Return to Atlantis: a Fantasy Romance (Kingdom in the Sea Book 1)

by Vivienne Savage

  Cosmas stared at him, mouth falling slack with surprise.

  “Don’t look at me what way.”

  “You chose a shark for her? Really?”

  “If you’re going to make a big deal of this—”

  “I’m not. Just a little startled that you’re asking my opinion when you’re as well-versed in riding sharks as I am.”

  “You’re the Commander of the Cavalry.”

  “We both also know the title was stolen from you, Manu. This should have been your job, your honor. Uncle tossed it to me because—”

  “Because you’re unbeatable in the saddle and could outmaneuver a Gloom-infected squid while you were riding a dying blue whale.”

  “Everything I know was learned from you.”

  A companionable silence fell between them during the brisk walk from the barracks to the southern stables. They entered a building designed to resemble an elegant rock formation, cut into the side of the Atlantian dome near one of the city’s trading ports. A young mer named Sophos approached them from the offices with a clipboard in his hand.

  “Good day, Commanders. May I be of service?”

  “We’re here to see Leilei.” Again, Manu saw Cosmas shooting him an inquisitive side-eye.

  “Would you like her corralled, or will you be visiting her in the stall today?” Sophos asked.

  “Corral is fine.”

  “Head up to level five. We’ll have her out to you in just a few.”

  The multi-level stable designated for the Royal Army kept over five hundred beasts at any given time, each of them belonging to members of the Myrmidon cavalry or used in their personal breeding program. They didn’t lose an animal often, but as their cavalry was ever-growing, so too did their need for more creatures. With a corral on each level, the guys had plenty of space to train the young sharks entering the program in a safe, contained environment. Manu had been working with sharks since he was a toddler, introduced to his first sandskipper when he was no more than four years old and still wobbling on his young legs.

  Manu and Cosmas took a spiral staircase to the fifth floor, arriving just as Leilei shot down the chute from her stall into the corral. A thousand pounds of energetic filly glided faster than a cross between a dolphin and a mako shark. Her svelte, navy blue body turned in the water, lights sparkling off the dappled pink and glittering purple on her flank. Her fins resembled a nebula, a replica of the Milky Way painted on sharkskin.

  Cosmas sucked air between his teeth. “She’s fast. A lot of energy. Gorgeous to look at, though. Is she the one that Anatolius failed out of the rider program?”

  “Maybe.” Desperate to avoid the conversation looming ahead, Manu stepped over the barrier separating them from the water-filled corral and dropped down into forty feet of water. Leilei twisted and rolled toward him, massive mouth open. She skimmed by his side and turned again, brushing past him several times until he stroked beneath her fins. “Hey there, girl. Told you I’d be back to see you soon.”

  “Already in love with her, aren’t you?”

  Of all the sharks Manu could have chosen, he’d picked the most energetic and eager for attention.

  “She’s sweet,” Manu said, shrugging. “What do you think of her?”

  “She may be too much shark for Kailani. I don’t know.” Cosmas rubbed his chin and observed the young filly at play. “She’s cute and has a lot of spunk.”

  “Reminded me of the princess.”

  “Me too,” Cosmas agreed, much to Manu’s surprise. “You picked well. She can’t ride yet, but if she attacks sharksmanship with the same dedication she devotes to all the other aspects of her training, it won’t take long to develop her talents. I would have chosen a mellow older male for her. One settled, with some years in the saddle. Leilei is untrained, enthusiastic and…honestly, I doubt I’m telling you anything you don’t already know. It’ll either be a match made in Elysium, or an awful, regrettable idea. Have you gotten her under saddle yet, or is she completely green?”

  “Greener than sea lettuce.”

  “Let’s get it done then.”

  15

  Divine Privilege

  On the seventh day of Myrmidon training, Kai decided she hated life. Her bed, warm and comforting, invited her to remain between the sheets. She wondered how long it would take before Manu stomped inside and dragged her out.

