I fell in love with a villainess

The dagger trembled.

Evangeline's breath fogged in the shipwreck's icy air, her knuckles white around the hilt. Jack slept unaware, the scar on his chest pulsing like a second heartbeat. Seraphine's voice slithered through her mind, slippery as eelgrass.

"One thrust, and Liran breathes again. One cut, and your brother returns from the dark."

The blade kissed Jack's throat. A bead of blood welled, black in the moonlight.

"Do you love him more than your own flesh?"

Evangeline's hand froze.

A memory flickered—Jack's laugh, warm and rare, as he burned toast in the solarium. "You're a terrible teacher," he'd said. "But I'm a worse student."

The dagger clattered to the floor.

The leviathan rose at dawn.

It breached the waves in a spire of rotting kelp and coral bones, its body a cathedral of drowned souls. Thorns twisted through its ribs, blooming with Rosa Noctis that wept black sap. Its roar shook the cliffs, sending avalanches of stone into the sea.

Evangeline stood at the water's edge, Jack's name strange yet familiar on her tongue. "We can't fight that."

He stepped beside her, thorns coiled around his forearms like serpents. "We don't have to. Just distract it."

"While you do what?"

"Something stupid." His gold-fractured eyes met hers. "Stay close."

They raced along the cliffs as the leviathan's tendrils lashed the shore. Evangeline's muscles remembered this—the rhythm of flight, the way Jack's shoulder brushed hers as they dodged falling debris. A tendril snapped toward her; he yanked her back, thorns shredding the appendage to mulch.

"Why?" she panted. "Why risk yourself for me?"

He lobbed a root-spear into the leviathan's eye. "Because you would."

Another memory—his hand in hers, pulling her from a nightmare. "I'm here," he'd said. "Always."

The leviathan screamed, its maw gaping. Inside, Oren hung suspended in a cage of thorns, unconscious but alive.

"The gardener!" Evangeline lunged forward, but Jack caught her waist.

"It's a trap."

"So we spring it."

Seraphine awaited them in the leviathan's belly.

Her form flickered between woman and wraith, thorns knitting her flesh to the beast's ribs. "Daughter of venom," she crooned. "Have you come to trade after all?"

Evangeline raised her dagger. "I've come to prune your garden."

The fight was brutal. Seraphine's thorns parried every strike, her laughter echoing through the leviathan's gullet. Jack battled the beast from within, roots erupting to rupture its veins, but the scar on his chest split wider, gold light bleeding into the rot.

"You're mine," Seraphine whispered in his mind. "Let go."

Evangeline saw him falter, his thorns withering. "Jack—don't!"

He smiled, blood on his teeth. "Sorry, Eva."

The scar detonated.

Light swallowed the leviathan.

Thorns devoured it from the inside, reducing the beast to a skeletal wreck. Jack collapsed, the scar now a gaping chasm, roots spilling from his chest. Evangeline crawled to him, Oren slung over her shoulder.

"Fool," she hissed, cradling his face. "I don't even know you."

His hand found hers. "You do. You're just stubborn."

A memory surged—his lips on hers in the witch's cave, salt and defiance. "Always," he'd said.

She kissed him, hard, as if to seal the fractures in his soul. The roots stilled.

Maeve found them at twilight, the leviathan's carcass littering the shore.

"The thorns will regrow," the witch warned, pressing a vial of glowing algae to Jack's chest. "This will slow the rot. But the price—"

"I'll pay it," Evangeline said.

"No." Jack sat up, the vial's light dimming the scar. "We're done trading memories."

Maeve shrugged. "Then trade something else. A vow. A promise. A lie."

Evangeline stood, bloodied but unbowed. "We'll trade nothing. The thorns want a war? Let them come."

That night, as Jack slept, she found the charred doll in her coat.

Seraphine's voice sighed from the stitches. "You'll regret this."

Evangeline tossed it into the fire. "I regret nothing."

Chapter 13 End.