Between the Monster and the Sea by Tessa Kelwyn
Between the Monster and the Sea
Description
Every year, Liora's village sends an unmarried girl across the water as a ritual sacrifice to the gods of the deep. It is considered a sacred honor. The girls do not come back, which the village chooses to interpret as a good sign. Liora ends up in the offering line. It is, genuinely, not her finest week. What waits on the island is not divine mercy or a peaceful surrender to something ancient and holy. There are no gods. There is no gentle, luminous afterlife. There is a cursed man who has been alone for longer than she has been alive, a feral creature with an unreasonable number of teeth, and eight black tentacles that are absolutely, definitely, not coming from the walls. They are coming from him. He is not what she expected. He is not what anyone would expect, partly because of the tentacles and partly because he turns out to have a voice like gravel and a dry wit that has had many years of solitude to sharpen itself to a very fine point. He forgot his own name somewhere in the last century. She gives him a new one. The tentacles, supposedly instruments of ancient terror, mostly just follow her around. This is where things get complicated. And warm. And significantly more tentacle-forward than she budgeted for.
Chapter 1
Mar 22, 2026
POV: Liora
We met where the rocks hid us from the village, his back against the stone and my hand in his. The tide was coming in and neither of us moved.
"I love you to the bottom of the sea and back," Jorin said, his thumb stroking my wrist. "Every wave that touches the shore, that is how many times I think of you."
My mouth twitched. The words were clumsy and too large for the boy saying them, but his eyes were steady on mine and his hand was warm.
"That is a lot of thinking," I said. "When do you find time to work at the forge?"
"I do not." He pulled me closer and pressed his forehead to mine. "My father says I have been useless for weeks. He blames the heat, but I blame you."
"You should blame yourself," I said, but my chest was full and tight, and I buried my face in his neck because I did not want him to see how much I needed this. "You chose to follow me to the beach that first night."
"I would choose it again." The words dropped low and certain. "Every night, Liora. I would choose you every single night."
I believed him because of his arms around me, the warmth of his skin, the rough certainty in his voice. I held all of it and did not look closely, because when you have been hungry long enough, you do not inspect the bread.
"Matchmaking day is coming," he said, his mouth against my hair. "When I come to your father's door, everything changes. No more hiding on rocks."
"My father will not make it easy for you." I pulled back to see his face. "He does not consider me an asset to anyone."
"Then he is blind." Jorin's hand cupped my jaw, and the roughness of his palm sent heat down through my throat. "I will make him see, I promise you."
We stayed until the tide soaked our ankles. Then he walked me to where the lamplight began and the secrecy ended. His hand left mine at the last house, and the cold crept in where his fingers had been.
I walked home with his words warm in my chest. The village was dark except for the glow from the Elder's house — my father's house, though most days it felt more like his hall than my home.
The laughter reached me before I touched the door. Inside, the warmth was not for me.
"Calla memorized the entire tide chart in one afternoon," my mother was saying, her voice bright with the particular pride she kept only for my sister. "The harbormaster said he has never seen anyone learn it so fast."
"She has a gift for everything she touches," my father added. "The weaving, the bookkeeping, the way she handles the traders."
Calla sat between them, golden-haired and sharp-eyed, accepting praise the way the shore accepts the tide — as though it were owed and inevitable. She was nineteen and already the center of every room she entered, effortless in a way that made my teeth ache.
I closed the door behind me, and the room shifted the way it always did when I arrived. My mother's smile thinned and father's jaw set.
"You are late," my mother said. "Where have you been?"
"Walking," I answered. "The shore was quiet tonight."
"The shore is always quiet when you are on it," Calla said without looking up. "Nothing interesting ever happens near you, Liora."
I sat at the edge of the table because that was where the table preferred me. My chair was the furthest from the fire, and I had stopped fighting for a closer one years ago.
"The Harren boy asked about you today," my mother told Calla, leaning forward. "His mother says he cannot stop speaking of you."
"Liora could learn from her sister," my father said, his eyes sliding toward me with the familiar weight of disappointment. "Calla does not bring trouble to this house and does not start fights in the square."
"Calla does not have to." The words left me before I could swallow them. "Everyone agrees with her before she opens her mouth."
"Because she earns their respect," my father said. "But you earn their complaints."
I was none of the things my sister was. Where Calla shone, I blurred. My hair was dark and tangled from the sea air, my features soft where hers were striking. The scar across my collarbone from a childhood fall was the only sharp thing about the way I looked.
"You have that look again," Calla said, tilting her head with practiced concern. "That sulking, wounded look. Grandmother used to make it too, sitting in her cottage, humming her strange songs."
"Do not talk about her." My fists curled beneath the table.
"Why not? Everyone says you are just the same." Calla's smile widened. "Difficult, odd, and always surrounded by a problem she created herself."
"Enough." My father's hand flattened on the table. "We do not speak of my mother in this house."
I shoved back from the table and walked out without asking permission. The air inside that house had turned to stone and I could not breathe another second of it.
The cottage sat at the edge of my father's land, small and weathered, pushed to the margin the way everything inconvenient was pushed in this family. A single candle burned in the window.
I found her in her chair, thinner than last week, her fingers curled around the blanket on her knees. She smiled when she saw me, and the warmth of it loosened the tight band the family table had cinched around my ribs.
"There you are," she said. "Sit with me, child."
"You should be resting." I knelt beside her and took her hand. "You look worse than yesterday, Grandmother."
"I look exactly as someone looks when they are leaving." Her voice was steady, but her grip on my fingers tightened. "Listen to me now. Tonight is the last time."
"Do not say that." My throat closed around the words. "You said that last month and you were still here in the morning."
"Last month I was lying to make you sleep." Her eyes held mine, clear and fierce and fading. "Tonight I am telling you the truth."
She reached beneath the blanket and pulled out a medallion on a thin chain, gold and warm and old. "This belonged to my sister. She was the shaman of this village before they buried her name along with everything else."
I stared at it. She had never spoken of a sister. "Why have you never told me?"
"Because some things are safer as secrets." She placed the medallion in my palm and closed my fingers around it. "Do not let them see it or touch it."
"Grandmother, please." My eyes burned and my voice cracked. "Tell me what to do. Tell me how to keep you here."
"You cannot keep me, child." Her hand found my face, dry and gentle and trembling. "But you can keep this. Swear it."
"I swear," I whispered. The medallion was warm against my palm — warm from her grip, I told myself, though her fingers had gone cold.
She began to hum — three notes, the melody she had sung to me since I was small enough to fit in her lap. I joined her, and our voices tangled in the candlelight, and I held her hand and did not let go.
Between the Monster and the Sea
30 Chapters
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