Rook came to the blackwater river for one thing: a way back to the wreck that killed his crew.

The river gives him Naere instead.

Naere is a Binder, a dangerous river-merman bound to laws older than the port at the river’s mouth. His freshwater world is dying as salt creeps inland, and the same treacherous shoals that keep Rook from his dead keep Naere from the source of the wound.

So they make a bargain.

Rook gets safe passage. Naere gets a road to the sea.

Neither expects the bargain to become desire.

But the farther they travel from the river, the more the balance between them shifts. Rook begins to see the loneliness beneath Naere’s possessive certainty. Naere discovers that the one man he most wants to keep may be the one man who cannot bear to belong to anyone.

And beyond the shoals waits a wreck neither of them understands as well as they think they do.

With a rival captain closing in and the boundary between river and ocean beginning to fail, Rook and Naere are pulled toward a choice that could cost them the dead, the living, and whatever has begun growing between them.

A dark MM pirate-merman romantasy about dangerous bargains, supernatural claiming, shifting power, and two men discovering that being kept is not the same thing as being chosen.