The CEO's Disgraced Husband Is the Sea God's Commander

3

The cold waves crashed against the sandy shore. Ginevra dragged Luca out of the small orange boat, throwing her waterproof phone onto the wet ground.

"I have to call the emergency rescue team immediately." Ginevra tapped the screen frantically. "Dante is still out there in the storm."

Luca collapsed onto the wet sand. He clutched his shirt directly over his heart, gasping loudly. His face twisted in agonizing pain.

"President Ginevra!" Luca curled into a tight ball, wheezing heavily. "My heart feels horrible! I think the freezing water triggered my severe condition! I am dying!"

Ginevra dropped the phone entirely. Her beautiful face turned perfectly white. She dropped to her knees, pulling Luca tightly into her arms. The very thought of Dante vanished completely from her mind in a split second.

"Hold on!" Ginevra grabbed her phone again, dialing the hospital line instantly. "Send an ambulance right now! My assistant is having a massive heart attack! Hurry up!"

The ambulance arrived in twelve minutes. Ginevra held Luca's hand the entire ride, whispering soft reassurances against his temple, never once looking back toward the dark ocean where her husband was still drowning.

Far out in the violent sea, Dante sank.

The freezing current pulled him deeper and deeper into total blackness. Saltwater forced its way into his throat and flooded his burning lungs. His arms had stopped moving a long time ago. His legs hung limp beneath him like dead weight. The ocean spun him slowly through the darkness, swallowing him the way it had swallowed a thousand nameless sailors before him.

His heartbeat slowed. Each pulse came weaker and further apart than the last. His vision narrowed into a tiny tunnel of fading gray, and even that was closing fast.

So this is how it ends, he thought. Drowning in water I paid for. On a trip I planned for the woman who left me here.

The last bubble of air escaped his lips and floated upward into the darkness. His eyes closed.

Then the darkness cracked open.

A single thread of golden light appeared directly below him. Not above, where the surface should have been. Below, deep in the blackest part of the ocean floor, as if something ancient had opened its eye and looked straight up at him.

The thread widened. It split into dozens of branches, then hundreds, spreading outward through the water like veins of molten gold bleeding through the body of the ocean itself. The light did not behave like normal light. It did not scatter. It did not ripple. It cut through the blackness in perfectly straight lines, as if the darkness was being sliced apart by something sharper than any blade.

Dante's body jerked violently. The freezing pressure around him vanished in an instant. The water vanished. The cold vanished. One heartbeat he was a dead man sinking through the Pacific, and the very next heartbeat he was standing upright on solid ground with completely dry lungs and clean air flooding his chest.

He gasped. Then he gasped again. His hands flew to his own throat, pressing against the skin, feeling the air rush in and out freely. He was breathing. He was alive. His heart was hammering against his ribs so hard it shook his entire body.

"What just happened?" His voice came out raw and cracked. It echoed back at him from every direction, bouncing off surfaces he could not yet see, multiplying and layering until it sounded like a hundred versions of himself asking the same question all at once.

Dante raised his head slowly.

His mind went completely blank.

He stood in the center of a chamber so enormous it made every building he had ever seen look like a toy. The floor beneath his feet was made of polished obsidian, perfectly black and perfectly smooth, stretching outward in every direction without any visible end. Running through the dark stone like living veins were rivers of molten gold, glowing softly, pulsing in a slow and steady rhythm. The rhythm matched his own heartbeat exactly, as if the floor itself was breathing with him.

Above him, there was no ceiling. Only an infinite sky filled with stars that burned in colors he had never seen before. Deep violet. Liquid silver. A shade of blue so dark and so bright at the same time that looking at it directly made his eyes water. The constellations formed patterns that no astronomer on earth had ever mapped, connected by lines of faint white light that drew the shapes of beasts and warriors and crowns across the cosmic canvas.

And standing between the floor and the sky, arranged in a perfect circle that extended farther than his eyes could follow, were the statues.

Dante stopped breathing for three full seconds.

There were dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Each statue towered at least sixty feet into the air, carved from stone so smooth and so luminous that it seemed to glow from deep within its core. Every statue depicted a different figure. Warriors in armor that no human civilization had ever forged. Women with six arms and crowns made of lightning. Giants gripping weapons the size of buildings. Creatures that were neither man nor beast but something far older and far more terrifying than both.

Their faces were frozen in expressions of absolute, unquestionable authority. The kind of authority that does not need to raise its voice or clench its fist because everything around it already knows to kneel.

Dante felt his own knees tremble. Not from fear. From the sheer, crushing weight of power radiating from these stone figures. The air itself felt heavier here, thicker, saturated with a presence so ancient that even breathing in this space felt like an act of trespassing.

"Where am I?" He barely managed the whisper. His voice echoed back at him a dozen times, each echo deeper than the last, as if the chamber was studying his words and deciding whether they were worthy of an answer.

He stepped toward the nearest statue. His footsteps made no sound against the obsidian floor. The golden veins beneath his feet brightened slightly as he walked, tracking his movement like a living nervous system responding to a new sensation.

The first statue depicted a warrior in celestial armor. Heavy layered plates of a metal that did not exist on earth, carved with symbols that glowed brighter when Dante's shadow fell across them. The warrior's right hand gripped a massive sword pointed toward the stars. His left hand was open, palm facing outward, as if offering something invisible to whoever stood before him. Every line of the carved face radiated savage, calculated dominance. This was not a man who fought because he had to. This was a being who fought because the universe bent when he did.

Carved into the base, in letters that burned with soft golden fire, was a single inscription.

MARS. GOD OF WAR. SOVEREIGN OF CONQUEST. UNDEFEATED ACROSS TEN THOUSAND CELESTIAL BATTLEFIELDS.

"God of War." Dante read the words out loud. Each syllable left his mouth and hung in the air like smoke, glowing faintly before dissolving.