Her scales are deep auburn and her blond hair barely reaches her breasts, which are covered by a braid of orange seaweed. She sits beside me on the rock and stares at the ship in the distance. Which will you take, cousin? Kahlia asks in Psáriin. It’s a wonder we even need our song to steal hearts. We have eyelashes born from iceberg shavings and lips painted with the blood of sailors. A magnificence forged in salt water and regality. It’s a well-known fact that sirens are beautiful, but the bloodline of Keto is royal and with that comes its own beauty. In that ocean lies the sea kingdom of Keto. A selection of each so it manages to be neither. For me, that’s the great sea of Diávolos, with waters of apple and sapphire. My hair snakes down my back, as red as my left eye-and only my left, of course, because the right eye of every siren is the color of the sea they were born into. It’s because they think that if they eat enough of them, they might become human themselves. And when they steal the hearts we keep, it isn’t for power. Sometimes they save the lives of sailors and take nothing but charms in return. They steal trinkets and follow ships in hopes that treasure will fall from the decks. They have the capacity to be deadly, like all monsters, but where sirens seduce and kill, mermaids remain fascinated by humans. Fish and human both, with the beauty of neither. Their deep-blue flesh is dotted with fins that spread up their arms and spines. Unlike sirens, mermaids have stretched blue husks and limbs in place of hair, with a jawlessness that lets their mouths stretch to the size of small boats and swallow sharks whole. Mermaids more fish than flesh, with an upper body to match the decadent scales of their fins. These are the women who take the human bounty of their kin. Left to suffer until their blood becomes salt and they dissolve to sea foam. I’ve heard things: tales of lost hearts and harpooned women stapled to the ocean bed as punishment for their treachery. Hearts are power, and if there’s one thing my kind craves more than the ocean, it’s power. I count each of them, so I can be sure none were stolen in the night. Every so often, I claw through the shingle, just to check they’re still there. There are seventeen hidden in the sand of my bedroom. I HAVE A HEART for every year I’ve been alive. He finds himself needing Lira to achieve his ultimate goal, so he has to work with her, like it or not. When he saves a drowning woman in the middle of the ocean who promises him the key to destroying all of sirenkind, he's not sure if he can trust her. Prince Eilan lives on the ocean, and his unsavory hobby of killing sirens is his calling. This seemed easy enough at first, but her budding affection for Eilan leaves her confused, and she questions the identity she's hidden from him. Robbed of her voice, Lira is given an ultimatum, steal Prince Eilan's heart or remain a human forever. Her own mother turned her into what she hates most, a punishment that leaves Lira fighting for revenge on the Sea Queen. The most lethal siren in her kingdom, everything changes for Lira when she's forced to kill one of their own, finding herself a sudden outcast-and worse-a human. In a world of sirens and sailors, Princess Lira is siren royalty with the hearts of seventeen princes in her collection.
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