Just like when Brady shouldn’t have gotten out of the inlet, he thought, cold dread crawling along his skin.
Darius was watching him. He returned the shifter’s gaze with a baffled shrug.
Victoria’s hands clenched in her hair, close to the scalp. Her face had turned so florid that Koenraad suddenly understood the cartoon trope about steam shooting out of ears. If some of the pressure didn’t escape, she seemed liable to explode.
And the way she was looking at him… She knew. No matter how he handled Darius, no matter how the next few minutes played out, there was nothing on earth that would convince Victoria of anything but the truth that she smelled with her own nose.
What stunned him was that she seemed to actually care. He guessed she was angry at being fooled.
“I don’t smell Brady,” Koenraad said evenly. “Darius doesn’t smell him. You’re the only one who does.”
“Darius can hardly smell anything—” She leapt to her feet, grabbed the lapels of Darius’s suit and shoved him into the water.
He landed with a splash.
Koenraad took a step forward as Darius surfaced. His fedora floated peacefully several yards away.
Executing a neat breaststroke, Darius swam to the hat with a surprising amount of grace and dignity considering what had just happened. He collected his hat and delivered it to the side of the tank.
He did not, however, immediately get out.
Koenraad strode forward and offered Darius a hand.
“I’m already wet. Might as well take a look around,” Darius said. He removed his clothing and tossed it onto the concrete, where it sat in a sopping mess. Then, in the blink of an eye, he shifted into an enormous shark.
He floated at the surface for a moment, his dark eyes staring murderously at Victoria. Koenraad could smell her fear; it resonated like a strident bell in the room’s calmness.
But she didn’t stand down. “Do you smell him?” she challenged. “Or are you so useless—”
Her degrading taunt was left unfinished because with a graceful undulation, Darius vanished under the surface.
Koenraad began counting the seconds. One. Two. Three. Four.
Still no Darius.
Sweat rolled down Koenraad’s face.
“You bastard,” Victoria repeated over and over. “How could you?”
“You’re hallucinating,” Koenraad said, his voice steady. “If I knew where Brady was, I would have told everyone.”
Darius launched himself into the air. He shifted human the moment his tail cleared the water’s surface, and he landed in an elegant walk.
“Did you smell him?” Victoria asked.
“There was a shark in there,” Darius said. “But I don’t think it was Brady. I’m sorry.”
And then Koenraad found himself flying sideways.
Tackled by Victoria.
They landed in a thrashing jumble of limbs and snarling bites.
“Children,” Darius admonished lazily. Koenraad was certain he heard amusement in his voice.
Victoria raked her nails down Koenraad’s cheek, and he smelled his blood well up in the troughs she’d left behind.
Of course he would heal, was already healing.
He tried to catch her wrists but she was fast, and he only got one of them. In trying to catch the other, his hand inadvertently brushed up against her bare breast.
“You want to fuck me,” she said as she ground her hips against him. “A human mate is no mate at all. In six months you’ll be begging me to challenge her, to put you out of your misery.”
“That’s quite enough,” Darius said, and this time the amusement was gone.
Koenraad flipped Victoria onto her back. “If you ever come near my mate, I will personally rip you from limb to limb.”
There was a metallic creaking noise that Koenraad didn’t immediately identify, nor did he connect it to the swelling sound of water surging through a hose.
Then he and Victoria were both washed into the pool, and he caught a glimpse of an irritated Darius aiming the hose’s flood their way.
Victoria had already shifted, and she was coming right for him.
It was a strange time to think of his clothing, but he couldn’t very well walk through the aquarium and to his car in the buff.
All he needed were his pants.
He kicked off his shoes and fumbled with his belt, pausing only to strike a blow to the side of Victoria’s head as she charged him.
The thing about sharks, as he’d explained many times, in vain, to Monroe, was that the moment they were biting, they were essentially blind. When a shark employed its most lethal weapon, it was at its most vulnerable.
And Victoria was gnashing blindly.
If he’d been a human, she’d have killed him within seconds. But he wasn’t human. He was a shifter. Fast. Strong. And even when her razor-sharp teeth raked across his forearm, it merely sliced his skin superficially.
Already the tissue was knotting together.
He yanked off his pants and immediately shifted into a shark. His shirt was reduced to strips of cloth.
Victoria aborted her furious charge. Now she wasn’t dealing with a 6’5” shifter in human form. For anyone, attacking a dominant shark of over twenty feet in length was a serious proposition. If she rushed him and missed, he could easily whirl, take an enormous chunk out of her, then come back and finish her.
Koenraad knew exactly how debilitating that would be. Shark bites hurt like hell.
As she retreated, he took a moment to cast about for Brady.
He assumed his son was hiding somewhere in the back of the tank, and that was how he’d escaped detection by Victoria and Darius.
He just hoped Brady wasn’t witnessing any of this.
Victoria started a charge, then veered off long before she was within biting range.
The truth was that if the two of them tried to kill each other, the outcome would be uncertain. Even though Victoria’s human form was anything but physically threatening, she was almost twenty feet long as a shark.