  Her body ached, her hamstrings protested straightening her knees to leave the fetal position, and she loathed the idea of going anywhere before the sun ever rose in their region of the world. One glance outside into the streets revealed dim lanterns lit by subtle blue and silver lights. The enchantments reflected the skies above the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Princess?” Amerin whispered from the door.

  “I’m awake.”

  “Commander Manu is here.”

  “Tell him I’m coming.”

  “He told me he knew you would say that, and that if you do not present yourself at the barracks’ training ground within the next five minutes, he is doubling the distance you must swim and adding fifty pounds of weight.”

  Kai’s belly roiled with nausea at the mere threat. “That’s inhumane.”

  Amerin chuckled and shut the door. “I’ll tell him you’re on the way.”

  There hadn’t been time since her arrival to get to know Amerin the way she wanted, but she enjoyed the merwoman’s company. This evening, as a reward for surviving the first week of Myrmidon training, they were to go to a show in the city together in hopes of bonding and renewing the friendship they’d had as children.

  But first, Kai had to survive eight grueling hours of hell. If Manu could complete his normal duties each day on top of training her, the least she could do was show up for it.

  All right. You can do this. You got this, girl. It’s just pain. Pain is just weakness leaving the body. Pain is just failure becoming success. Pain is temporary. Pain was also crippling her and making it impossible to swing her legs out from beneath the sheets. She tossed them off, but her back screamed and every muscle from her neck down to her hips stretched taut as unconditioned leather.

  Prior to bed, she’d stretched, soaked in a hot tub with salts, and then stretched again before crawling under the blankets. Her treacherous body didn’t care.

  Manu had spent the week introducing her to a whole theme park of torture devices masquerading as training equipment, most of which she’d seen during movies like Gladiator or the show Spartacus. At least each episode of the latter had been sixty minutes of glorious abs, steamy sex scenes, and hunks like the delicious Andy Whitman and Manu Bennett fighting in a bloody, fictionalized Ancient Rome.

  No wonder she liked Manu so much. He shared a name with one of her favorite actors. And realizing he shared a name with one of her favorite actors made her wonder about the many other Atlantians she’d met with names belonging to Pacific Islanders instead of the Greco-Roman names popular with most high mers. Her own father had been named for a Roman god, her mother a Greek ocean nymph.

  Interesting, she thought.

  Amerin returned to help her into her suit. Eventually, her body loosened enough to leave the room. She found Manu in the entrance hall instead of the barracks. The mer stood with his arms crossed, watching her descend at a hermit crab’s pace.

  “I’ve seen starfish move faster,” he remarked.

  “Blow me.”

  “Such words from a princess.” A hint of a smile touched his lips.

  “We’ve had this talk before. Besides, I don’t feel like a princess today. I’m stiffer than driftwood.”

  Manu’s dark brows popped up, then a big grin spread across his face. She scowled until he said, “You’re picking up our euphemisms.”

  She was. Imagine that.

  “I take it you haven’t eaten?”

  Kai shook her head. “Overslept. Sorry. I know. I know.”

  “No need to apologize. I may tease, but I’m not so much of a blowhole to expect improvement overnight, Your Highness.�
� He nodded toward the corridor that would take them not to the courtyard, but to the dining hall. “You can’t train on an empty stomach.”

  He stood by while she ate, patient as ever despite the waste of his time. She guzzled a glass of water afterward, then their path to the training grounds resumed.

  There, she dragged heavy things, lifted other objects, and pushed an enormous wheel that required all her strength. In another room, he made her clutch a hundred-pound weight to her chest and run underwater. She discovered strength she hadn’t known she possessed when it turned into a race, him urging her to shed her long legs in favor of a tail to keep pace alongside him.

  One thing she liked about Manu was that he often participated in the exercises with her instead of standing by like a grim-faced fitness instructor. It wasn’t like her time in the military where someone had always shouted for her to move it and hustle and go, go, go.

