The morning after the night of silent screams felt brittle, as if the very air in the villa had been glazed over with a thin, invisible layer of ice. Ante had risen with the sun, his body aching from a sleepless night spent standing vigil at his window, his mind a churning sea of rage and strategy. He moved through the quiet house with a purposeful energy, his senses heightened, listening for any sound from the south wing. There was only silence—a heavy, exhausted silence that was more telling than any sob.
He found his father already in the kitchen, a rare occurrence. Jure was standing at the counter, drinking a thick, black coffee, his back to the room. He was dressed for business, a dark, tailored suit a stark contrast to the sun-drenched casualness of the villa. He didn't turn as Ante entered.
"I have to go to Dubrovnik," Jure announced, his voice flat, devoid of its usual commanding resonance. It was the voice of a man consolidating his forces after a skirmish. "The Austrians are being difficult. It will take most of the day."
Ante said nothing. He watched the rigid set of his father's shoulders, the way he held his coffee cup like a weapon. This was a retreat, a tactical withdrawal. He was leaving the battlefield, but only to secure his flanks. His absence was not a reprieve; it was a warning of a coming, greater assault.
"Fine," Ante said, his own voice carefully neutral.
Jure finally turned. His eyes, the colour of old whiskey, were bloodshot, but the flinty core was undimmed. They scanned Ante, looking for signs of rebellion, for the fallout from the night before.
"Mirna is still unwell," Jure stated, a preemptive strike. "She needs rest. Quiet. I expect you to respect that."
The hypocrisy was so galling it took Ante's breath away. He was the one who needed to respect her, after the violation he had undoubtedly inflicted? The urge to confront him, to name the unnameable horror, was a physical pressure in his throat. But he remembered the sound of her choked sob, the terrible silence that followed. A direct confrontation would only make things worse for her. It would paint a target on her back.
"Of course," Ante forced out, the words tasting like ash.
Jure gave a curt nod, a king satisfied his orders would be obeyed. He finished his coffee, placed the cup in the sink with a definitive clink, and left without another word. A few moments later, the sound of the Land Rover's engine faded down the driveway.
The villa was theirs.
The ice in the air did not melt, but it shifted. The oppressive, watchful presence was gone, replaced by a tense, waiting void. Ante waited a full hour, giving his father time to be well and truly gone, before he went to find her.
He didn't go to her room. He went to the solarium. She was there, as he'd suspected she would be. But she wasn't curled on the rug. She was standing at the glass wall, her forehead pressed against the cool surface, her palms flat beside her head as if trying to push through to the sea beyond. She was wearing the same simple sea-foam coloured dress from the day before, and she looked so frail, so utterly drained, that she seemed almost translucent, a watercolour painting of a girl.
"Mirna?" he said softly from the doorway.
She didn't jump. She simply went still, then slowly turned her head. The sight of her face struck him like a blow. The delicate skin around her incredible violet eyes was swollen and shadowed, a testament to a night of tears. But the eyes themselves were different. The flicker of intelligent curiosity he'd seen yesterday was gone. In its place was a flat, hollow emptiness, a deep, traumatized shock. She looked at him without recognition for a moment, as if he were just another feature of the nightmare.
"I thought," Ante began, choosing his words with the care of a man defusing a bomb, "you might like to get out. Away from the house. I have the dinghy. We could just… be on the water."
He saw the war in her eyes. The instinctive, caged fear of leaving the known prison for the unknown. But then, her gaze drifted past him, to the vast, blue expanse of the sea. The hollow look was pierced by a needle of pure, agonizing longing. The sea was her siren, her tormentor, and her only salvation.
She gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
He didn't offer his hand. He simply turned and led the way, and he heard the soft, hesitant shuffle of her bare feet following him.
The dinghy was a small, inflatable Zodiac with a modest outboard motor, a practical workhorse he used for coastal surveys. It was a world away from the gleaming, predatory luxury of The Siren. It was simple, honest, and it sat low in the water, intimately connected to the sea.
He helped her in, his touch on her elbow brief and impersonal. She settled on the pontoon, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her body tense as they puttered away from the dock. She didn't look back at the villa, that stark, white fortress on the cliff. Her entire being was focused forward, on the open water.
As the villa shrank behind them, its windows like blind, accusing eyes, a remarkable transformation began to take place. It was slow at first, like a flower opening to the sun after a long night. The tense, hunched line of her shoulders began to soften. The death-grip she had on her own arms loosened. She took a deep, shuddering breath, and it seemed to be the first full breath she had taken since he'd found her in the solarium.