Koenraad was the outlier. The biggest sharks were usually the females, but males ran larger in some family lines.
One thing Koenraad knew for sure. He wasn’t leaving Victoria alone in the tank. If she checked more thoroughly, she’d find Brady, and that would be the end of that.
For the sin of hiding Brady from the boy’s criminally neglectful mother, Koenraad would be restricted to infrequent, supervised visits.
And if Brady attacked another human, he’d be put to death. Victoria would have absolutely no problem carrying out that sentence.
If Koenraad told her to be careful, to keep an eye on him?
No, he didn’t see that going well.
She swam back and forth, her tail flicking angrily at the completion of each traverse.
This was his chance to kill her.
Or to try.
But then it would be over. Monroe would be safe. His family wouldn’t have to hide anymore. And Darius was a witness. Victoria had started this fight.
He didn’t know if he would win, but he had to try.
Koenraad’s streamlined body hurtled through the water, his teeth ready to slash, his eyes fixed on the kill.
He wouldn’t let her get away this time.
Chapter 18
Victoria didn’t move at all for a moment.
And then she did.
Koenraad expected her to meet his charge, but she surprised him by fleeing toward the back of the tank.
He gave chase.
She whipped to the right, skimmed along the side of the glass. He could smell her fear now. Apparently she’d never expected he would come at her so readily.
That mistake would cost her.
She nearly slammed into the glass where it curved, and at the last minute she arched for the surface. Realizing her tactical error, she practically jackknifed down.
Now she headed straight for the area where Koenraad estimated Brady was hiding
.
Could Brady see?
And if he did?
Even if he didn’t, once Victoria’s blood touched the water, Brady would know… And Koenraad wanted to teach his son not to attack, not to kill.
Koenraad hadn’t even decided to change his mind, but he was already slowing. He suddenly realized something. Victoria and Darius hadn’t missed seeing Brady because he was actively hiding from them.
The young shifter was somehow… gone.
It made no sense. Koenraad could smell him, smell that he’d been here much more recently than the hour Victoria had estimated.
In fact, Brady’s scent was so strong that Koenraad would have bet money that Brady was still in the tank.
But now he and Victoria had swum through every quadrant, and at a high enough speed that Brady couldn’t have darted unnoticed past them… And the boy simply wasn’t there.
Victoria was speeding away, heading for the surface on a long diagonal. If she breached the water at that speed and trajectory, she’d end up a block away.
He gave chase. After all, if Brady was gone, there was absolutely no reason not to put an end to Victoria.
But he couldn’t catch her before she got out.
He shifted human and pulled himself out of the tank, making sure to keep a good distance from the other shifters.
“If you two are done trying to kill each other, I’d like to get on with my day,” Darius said. He was dressed again. He walked away, looking surprisingly dignified for someone whose shoes squelched with every step.
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” Victoria hissed. “I know you’ve got him, and you won’t be able to hiccup without me or one of my friends seeing you.”
“You know what I regret the most?” Koenraad asked. “It’s not that I was stupid enough to fuck you—”
“Which you loved,” she snarled. “Your dicks nearly tore a hole through me.”
“And it’s not that I didn’t resort to tricks to gain sole custody of Brady. You know what I regret?”
Her face went wan. She knew what he was going to say, and that should have been enough.
But it wasn’t.
“I regret not letting you die.” He pointed to the scars that twisted down his torso. “Every fucking time I see these, I wish I’d walked away.”
“Fuck you, too,” she said.
If he hadn’t seen the brief flash of hurt in her eyes twenty seconds earlier, he would have thought she didn’t care.
She did care. And he regretted what he’d said.
But he also meant it.
He waited until both shifters were gone, then he made sure to lock the door behind them. He could only imagine what the human employees would say about Victoria’s scream and her coming out, drenched, along with a bedraggled Darius.
It would have to be spun that she’d somehow fallen into the tank or something.
He climbed back to the tank and lowered himself into the water.
The task before him was one he didn’t look forward to. It was also one he’d engaged in too many times recently: looking for clues to explain Brady’s escape and where he’d gone.
Koenraad scrubbed a hand over his face. On the bright side, without Brady, there wasn’t any urgency in getting a crew for Second Chances.
Koenraad saw that his pants had gotten snagged on an outgrowth of orange pseudo-coral. He dove down for them, then went deeper for his shoes.
The totality got thrown outside of the tank. He heard a clunk, surely his phone flying out of the pocket and clattering onto the concrete. Not that it made a difference. Water and cell phones didn’t mix.
He felt it unexpectedly: something large, moving through the water. The sensation traveled along his skin, and if he’d been in his shark form, he would have been able to pinpoint the location immediately.
It was bigger than the fish, and it was familiar.
“Brady?” he said aloud. He plunged under the surface and swam toward the rear of the tank.
His eyes confirmed what his other senses were telling him.
Brady was still in the tank. How had three sharks all missed Brady?
The most obvious answer, that Brady had an undetectable hiding place, was hard to believe.
