Between the Monster and the Sea

Every year, Liora's village sends an unmarried girl across the water as a ritual sacrifice to the gods of the deep. It is considered a sacred honor. The girls do not come back, which the village chooses to interpret as a good sign.
Liora ends up in the offering line. It is, genuinely, not her finest week.
What waits on the island is not divine mercy or a peaceful surrender to something ancient and holy. There are no gods. There is no gentle, luminous afterlife. There is a cursed man who has been alone for longer than she has been alive, a feral creature with an unreasonable number of teeth, and eight black tentacles that are absolutely, definitely, not coming from the walls.
They are coming from him.
He is not what she expected. He is not what anyone would expect, partly because of the tentacles and partly because he turns out to have a voice like gravel and a dry wit that has had many years of solitude to sharpen itself to a very fine point. He forgot his own name somewhere in the last century. She gives him a new one. The tentacles, supposedly instruments of ancient terror, mostly just follow her around.
This is where things get complicated. And warm. And significantly more tentacle-forward than she budgeted for.