Ante cut the engine to a gentle putter, wanting to minimize the mechanical intrusion. The silence of the sea enveloped them, broken only by the lap of water against the rubber hull and the cry of the gulls. The sunlight danced on the waves, and the air was clean and sharp with salt.
Mirna leaned over the side, tentatively at first, then with more confidence. She trailed her fingers in the water, her gaze fixed on the shifting, sun-dappled depths. And then, she began to hum.
It was a strange, melodic tune, unlike any music Ante had ever heard. It was not a human melody with a clear structure; it was a series of rising and falling, fluid notes, full of clicks and trills that mimicked the sound of water over stone, the echo in a cave, the sigh of the waves. It was ancient and wild, a song without words, a language of the deep.
Ante watched, mesmerized, his scientific mind cataloging the sound, his human heart simply captivated. She was no longer the terrified captive. In this element, she was in her element. A serenity settled over her features, smoothing away the shadows of trauma, and in that moment, her beauty was so profound it was almost painful to behold.
And then, the sea answered.
A sleek, grey shape broke the surface about fifty meters off the starboard side, its dorsal fin a perfect, dark triangle. Then another. And another.
Dolphins.
A pod of half a dozen bottlenose dolphins, their skin gleaming like wet slate in the sun, altered their course and arrowed towards the dinghy. They were playing, leaping and twisting in the air with effortless, joyful grace. They reached the boat and fell into formation, positioning themselves perfectly on either side of the bow.
They began to ride the pressure wave, their bodies so close Ante could see the intelligent, curious gleam in their eyes, the permanent, smiling curve of their mouths. They weren't just investigating the boat; they were interacting with her.
Mirna's humming shifted, incorporating new, complex clicks and whistles. She leaned further over, her hand still in the water, and one of the larger dolphins rolled onto its side, its flank brushing against her fingertips. It was a gesture of recognition, of familiarity. The dolphin let out a series of chattering clicks, and Mirna responded with a soft, warbling note from her own song.
Ante's breath caught in his throat. He had spent his life studying marine mammals. He had seen dolphins approach boats before, drawn by curiosity or the hope of food. But he had never seen anything like this. This wasn't a casual encounter. This was a conversation. This was a reunion.
He killed the engine completely. The silence was now absolute but for the swish of water, the puff of dolphin blowholes, and Mirna's otherworldly humming.
"They know you," Ante whispered, the words torn from him in a rush of astonished reverence.
Mirna turned her head to look at him. The hollow emptiness was entirely gone. Her violet eyes were clear and deep, reflecting the sky and the sea and a knowledge that was as old as the tides. There was no fear in them now, only a calm, profound certainty.
"They are my friends," she said simply, as if stating the most obvious fact in the world.
And in that moment, as he looked from her serene, luminous face to the dolphins playing and chattering around her with an almost protective affection, the wild, impossible thought that had been forming at the edges of his mind since he first saw her, since he heard her speak of the sea's secrets as if they were childhood memories, finally crystallized.
It was a thought that defied all logic, all science, all rational understanding of the world. It was a leap into the realm of myth and legend, into the whispered stories old fishermen told over glasses of rakija on dark nights. Stories of the Jadranke, the Morske Devojke—the beautiful, powerful women of the sea, the daughters of the Adriatic, who could charm the winds and the creatures of the deep, whose songs could lure sailors to their doom or guide them safely home.
A woman with no past. Found naked on a secluded shore. With impossible violet eyes and an innate, intuitive knowledge of the sea. Who hummed a song that called dolphins to her side as friends.
The pieces, insane as they were, fit together with a terrifying, beautiful perfection.
He wasn't looking at a traumatized amnesiac. He wasn't looking at his father's tragic captive.
He was looking at a creature of the sea. A being who belonged not in a villa on a cliff, but in the vast, blue wilderness around them. His father hadn't just kidnapped a woman; he had captured a myth. He had pulled a siren from her sanctuary and was trying to cage her in a world of silk and stone.
The realization was a seismic shift in his reality. The moral imperative to save her was now compounded by something far more profound, far more terrifying. He wasn't just trying to free a woman from a monster. He was trying to return a goddess to her domain.
He looked at Mirna, truly looked at her, and saw not just a beautiful, suffering girl, but a miracle. And he knew, with a certainty that shook him to his very core, that his father's obsession was a blasphemy against nature itself. The war was no longer a family conflict. It was a battle between the human world of possession and the ancient, untamable magic of the deep. And Ante knew, without a shadow of a doubt, which side he was on.