Bunny Ears and Broken Contracts Chapter 08

Bunny Ears and Broken Contracts Chapter 08

I’d been pouring money into dark web leads for weeks — hunting for a potion that could turn a merman’s tail into legs. I’d finally gotten a hit.

The seller wanted to meet in person.

The price wasn’t just money. She also wanted a pearl — one cried from genuine emotion — and a scale.

I brought everything. The seller turned out to be an old woman drowned in a black cloak. She examined the pearl and the scale for a long time before looking up.

“It’s real.”

“Rare thing these days — a merman willing to bond with a human.”

I said nothing.

She rubbed the scale between her fingers, brought it to her nose, and inhaled. Her voice came out like gravel. “So it’s him.”

“Him?”

She said it like she recognized him. I stared at her.

“Gano is royalty,” the old woman said. “Merman royalty.”

“But the tribe’s been isolated for so long that the royal line has branched out. This generation alone has four, maybe five heirs.”

“He’s somewhere in the middle — not the eldest, not the youngest, nothing remarkable about his abilities. And mermen are matriarchal. A prince with no standout talent?” She shrugged. “Nobody pays attention.”

“The tribe migrated recently. They hit rough waters partway through.”

“The young ones all had escorts — all except Gano. He got swept away. It took his family forever to even notice a prince was gone.”

“Word eventually made its way through the deep-sea network — Gano had drifted into shallow water, gotten disoriented, and been captured by land beastmen.”

She paused. A gnarled hand emerged from the cloak, a clear vial lying in her palm.

She smiled.

“I was going to help them track him down.”

“But it looks like he’s already found someone worth staying with.”

“Besides, the tribe stopped searching a while ago.”

I took the vial and frowned. “They stopped looking?”

“If I hadn’t found him by accident, he’d still be locked in that tank, getting tortured by those rats.”

The old woman chuckled and brushed past me. “Didn’t I just say it? No one cares about Gano.”

She glanced at the vial in my hand, and her voice softened.

“For him, a pair of legs might end up meaning more than any tail ever did.”

I drove home with the vial in my pocket and the old woman’s words stuck in my head.

Before today, my logic had been simple — a merman with a tail was inconvenient. Legs would fix that. That was why I’d bought the potion.

When the time came, I hadn’t planned on asking his opinion. Too much freedom was dangerous with beastmen. I didn’t want to make that mistake again.

But now I sat in the car, turning the vial over in my fingers, and hesitated.

A fist banged against the car window. I looked up.

Oliver. Standing outside the car, eyes locked on mine — wounded, anxious, angry, all at once.

I rolled the window down. “Why are you here again?”

Oliver just stood there, lips pressed tight, staring at me. I wasn’t in the mood for this. When he didn’t speak, I reached for the window switch.

“I’m not pregnant with Chloe’s baby!”

“It’s a phantom pregnancy.”

“I… I don’t need to stay with her anymore. I want to come home.”

The words tumbled out of him, one over another.

His hand shot out and caught the glass before it could close. His voice was shaking.

“I want to go home.”

The second he said it, the comments flooded my screen again. The same thing, over and over — how I’d regret this, how Oliver deserved better, how my heart would break in the end. Like a broken record that wouldn’t stop.

I exhaled slowly. Then I smiled — the kind of smile that had nothing warm in it. I looked Oliver dead in the eyes.

“Do you know what that lab was working on? The one that threw you away?”

“Male beastman pregnancy. That was the whole project.”

“And you were the failed experiment. You can’t get pregnant, Oliver. It’s not possible. Not for you.”

“I knew it was a phantom pregnancy from the start.”

The comments glitched — stuttered, scrambled into gibberish, then dissolved into a wall of question marks before vanishing entirely.