When she returned to the office, Viola didn’t tell Matt about her pregnancy either. No one else would know until she had given the news to Sebastian first. She acted as normally as she could, even when Matt looked surprised that she had returned sooner than he expected.

“I guess the Doc knew better than to mess with you on his silly experiments. I ordered you some food; it’s on the desk, Supreme Luna,” Matt said.

Viola couldn’t have felt more loved by the people around her lately. She smiled in appreciation.

“Thank you.”

She was forced to retire for the day earlier than she wanted when exhaustion and sleepiness began to overtake her hours later. She kept yawning, tears gathering in her eyes and blurring the screen in front of her. When she noticed that it was already 5:08 p.m. she finally gave in and turned everything off.

Viola was on her way back to her penthouse when she heard the melody echo in her head again, and she stopped dead in her tracks.

“Did you hear that?” She asked her bodyguards, and the men exchanged looks before glancing at her strangely.

“No, Supreme Luna. Did you hear something?” One of them asked in a gruff voice, a suspicious look crossing his face, as though something wasn’t quite right with their Luna. First she’d been walking like a snail, and now she was looking around asking if they’d heard something. What exactly was she hearing?

Even as the men denied hearing anything, the sweet, sorrowful sound washed toward her again, and her chest tightened at the sound. How could they not hear it, when it was so loud inside her own head?

Feeling uneasy, she quickened her pace slightly and arrived at her penthouse, closing the door behind her as though to shut the sorrow of the sound out.

She didn’t know what was wrong with her, not since the moment she had sung that song at the ceremony. It kept replaying in her head. Apart from everything happening too fast, there was also her earlier worry about where Sebastian had gone, and whether he had set out to hunt down his cousin.

Viola barely knew which emotion to sit with right now, was it the excitement of learning she had a wolf, one that had been suppressed by someone in her life without her knowledge? Or the fact that she was going to be a mother to Sebastian’s child? Or her worry over him and his whereabouts? Or the sound haunting her, alone, inside her head?

She couldn’t process it all at once that everything was starting to feel overwhelming and heavy.

Viola went to the water dispenser and was pouring herself a glass of water, hoping to cool all those emotions and feelings, when the water suddenly splashed out of the glass and she dropped it as Wave sprawled out of it, screaming, “She’s here, she’s here!”

“Who’s here?” Viola asked, one hand flying protectively to her belly, the other to her chest, as Wave had nearly scared the soul out of her.

“The mermaid!” He exclaimed.

Viola, still shaken from the creature’s sudden appearance after it hadn’t answered her call that morning, looked at it in confusion as she asked,

“What mermaid?” She even turned to glance around her room, and right at that moment, the sorrowful sound came to her again. She was about to cover her ears with her palms when Wave leapt up and exclaimed,

“The mermaid is singing and calling for you! She’s here!”

Viola’s hands dropped from her ears, and she stared at Wave in astonishment. “You heard it too?”

She watched the creature bob its watery head, its enormous eyes fixed toward her door, as it trailed toward her couch. “I know where she is. Come with me if you want to see the mermaid. She’s calling with a mermaid song!”

Viola was confused by everything. Mermaid song? Wasn’t that the song she’d sung at the ceremony? And how could a mermaid be in Silver, when they knew better than to come onto land, especially into Silver, where the earliest history of their enmity had begun?

“What do you mean, mermaid song? I sang that song at the ceremony. There’s no way a mermaid could be here singing it.” Viola told him with a frown, but Wave kept pacing across her couch, leaving it soaking wet, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from scolding him and refocus on the more urgent matter at hand.

Wave turned his eyes to her with a dark look. “Your monster put the mermaid here. The other monsters dragged her from the water and put her inside a big thing not connected to the sea. Let’s go free her, Mermaidia!”

“Sebastian caught a mermaid?” She asked with a scowl, and when Wave bobbed his head again, she let out a humorless laugh. “You must be mistaken. He has no reason to catch and keep a mermaid, especially since he doesn’t even like them, and knowing his own wife is part mermaid, he’d never do something like that. Wave, stop trolling me…” She trailed off when the sound came again, and this time it was so clear she felt like she could trace it back to its source.

“Show me where she is.” She said quietly, unable to deny the sound and wanting to find the real source.

Wave immediately dropped from the couch and began leading her out. The creature had no need to use doors, it dissolved through the little gaps beneath them to the other side, and before she’d even opened her own door, it had already reached the elevator, bouncing impatiently for her to get there.

Viola didn’t believe her husband would ever capture and keep a mermaid; she didn’t think he was the kind of man who ate the creatures’ fishy part for nutrients, especially knowing his own wife carried that heritage in her blood, he wouldn’t do that to her. But she still wanted to see for herself whether Wave was truly right about the sound coming from a mermaid somewhere in this building.

“If it’s coming from a mermaid, why is she singing my song?” She asked once they were inside the elevator.

“Because it’s the only song she’s heard you sing. Mermaids call to each other through the channel of song. She must have heard you through a channel, and now she’s using your song to call you to her. What color was your song, Mermaidia?” Wave asked, still bouncing impatiently, clearly displeased with the slow, enclosed human contraption that took its time opening and delivering them to their destination, he would much rather have been swimming and gliding through open water than trapped inside a magic door called an elevator.

“Do songs have colors? I don’t understand.” Viola asked, still trying to digest the fact that her song had somehow reached a mermaid, unsure whether that was a good thing or a bad one.

Wave nodded. “Many colors. In the sea, mermaids sing in colors, and sometimes they can share the emotions carried by those colors or take on someone else’s color,” he explained.

Seeing that she seemed too naive, too shaped by the ways of the land-dwellers to understand how the sea world worked right away, Wave rolled his eyes and continued explaining in the slow voice one would use with a little mermaid child. His owner seemed no different from the little children who were still learning the ways of their world.

If only she would leave her monster and return to the sea with him.

“When you sing in white, you share it with everyone listening, and while you share it, you naturally take their color back in return. The worst colors to take are blue and red. If you take blue, all their sadness and pain will flow back into your heart, while your white song gives them joy and happiness for as long as their sadness remains inside you. If you sing in blue, you take their happiness and give them your sadness instead, making everyone miserable.

“And if you sing in white and take back red…” Wave chuckled nervously. “Mermaids avoid taking red because all the people’s resentment, anger, and dark thoughts will flow into you, and you can become dangerous. They lock people who take in red in cages until the color is gone from their hearts. You can share any kind of color through music, but avoid singing in white so you won’t take back others feeling to give you color.”

Wave finished explaining just as the doors slid open. He bounced out without waiting for her, calling back, “Hurry, Mermaidia!”