The man was on the floor next to a shattered mess of sand, wood, and glass. It looked like it had been a nice coffee table at one point. There were thick shards of glass embedded in his abdomen, and my stomach turned at the sight of blood running down his skin.

The woman was right next to him, and there was blood on her hands.

“What the fuck is going on?” Triton demanded.

The man on the ground gaped at him.

The woman gawked.

I’d seen the way Triton interacted with the selkies, who were threatening the merrae with war. He’d stayed even-tempered the entire time, only getting slightly angry when they insulted me.

So his obvious fury was clearly catching the couple off guard.

He set me down and stepped in front of me, blocking my view of them entirely.

Triton clenched his jaw.

A sideways glance at Rayna and the stunning dark-haired, dark-skinned man standing next to her—he must’ve been Wesson—showed they were even more shocked than the fighting couple, Greta and Platt.

When Triton didn’t speak again right away, still trying to calm himself, I figured it was time to hold up my side of the bargain. The bargain that didn’t exactly favor me, but I was the one who offered it.

I stepped around Triton, and he immediately dragged me to his chest, roughly.

Maybe he hadn’t been just trying to block my view.

Maybe he’d been trying to shield me from them.

“I think what the king means to say is this relationship is very clearly fucked up,” I said, forcing my voice to come out upbeat. I wasn’t angry like the king was, but one of us needed to stay calm and pleasant if that was usually how he did things. “You’re shouting curses and insults at her,” I gestured from the man to the woman. “You’re literally breaking furniture with his body in response.” I gestured from the woman back to the man. “If this was Earth, the cops would be involved, and you’d probably be going to prison or…therapy.”

I couldn’t come up with the word for therapy in their language, so I just threw it out there in English after a moment of trying to come up with it.

Greta and Platt both gaped at me.

Maybe they didn’t know what therapy was.

“Do you have therapy here?” I asked Triton aloud.

“What is it?” His voice was low. He was clearly still trying to gain control of his anger.

“When you talk to someone about your issues so they can help you work through your problems and give you tools to do better.”

“Then no, we don’t have therapy.”