  In small leaps, she made progress that week. It still wasn’t enough. “Decent,” he said at the end, clicking his stopwatch. She’d been overjoyed weeks ago to discover such technologies still existed in their realm.

  “What’s my time?” she asked him.

  “Don’t worry about your time.”

  “What’s my time, Manu? I want to know it.”

  He sighed and led her from the racetrack to the armory. They each claimed a trident before entering a vacant sparring room. The barracks had several, built for training in focus groups as needed. “One minute, thirty-nine seconds.”

  “Thirty-nine seconds of failure,” she concluded, deflating.

  “It isn’t failure.”

  “It is until I beat the requirement,” she muttered, rubbing her neck.

  “Princess.” She glanced up into compassionate brown eyes, so very expressive and open it startled her into silence. He took her by the shoulders and squeezed with both strong hands. For that moment, she was captivated. Lost. Those eyes were all that mattered. “You’ve made greater improvement within seven days of training than you have in the weeks since your arrival. There is only so much a mer can be expected to master in limited time. You’re harder on yourself than you must be.”

  “I want to succeed.”

  “I understand that. But even our Myrmidon recruits receive a year of training.”

  “I don’t have a year to do this.”

  He sighed and dropped both hands, the loss of their warmth distracting her. “Please put those back.” When he blinked, heat surged to her face and she hastily added, “If you don’t mind. My shoulders are tight from all of the weapons training and that kind of helped.”

  “Ah.”

  And then, without asking anything more, Manu maneuvered behind her and returned both hands to her shoulders. He squeezed lightly at first, introducing her to a blend of pleasure and pain. “Ow, ow, ow. A little left with this hand,” she muttered, tapping his fingers with her right.

  “Here?” His thumb kneaded into the juncture of her shoulder and neck.

  And it was magical. Within a few seconds, one of the worst kinks loosened.

  “Fuck yes,” she murmured, rolling her neck to one side and sighing. The man’s hands were absolute bliss. The last time she’d received a massage as good, she’d been dating a hot machinist’s mate during a naval deployment, a sailor with hands strong enough to tighten nuts and bolts without tools. But he’d still known exactly how much pressure to use, never hurting her.

  And at that moment, her brain decided to recall that her body owned a vagina. It wasn’t the most convenient moment to remember such things, but her imagination decided to wander from the platonic act of him kneading her shoulders to wondering how his fingers would feel in other places.

  Between her legs. Skimming her naked skin. Squeezing her breasts. Inside her.

  His breath stirred her hair, sending goosebumps prickling over her arms every time she imagined his lips touching the nape of her neck. Not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to sit on his face instead of trying to punch him in it. Her nipples tightened harder than glass beads.

  God. She must have been seriously hard up for a lay to fantasize about Manu of all people. The man didn’t have an ounce of interest in her. And from what she’d once interrupted, she thought he had a woman. To distract from the flourishing, unwelcome thoughts flooding her body with need, she cleared her throat. “Manu?”

  “Hm?”

  “There’s something I’ve been wondering. My true name is Zephyrine. It’s Greek.” She peered at him through the reflection in the wall.

  “Yes?” Though he canted his head and gave her a look that suggested he thought she’d gone crazy. Maybe she had.

  “And yours is Manu. That isn’t Greek. How does a mer from Atlantis end up with a name belonging to another culture?”

  “Many of our people have close ties to Pacifica,” he explained. “Though their gods are different.”

  Her brows rose a mile.

  “The limited number of high mer required many of our ancestors to broaden the gene pool by inviting nobles of the other underwater kingdom to our city. My mother’s family hails from their region and emigrated from Pacifica as part of your grandfather Maui’s royal retinue. He was a prince among her people. Our people.”

  “Maui. As in the god Maui?”

  “He was a great mer, but not the actual god Maui. A descendent.”

