Chapter 12
Living with both of them was not peaceful.
Let me start there.
It was not calm, simple, or sensible.
But it was never boring.
Rowan was infuriatingly smooth. Adrian was infuriatingly obvious. Rowan flirted like breathing. Adrian glared like it was a full-time job. Rowan liked to drape himself over me whenever Adrian was looking. Adrian liked to conveniently appear shirtless whenever Rowan was trying to prove a point.
And me?
I had somehow become the referee in my own house.
Still, things changed.
Adrian really did try.
When he got upset, he would stop, visibly remember my rule, and force words out through clenched teeth instead of storming off.
When he felt neglected, he asked for attention instead of flooding a room.
When I touched him, he no longer acted like I was committing a crime. He only went pink and muttered threats with absolutely no force behind them.
And Rowan, for all his teasing, stopped provoking him quite as ruthlessly.
Quite as ruthlessly.
Not entirely.
One afternoon I found Adrian sitting on the porch steps, head down, carefully untangling a small string of pearls he had threaded together.
“For what?” I asked, sitting beside him.
He stiffened, then held them out without meeting my eyes.
“For your hair.”
Something in me softened.
I took them.
“Thank you.”
His shoulders relaxed.
That same evening Rowan handed me a carved wooden comb he had made himself.
“What?” he said when I stared. “He’s allowed to give presents and I’m not?”
I laughed so hard I nearly cried.
Maybe that was the beginning.
Not of peace exactly.
But of something steadier.
The village noticed, of course.
It would have taken actual blindness not to.
The women whispered when they saw Adrian and Rowan working on the yard together. The old bachelor stopped leering at me altogether after Rowan smiled at him once with all his teeth and Adrian casually cracked a fence post barehanded nearby.
Nora came over and stood in my doorway looking from one beastman to the other.
Then she looked at me.
Then back at them.
Finally she said, “You know what? Good for you.”
That was as close to a blessing as I was likely to get.
The comments had opinions, naturally.
Rural reverse harem achieved.
No one on the internet believed in them, but here we are.
The fox cooks, the siren cries, and Ellie wins.
I did win, in a way.
Not because I had two beautiful beastmen.
Not because one was rich now and the other was endlessly capable.
But because for the first time in my life, home no longer felt cold when I came back to it.
There was always warmth.
Always noise.
Always someone waiting.
One evening, months after I had first dragged Adrian out of the ocean, I found him standing by the new bathing pool Rowan had built behind the house.
He looked nervous.
Which on Adrian looked almost absurd.
“I have to show you something,” he said.
My brows rose. “That usually ends badly.”
He ignored that.
Then, very slowly, he shifted.
Not into legs.
Not fully into tail.
But into something in between—smooth, controlled, elegant. Enough to show me what he had once been so ashamed of.
Feet.
Scales.
A body caught halfway between forms.
He braced for me to laugh.
I saw it in every inch of him.
Instead I stepped closer, touched his face, and kissed him.
When I pulled back, his eyes were bright.
“You don’t think it’s ugly?”
“I think,” I said, “that you made yourself miserable over something I would have accepted the first day.”
His mouth opened.
Closed.
Then he leaned into me like the whole world had just exhaled.
Behind us, Rowan’s voice drifted over lazily.
“If the emotional breakthrough is done, dinner’s getting cold.”
Adrian glared over my shoulder. “Stay out of this.”
Rowan smirked. “Hard to when you’re standing in my yard crying.”
“I am not—”
A pearl hit the ground.
I started laughing before I could stop myself.
Adrian looked horrified.
Rowan looked delighted.
And somehow, between the two of them and the fading sunlight and the ridiculousness of my own life, happiness arrived so quietly I almost missed it.