Viola flushed and turned away from Zoe’s prodding eyes as she answered, "We went to an amusement park." She had no reason to hide it, and if she was being honest, she had been quietly bursting to tell someone.

Zoe’s gray eyes went wide and round, giving her the look of a startled doll, and then landed on the purple plushie sitting between the pillows on the bed. She reached over and snatched it up. "My brother took you to an amusement park and won you this?"

Viola nodded, and Zoe’s lips pulled into a curious smile. "No wonder you smell so much like him lately. When I first woke up this morning, I thought hermano was in your room. Even now, you have his scent."

Zoe didn’t think much about the scent of her brother on his wife because, just like everyone else in Silver, she believed her brother had marked his wife during their ceremony. But Viola, who was certain he hadn’t marked her and that she wasn’t supposed to carry his scent, fought the urge to sniff herself and frown.

She carried his scent? Maybe it was because of how much they’d been close to each other lately, and she didn’t think too deeply about it or try to consider the other reasons a mate could carry her husband’s scent without a mark.

"Tell me everything. I don’t see him being that romantic on his own, so hearing it out loud will help me believe it," Zoe said excitedly.

Since she still had two hours before she needed to leave to meet her husband, Viola sat down with Zoe and told her everything, from how her brother had gripped her arm in a death grip on the Ferris wheel and turned three shades of green, to how he had reflexively punched one of the haunted house actors clean unconscious.

Zoe sat there with increasingly stunned eyes and an expression of pure disbelief, hugging the purple plushie tightly to her chest the entire time.

When Viola finished, Zoe was smiling like a fool and dabbing at the corner of one eye. "You have just inspired me. I am taking Gilbert to the amusement park and making him win me a plushie too."

Zoe left after a while, happy for Viola and quietly emotional that her brother was finally coming back to himself, that things between them were genuinely going well. She had been in a few relationships that hadn’t lasted more than a month, and she wanted this one with her doctor to be different. She left Viola’s penthouse with outfit advice tucked in her head and a spring in her step.

After she was gone, Viola stood there for a moment with a little worry. Zoe was walking toward a heartbreak she didn’t see coming, and there was nothing Viola could do to stop it without causing it herself.

It would hurt either way, whether it happened now or later. Not unless Gilbert chose to reject Laila’s bond and take Zoe as a chosen mate, but for that to happen, he would have to mark Zoe first, and none of that was close to certain yet.

Maybe she needed to stop hovering over her friends like a mother hen. It wasn’t the first time in history that someone had chosen a promised mate over a fated one. Some people simply did.

Viola was moving out of her bedroom when she remembered and reached for her phone. She had seen Nick’s reply notification yesterday, but so much had happened that she hadn’t had a single moment to open it. When she pulled up his message now, though, her brows drew together.

[It’s okay. We can reschedule our plans. One of my friends is having a mating ceremony coming on next week, and I believe the event will help me forget about the family I have lost. Will you please come with me?]

Viola bit the inside of her cheek. She wanted to be there for him as a friend, but for some reason she felt Nick was depending on her far too much for companionship. Right now, she had so much on her own plate, and going out randomly with someone who didn’t know her secret wasn’t something she should be doing.

She hated that she would have to reject his offer yet again, for if he was really growing feelings for her, not seeing him so often would help those feelings fade, and she didn’t want to become someone he sought emotional comfort from when she had her own problems to deal with.

She replied and apologize that she would be busy on that day.

A few minutes before the two hours were up, Sebastian shared the location. She left her penthouse and followed the arrow on her phone through the building, into parts of it she had never been before.

She took the elevator, then stairs leading downward in the direction of the training grounds, turned down another corner into a long hallway, and pushed through another door. The deeper she walked, the more she noticed the absence of security cameras, and unease began to prick at her, until she reached a set of double doors, pushed them open, and stepped through.

She gasped.

It was a vast open space, and at the center of it sat a wide, sprawling pool with lights built into the floor beneath it and along its edges, giving the water a soft, luminous glow. She was still staring at it when she heard her husband’s voice.

"Hi, love." He said, rising from one of the chairs where he had been sitting with his tablet, which he set down at the sight of her.

"Hello." Viola turned to him and felt relief wash through her immediately. He pulled her into his arms and held her tightly, pressing his lips to her hair before stepping back to stroke her cheek and said,

"You did good finding the pool ground." He praised as this place was complicated even with the map location of the building.

Viola pursed her lips. "I nearly turned back at one point because I wasn’t sure I was going the right way. What is this place?" She looked back at the pool again.

"It was built for secret parties thrown by the teenagers who used to sneak down here. More accurately, my cousin liked to throw parties as a boy and commandeered this pool for them. It hasn’t been in use for a long time, I think most people have forgotten it even exists. But I had the old water drained and replaced with a clean one before you got here."

He took her hand and began to lead her closer to the edge, but she dragged her feet and stepped back, not wanting to be anywhere near a body of water that size. Though it was just a pool, it looked overwhelming too big.

"How deep is it?" She asked, unable to keep the dread out of her voice.

Sebastian glanced back at her over his shoulder. "The shallow end is no more than ten feet. The hollow in the middle is thirty feet deep."

He saw the horror cross her face. Thirty feet was too deep for a pool in any place she had grown up in, but in Silver, people didn’t do things the way humans did and had never seen the point of going halfway.

"Don’t worry," he said. "I won’t let you drown. I will be right beside you every second." Then he reached into his pocket and produced three bars of chocolate, holding them up. "And if you do well, you will be rewarded with your favorites." He teased.

"How did you know these were my favorites?" She looked at the chocolate with barely disguised hunger and then back up at his eyes. They had always been her favorites, and she had run out of them in her penthouse days ago and had no idea where to get more, as it was Zoe who bought those for her.

"I found the wrappers in your kitchen and figured it out from there, and trust me, there is a lot more where those came from." He pinched her nose gently, trying to ease the visible tension wound through her and settle her nerves before they got to what they had actually come here to do.

His plan was to teach her how to swim first, and then see what she could do with those abilities, and more importantly, how they could bring them under control.

Though most people in Silver wouldn’t recognize the signs of mermaid abilities even if they were standing right in front of them, the elders who had lived the longest were a different matter entirely.

Those who had been present during the silent war between mermaids and werewolves knew exactly what to look for, and they had already begun to murmur among themselves that there was an imposter somewhere in their midst.

If Viola was found out before Sebastian could get ahead of it, there would be very little he could do to protect her. Short of something as extreme as killing every single person who knew the truth, he had no solution, and he refused to let his mind go there unless it became the only option left.

He would do absolutely anything to protect her. But if there was a way to avoid things reaching that point, he would find it, and teaching her to master her abilities and keep them concealed was, right now, the best option available to either of them.