What would you sacrifice for a love that was never meant to exist?

ADAORA:

I wasn't supposed to survive.

The ocean should have killed me—crushed me in the depths of a shipwreck three hundred years before I was born. Instead, I woke in the arms of a man who shouldn't exist. A pirate. A killer. A ghost from history with silver hair and storm-grey eyes that see straight through every lie I tell.

Captain Declan Thorne claims I'm his prize. His sea witch. His salvation.

He has no idea I'm his destruction.

Because the portal that brought me to 1715 is still open, still calling me home to a life I barely remember wanting. And every day I stay in this brutal century, every night I spend in his bed learning exactly how a pirate claims what's his, I'm betraying everything I worked for. Everyone who thinks I'm dead.

But God help me, I don't want to leave.

THORNE:

She's lying to me.

I knew it the moment I pulled her from the water—this woman with skin like midnight and eyes that hold secrets from a world I can't imagine. She speaks of futures that haven't happened, machines that don't exist, knowledge that could save my crew or damn us all.

I should have thrown her back to the sea.

Instead, I'm keeping her. Teaching her to survive in my brutal world. Protecting her from dangers she doesn't understand. And every night, claiming her body with a possession that's becoming dangerously close to something I swore I'd never feel again.

She thinks I don't know about the portal. The glowing passage in the caves that pulls at her like a siren's song. The choice she's putting off making because she knows what I'll do when she tries to leave.

But I do know. And when that moment comes—when she stands between her old life and this one—I'll be there.

Because I've lived thirty-five years as a dead man walking. I've stolen, killed, and damned myself a thousand times over. But losing her?

That's the one sin I won't commit. Not without a fight.