How Does The Swimmer End?

Meadow never knew what life had in store for her when Luna Amber came to ask for her hand in marriage on behalf of her son, the Alpha of the pack. It was an amazing and unbelievable offer, and though it seemed suspicious, Meadow wanted to believe that life had finally smiled on her. She went into the marriage blindly, thinking her luck had finally changed and there would be love in her mute and dull life. She soon found out that the Alpha never wanted her, and Luna Amber acted on her own without his consent for her selfish reasons. Something that was supposed to be blissful and beautiful turned into a nightmare she could never wake up from. Accepting her situation, she tries to make it work, hoping one day, her husband will want to try with her.

Three hours after my engagement banquet ended, I was stuffed into a burlap sack and thrown straight into the ocean. By the time deep-sea divers found me, my body had swollen into something grotesque and barely recognizable. The police called my fiancé right away to come identify the remains, but he could not have sounded less interested. "So, she's dead. So what? I'll show up at the funeral when the time comes." Left with no choice, the police dialed the second starred contact in my phone. It was my own brother. He laughed so hard that he doubled over. "Dead? Last I checked, it's not April Fools'. Not a funny joke. And do me a favor. Tell Selene Corvin I couldn't care less about her corpse. Throw it back in the ocean to feed the fish. I don't care." He did not know that I did end up as fish food for a very long time. The moment my remains appeared on that massive screen, however, both my fiancé and my brother lost their minds.

I am the youngest daughter of the King of the Sea, the most beloved little mermaid princess. The man I married is the world's most brilliant marine biologist. He has a childhood sweetheart who grew up with him, a woman who knows everything about extracting ocean toxins. The two of them, her brewing poisons and him developing antidotes, spent over a decade happily doing research together. Until the day she injected that toxin into my body. I nearly died. When I came to, he was sitting at my bedside writing up a treatment plan. "Don't be mad at Vicky," he said, still writing, his voice impossibly gentle. "She's just immature. She didn't mean to hurt you." "She knows I can save you. She just wanted to get a rise out of me." The moment those words left his mouth, one of Vicky's people came to call for him. After he left, I looked down at the treatment plan. He had left out one key ingredient. He'd been in too much of a hurry. He hadn't even noticed. That was when the sprite, silent for so long, finally stirred. The glowing pearl that had traveled with me for over twenty years drifted out from my collar, floating lazily in a slow circle. "Your Highness, once your human-form energy is depleted on land, your soul will return to the sea, and you'll never be able to come ashore again. This treatment plan is missing deep-sea spirulina extract. Following it will drain your energy even faster. The choice is yours." I stared at that line for a long time. Then I passed the treatment plan to the caretaker and smiled. "Let's go with this."

Despite me being three months pregnant, my husband asked me to jump into the water to help his first love look for her necklace. I teared up and begged my husband not to make me do this . Yet his friends all criticized me. “He’s just asking you to jump into the water. You’re the only one who can swim here. Nothing will go wrong if you’re only in for a little while.” “Minerva, that’s the memento Violet’s mother left for her.” I tried to keep fighting against it and grabbed the hem of Shaun’s shirt. But he shoved me into the sea. I struggled against the water as I hoped to see any hint of pity in Shaun’s eyes. Yet he said, “Minerva, you’re an excellent swimmer. You’ll be fine.”

"She was my siren. My unearthly creature, far more beautiful than any angel. I was getting lost in her ocean blue eyes and she was making my heart skip a beat every time she smiles. She was the beginning and the end of all my days, she was my reason to wake up and live a better life. She was my whole life. And my undoing..."

As the only expert in the world capable of rescue dives below 3,000 feet, I received a once-in-a-lifetime salvage contract worth tens of millions of dollars. I had dived in those same waters over a decade ago. My son's research submersible had been damaged on the ocean floor. After his oxygen ran out, he suffocated in the dark. The grief nearly destroyed me. My husband, Griffin Lattimer, held me through it, staying by my side through countless miserable nights. I found out later that he had personally redirected the only rescue vessel capable of reaching the depths our son was at to save his childhood friend's daughter. That girl had merely choked on a mouthful of water in the shallows. I divorced Griffin and threw myself into deep-sea salvage like a woman possessed, diving over and over until I knew the undercurrents of those waters better than I knew my own home. I never wanted another child to die the way mine did. Today brought the same stretch of ocean, the same crushed hull, the same depleted oxygen, and the same impossible odds. When I opened the client's file, I went completely still. I recognized the name and face inside instantly. I would never forget either of them for as long as I lived. I smiled and slid the folder back across the table to my partner. "I can't take this one."