The sirens had killed people and nearly killed Alex and Harper, and now Gemma was a siren, too. She was the same evil that they were, and she shouldn’t derive any pleasure from this life. That was her punishment for living and allowing herself to become one of them.

Gemma shook her head. “I’m just going to get something to eat.”

They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, and Thea stopped, leaning on the banister, groaning. “You’re making this so much harder than it needs to be.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” Gemma said honestly.

“If you would just eat and swim, you’d feel so much better,” Thea said. “I know you’re all hung up on the eating thing, but if you’d just spend, like, an hour in the ocean, you’d feel a million times better.”

Gemma shook her head again. “Go swim. Don’t worry about me.”

“Whatever.” Thea threw her hands up in the air. “I’m done.”

Thea turned, heading out the back of the house to the beach. Gemma could see it through the windows, the crystal blue water splashing against the shore. She swallowed hard and looked away before she gave in to it.

She went to the kitchen to root around for something to eat, even though she knew none of the food would appeal to her.

The appliances were stainless steel and stood in sharp contrast to the stark white of the rest of the room. She’d just opened the fridge when the owner of the house, Sawyer, wandered into the kitchen.

“Oh,” Sawyer said when he saw her, looking sufficiently disappointed. “I thought it might be Thea.”

“She’s out swimming,” Gemma said. She grabbed an orange from the crisper, since it was the only thing that looked even mildly appetizing, then closed the fridge behind her. “You can probably join her if you want.”

He glanced to the back of the house toward the ocean. A longing filled his face, but it quickly shifted to conflicted regret.

“Nah.” Sawyer shook his head and ran his hand along the smooth gray-and-white granite of the island. “Penn told me to stay around the house, so I should do that.”

That explained the conflict. Penn, Thea, and Lexi had enraptured him with their song, so he wanted to be with them constantly. But he also didn’t want to disobey them. So if Penn told him to stay at the house, that overrode his urge to join Thea in the water.

Penn had even told her that when Sawyer was under direct orders from a siren, it wasn’t just impossible for him to disobey. If anything tried to stop him, he’d destroy it if he had to. The enchantment made him so fixated on his cause that it could even give him a superherolike strength. The way a mother could tap in to her adrenaline to lift a car off her baby, a person under a siren’s spell would do anything to do a siren’s bidding.

Gemma had refused to sing and enchant him, which was why Sawyer had almost no interest in her. It had been hard to fight the urge, though. As soon as the other sirens began singing, bespelling Sawyer with their melody, Gemma had the strongest impulse to join in with them. Her very being tried to compel her to sing, and eventually she’d had to cover her ears and cower in the corner, hiding away from the sirens and their song.

Once Sawyer was under their spell, he’d gladly invited the sirens to stay in his house for as long as they wanted, with free access to his credit cards, his cars, everything he owned. And from what Gemma had seen, he seemed to own quite a bit.

Sawyer himself was stunningly handsome. When they’d come upon the house, Gemma had expected the owner to be some rich old man. So when she saw him, looking as if he could be a male siren, she was shocked.

He was young, too, probably in his mid-twenties. His skin was deeply tanned from so much time spent on the beach, and it stood out sharply against his clothes. He wore a thin white shirt with the top few buttons undone, revealing the smooth contours of his chest. His hair was dark blond, and his eyes were a shade of blue that rivaled Lexi’s in beauty.

From what Gemma understood, it was only Sawyer’s good looks that kept him alive. Penn was rather taken with him, at least as much as Penn could be taken with anybody.

“So…” Gemma said, attempting to make conversation with Sawyer since they both stood awkwardly in the kitchen together. “Do you own this house?”

Sawyer raised an eyebrow and looked at her like she was stupid. “Yeah.”

“I mean, like, it’s your house and not your parents’ or something,” Gemma said as she peeled her orange. “Because you seem awfully young to own a house like this.”

“My grandfather died when I was nineteen and left me a third of his oil company,” Sawyer explained. “And I built this house when I was twenty-two.”

“You built this house?” Gemma asked, using a section of the orange to gesture around the room.

“Well, I didn’t build it with my own two hands,” Sawyer said, but he didn’t need to.

His nails were perfectly manicured, and although he hadn’t touched her, Gemma would guess that his hands were baby-soft. He didn’t look like he’d done a day’s work in his entire life.

“So what’s the deal with all the white?” Gemma asked.

“It’s pure and clean and fresh.” Sawyer smiled as he talked about it. “I wanted a house that was filled with light.”

“But don’t you get bored?” Gemma asked. “Don’t you ever want to look at something blue?”