anyone would be pulled, it would be us.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Do you feel the pull for me?”

She bristles like an anemone. “Oh, just forget it!” She turns away, but he catches her arm and whirls her around.

“I don’t believe in the pull,” he blurts. “I think it’s a bunch of superstitious muck. Besides that, I think the pull would pale in comparison to the way I feel about you.”

She lets out a tiny gasp, swirling the water in front of her and spooking some fish close by.

Grom pulls her closer, wanting this moment to be right, wanting the right words to appear in his mouth, wanting the contrary ones to disappear from hers. “If it was the pull, surely it would have brought us together before now. I’ve been old enough to sift for a mate for three seasons now. Don’t you think that if the pull were at work, I would have sought you out already?”

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. About you and me. And…Not long ago in the Cave of Memories,” he says, “you told me that I was mean to you when we first met, at your mother’s entombing ceremony all those years ago. Do you remember that?”

She bites her lip. “I was just a fingerling when she died. Nine mating seasons old. It wasn’t what you’d said. It was how you said it. As if I was unimportant. As if it was a bother for you to be there.”

Grom nods, cringing on the inside. That had been exactly how he felt when he’d had to make an appearance at the ceremony—imposed upon. “I’m so sorry.” He brushes her cheek with his fingers, something he wishes he’d done all those seasons ago. Something, anything to comfort her instead of set her on edge like he did. If he wouldn’t have been so self-occupied, maybe they wouldn’t have avoided each other all this time, missed out on each other. Maybe they’d already be mated. The thought bears down on him with the weight of a great whale. “I have no excuse,” he says softly. “But something you said back then stuck with me. Do you remember what you told me? When I offered you my condolences?”

Nalia shakes her head. Then she sends the thrill of a thousand electric rays running through him when she rests her hand on his. “No.”

“You asked how I could understand your loss, when I didn’t even know your mother. But you were wrong. I did know her, before you were born. And I liked her.” He offers his fist between them, then opens it. When he picks up the black pearl, her eyes go round and soft, luring him closer like the light of the dangle fish she’d wanted to hunt down. “I remember she had a pearl like this one,” he tells her. “I remember how happy she was when my mother gave her a human string for it. She put it through the pearl and wore it around her neck, always.”

Nalia accepts it into her palm, rolling it around with her finger. “She was entombed with it,” she breathes.  “I wanted to keep it, but I thought it would be selfish, so I didn’t ask Father for it.” She lifts her scrutiny from the pearl to his face. “This looks exactly like hers. It must have taken you forever to find one just like it.” She bites her lip. “That’s what you’ve been doing in the shallows every day before you come to meet me and Freya.”

He nods. Every single day since he was forced to cut off her hair, he’d been harvesting in the oyster beds. Sure, Freya could have used her Tracker abilities to locate him. But by Nalia’s expression, he knows that’s not the case. “You can sense me, then. The way I sense you.”

“Is that the pull?”

He grins, scratching the back of his neck. “I thought we just agreed that the pull doesn’t exist?”

“Then why do we feel this way?”

“I was thinking of calling it ‘love’. Of course, I can’t speak for you—” He’s cut off by her lips on his, her body against his, her arms wrapped around his neck. This kiss is even better than the first. This kiss wraps heat around them, between them, through them. It makes the ocean seem inconsequential, the moon unimportant, everything else non-existent.

It fills all the empty spaces inside him, the ones he didn’t know were there, and the ones he thought he’d already filled. And the future is laid plain before him. Their future.