Chapter 379 The Mermaid

“What is he doing here?”

Matt turned to follow his gaze and found Nick walking in their direction. “He’s friends with Kenny’s distant cousin, the one who works in Silver’s tech company.”

Sebastian didn’t like Nick being anywhere near where his wife was, for reasons he could already sense clearly enough. His cousin was carrying feelings for her that Sebastian would never allow. On top of that, Nick was someone Sebastian had been quietly growing suspicious of for some time, though he couldn’t bring himself to fully commit to that suspicion. He had kept men watching Nick almost his entire life, the same way they had watched Javier and his mother, and Nick had always come back clean of his brother’s particular brand of greed.

“Supreme Alpha.” Nick greeted as he reached them, smiling easily, and Sebastian acknowledged him with a stiff nod.

“Hey, Zoe!” Nick walked towards his cousin and pulled her into a hug, which she returned before immediately grumbling at him. “Where have you been hiding? I’ve almost forgotten you exist, you’ve become completely scarce.”

Zoe was only joking, but she had no idea her cousin took it to heart the way he did. Nick’s smile went just slightly stiff at the corners. He hated being forgettable more than he hated almost anything else, more than the fact that he had never once measured up to Javier in his mother’s eyes. He buried it under his easy expression and said,

“I didn’t know I was that easy to forget.” Then his eyes moved around the group. “Where’s Vee?”

He had only glanced away from this side of the hall, where he had been mingling with friends and keeping up with their drama, for a brief moment. When he looked back, she was gone.

More than anything else right now, he wanted an opportunity to get her alone, away from the husband who was constantly at her side to carry on with his plans for her. He wouldn’t be able to rest until he got the kiss he had witnessed her giving his cousin. Nick’s blood boiled at the memory, and every part of him roared with the desperate need to know what her lips felt like.

“Vee went to the restroom—” Zoe’s words cut off as the lights in the hall suddenly died.

Every light went out except for the ones on the stage, which came on in a single warm beam and pulled every eye in the room toward it. The chattering dissolved into quiet murmuring.

“What’s going on?”

“Who knows. The ceremony has been boring anyway, there’s been no real entertainment.”

“They should just do the marking and get it over with. Hailey already ruined everything for her brother.”

“What’s about to happen again?”

While everyone was still wondering, a figure stepped into the spotlight on the stage, the light catching her and the grand piano that had been placed there, and a microphone positioned in front of it. People recognized her immediately as the Supreme Luna and exchanged glances, wondering when she had slipped up there and what she was about to do.

Sebastian stared at his wife as she made her way to the stool in front of the piano and sat down. Was she going to play? He had never once heard her play anything before, had never even known whether she could, despite the fact that her penthouse, like most homes in Silver, housed a piano.

“This is a gift from me to the couple.” Her voice came through the microphone, clear and warm. “And to someone very special, amidst a million.”

Her fingers found the first keys, and slowly the notes began to build and breathe outward into the entire hall. It was a sweet, deeply romantic symphony that reached into the chest of every person in the room and held on, the chattering stopped completely, every single person drawn toward the stage without fully realizing they were moving. Even Laila, who had been crying quietly out on the balcony, turned her head at the sound.

Sebastian stood transfixed. The melody she played washed over him, dissolving every trace of the anger that had been simmering inside him and replacing it with something he knew so well, love and warmth.

The music flowed through the hall, filling every corner of it, and when she parted her lips and began to sing along with it, it took the breath from more than a few people in the crowd. Her voice was unlike anything. It moved like a healing balm across every wound in the room, its sweetness pulling tears to eyes and bittersweet smiles to lips that hadn’t smiled genuinely in hours.

As Sebastian listened, he couldn’t help the thought that crept in, was this what people meant when they said mermaids and sirens could charm any soul with their melody? Because this song was doing something to his heart that he couldn’t put a name to, especially when she looked out across the hall in his direction and sang,

[…A love like no other. I can’t say I love you enough, for my words could never be enough. Hold my hands, hold my heart, kiss my lips and take me home…]

Viola sang with everything she had, her whole heart poured into it, not thinking about anything beyond the music and the people she was singing for, completely unaware that when a mermaid sings, particularly one of royal blood, her voice carries something beyond melody. It could heal the most broken heart in a room. It could bring hope to someone who had forgotten what hope felt like. And it traveled.

The song moved through an invisible channel that only mermaids shared between themselves, carrying itself all the way back to Silver, where a certain mermaid was currently in the captivity of Sebastian’s men, being transferred into a containment tube.

The mermaid swam to the glass and pressed both hands flat against it, her blue eyes wide and searching, making a sorrowful sound as though trying to reach the singer, as though she could hear it and was calling back across the distance.

“She’s trying to charm you with those eyes. Lock the tube before the fucking creature pulls off another trick on us.”