  “A descendent of the actual god Maui, who married my grandmother, a descendent of the goddess Thalassa.”

  Manu shrugged. “We can’t choose who we love,” he muttered, the comment sounding like a loaded statement.

  “This means I have a god’s blood in me twice over.” Nothing should have shocked her anymore at this point, but somehow, he’d still taken her by surprise.

  “It does.”

  And it also meant she had to try twice as hard to succeed. With that kind of divine genetic privilege, failure wasn’t an option.

  Giving Princess Kai a rubdown in the sparring chamber had been a mistake. Manu knew it from the moment Elpis stepped into the sparring room with her shield and spear, followed by three wide-eyed, impressionable recruits.

  Fuck me. It looked bad in every kind of away, because it was bad.

  Elpis stared, jaw working, violet eyes narrowed into tight slits. “My mistake. This room appears to be occupied. Forgive us, Your Highness.” She bowed, as did her students. “Fellow Commander.”

  And from the room she strode, her back as rigid as the weapon she carried.

  He turned to find Kai studying him with apologetic eyes. “I got you into trouble with your girlfriend, didn’t I?”

  “She isn’t my girlfriend.”

  Kai leaned back and crossed both arms against her chest. “Does she know that?”

  “She does.”

  “I dunno, man…that look she gave you said volumes. Do you know what it said?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “It said, ‘Fuck you, Manu. Eat whaleshit.’ That look, my dude, was the look of a woman spurned.”

  He grunted. “It’s no concern of yours, Your Highness.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. No concern of mine. But you jumped back and took your hands off my shoulders like you did something wrong.”

  Or like he’d been busted giving his future queen an intimate shoulder rub while sporting the most painful erection of his life, by the comrade he’d shared a one-night stand with only a few short weeks ago. “I did.” He licked his lips, once again thankful for his choice of armor.

  “Which was?”

  “I shouldn’t be so familiar with you. It’s one thing to touch you during training when it is necessary, but another—”

  “What? Are you serious? I asked you to touch me. If you can put your hands on me to pummel me, why the hell aren’t you allowed to fix it all at the end?” She rolled her right shoulder and gave a euphoric sigh. “That really did help.”

  Manu smiled tightly. “You are royalty, and you are spoken for. That’s all that matters.”<
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  “Spoken for?” Her voice elevated and she took a step toward him. “I went out twice with Cosmas. He doesn’t have any claim over me.”

  “In our society, mers of my caste—”

  “Our society can fuck off. I make the rules about what I want to do with my body, and if I want my friend—my trainer—to rub the kinks out my damned shoulders so that I can hit the workout again, that’s what I want done.” She paused a moment, chest heaving, fire in her eyes. “That sounded really spoiled. Kind of diva.”

  “A little.” He paused. She’d called him a friend. He let the words bounce around in his head a few times before deciding to address it. “You consider me a friend?”

  Laughing, she rolled her other shoulder then plucked her trident from the floor. “Well, yeah. I guess I do.” Her brown eyes twinkled when she smiled. “You believe in me.”

  “I do.”

  “You spend time with me. You make me laugh. When you’re not doing the stern and disapproving teacher thing, you’re a funny guy. And you make me strive to be better. Where I come from, that’s a friend.” She rapped the end of her trident against the floor then moved into her on-guard position, feet perfectly distanced, stance impeccable. “Ready when you are.”

  Manu stepped on the blunt end of his trident, popping it up from the floor and into his hand. “Let’s get it done. Amerin tells me you both have a long evening ahead of you, and I’d hate for you to be late.”

  16

  Loyalty to None

  A night on the town in Atlantis differed only a little from a night on the town in Galveston. In the surface world, she would have tossed on a pretty summer dress, caught a movie at a theater, met someone for a bite to eat, or hit up an evening event at a local book store. Events were one of her favorite activities, and she’d even gone to a public hexing hosted by witches at an occult book store once in New York. That had been fascinating to watch.