Koenraad decided he didn’t care. Fate had—finally—delivered him a miracle, and he was gratefully accepting it.
He waved for Brady to approach, which the young shifter did obediently. They swam for the surface together.
“We’ll leave in a few hours, son,” he told Brady. Brady had never been able to communicate verbally even before he became trapped in his shark form, but Koenraad missed being able to see his son’s facial expressions.
“Have you been eating?” he asked. He didn’t expect anything in way of response, and he didn’t get one.
It seemed to Koenraad that Brady was greatly improved from the day before. The more he talked about going to the open water, the more his son relaxed. However trapped Brady was, he still understood at least some of what was being said to him.
Koenraad hadn’t assumed that was still true after the night of Monroe’s attack. It was a relief.
But as he dressed, he wondered if he should take any solace in the fact at all. It didn’t change the fact that Brady would have to spend the rest of his life in exile from civilization.
Koenraad managed to slip out of the employee entrance without anyone seeing him. Just as well. He didn’t feel like coming up with a lie to explain why he was now wet and shirtless.
After changing in the car, he went back into the aquarium to smooth things over. Then he made a phone call to arrange for transport to release one juvenile great white shark back into the wild. Immediately. The price was steep, but Koenraad didn’t care.
Just a few more hours and the whole disaster—Victoria, Brady’s imprisonment, the shark attacks and the threats on Monroe’s life—would be nothing but a sour memory.
Chapter 19
TWO WEEKS LATER
“Faster! Pump harder! You can do it!” Nicole’s normally calm voice was shrill.
Sweat coursed down Monroe’s cheeks and neck. She could feel it pooling between her breasts, in the small of her back.
She didn’t dare glance at her reflection in the mirrored walls. Instead, she focused on trying to appease the drill sergeant barking at her.
Nicole’s dark eyes, her enormous pupils almost indistinguishable from the irises, tracked the clock above Monroe’s head.
That meant this would be over soon. Right?
“Cool down,” Nicole said, drawing out the vowels. “Wow, what a workout!”
“That’s… easy… for you…” Monroe didn’t bother heaving out the rest of the sentence. She was too breathless.
When she’d mentioned that she missed spinning class, she hadn’t expected Koenraad to somehow find a professional torture artist within the boat’s small crew. But he had.
And Monroe had learned to keep her mouth shut about things she missed.
When she’d volunteered to come with Koenraad, she had never in a million years imagined that exile could be so… luxurious.
Second Chances was a work of art. Monroe often found herself marveling at a bit of paneling, or a rug or a piece of art. She had no clue what Koenraad had paid for the yacht, but she knew it had to be a lot.
The boat had its own smaller boat. It reminded Monroe of a mommy whale and her calf. And out here, she’d actually seen a few whale pods. They were magical.
Once, trying to be funny, she’d mentioned that it’d be nice to do a little ice skating.
Koenraad’s response? No one is using the pool hall. We can clear that out—
She’d had to interrupt him. In any event, while the boat was usually so steady that Monroe often forgot she was on the ocean, every so often, when the wind and waves picked up, it got a little dicey.
Not the sort of environment for sliding around a big sheet of ice with axes taped to her feet.
“If you don’t need
me to help you stretch, I’ll go pitch in with lunch,” Nicole said.
“I’m good,” Monroe said as she continued to pedal slowly. The display said that her heart rate had returned to a much less worrisome 145 beats per minute.
And that reminded her. She needed to remind Koenraad to give Spencer another call. They hadn’t heard anything since the message he’d left en route to Boston.
At first Koenraad had said not to worry, that Spencer sometimes disappeared when he got immersed in his work. Spencer had left the Caribbean a few days later than he’d planned because he’d been doing favors for Koenraad, and his work had been piling up.
But two weeks felt like a long time.
Monroe wasn’t worried, but she thought of it more and more, and every few days she used a paring knife to discreetly give herself a little nick on the finger.
The result never varied. A crimson drop of blood swelling out of an already invisible wound.
Perhaps if she cut deeper… But the thought freaked her out. She’d looked online, and when a human got a blood transfusion, that blood lasted about four months. Obviously shifter blood didn’t last as long or Spencer and Koenraad wouldn’t have been so surprised.
So she had no guide to follow, no clue what was happening.
She finished stretching, then took a long, cool drink of water. She couldn’t help but look in the mirror now. Her face was splotchy, her hair a sweaty mess. The sun had streaked the hair around her face, but the rest was a disaster.
She wondered what Koenraad would say if she told him she needed to touch up her highlights. Would he tell her there was a full chemistry lab next to the engine room?
They were heading back to Tureygua soon, to change up part of the crew and to get fresh supplies. In the future, they could rendezvous with other ships—You can order whatever you like and it’ll get to us within a few days, Koenraad had gushed.
Monroe didn’t mind the prospect of a few days of civilization. She’d get her hair done and personally pick up the three boxes of books she’d ordered online. Koenraad had done a good job in supplying reading material, but Monroe could go through several books a day, and at the moment she was on a fantasy binge.
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