Because I was poor, the village never assigned me a beastman husband. Every year, the women with better houses, fuller pantries, and family backing got first pick. The rest of us were left to smile through the humiliation and pretend we did not care.

Chapter 15

By spring, nobody in the village remembered me as the poor orphan woman who got passed over every year.

Now I was the woman with the rebuilt house on the hill, the one whose fox husband charmed merchants into lowering prices and whose siren husband could silence a whole road with a single look.

The old bachelor stopped speaking to me altogether.

Probably wise.

Nora started sending people to Rowan for repairs and to Adrian for sea goods, which only made both of them more arrogant.

The comments still appeared now and then, but more and more rarely, and when they did, they seemed almost disappointed.

No tragedy?

No one died?

No one got returned to the ocean?

Nope.

Domestic happiness arc.

Sometimes I still thought about the girl I had been on that moonless night.

Lonely. Humiliated. Desperate enough to throw a net into the dark and pray for a life different from the one she had.

She had not known what she was doing.

She had made a reckless choice.

A foolish one, maybe.

But I could not hate her for it.

Because that foolish girl had dragged destiny home in a net.

She just had not realized destiny would come with a temper, tears, fur, claws, jealousy, seduction, broken buckets, stolen kisses, and entirely too much work.

One warm evening, I stood in the yard while the sunset turned everything gold.

Rowan was fixing a loose fence post. Adrian was in the bathing pool, pretending not to listen to every sound I made.

I looked at them and smiled.

Adrian noticed first, suspicious immediately. “Why are you looking at us like that?”

Rowan glanced over too.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m lucky,” I said.

They both went quiet.

Then Rowan laughed under his breath and came over, wrapping an arm around my waist from one side.

Adrian clicked his tongue, climbed out of the pool in one smooth motion, and came to stand on my other side, still damp, still gorgeous, still impossible.

“You are lucky,” he informed me.

I laughed and leaned into both of them.

Maybe I was.

Not because love had come to me easily.

It had not.

Not because it had been tidy.

It definitely had not.

But because when I had reached into the dark with empty hands and a reckless heart, something had reached back.

And in the end, what I caught was not just a beastman.

Not just two.

I caught a home.