The small room was completely surrounded by water.
In response, the shifter froze, flames receding into his body as Sam’s death mask rose up before his eyes as vividly as if he’d gathered his sibling’s lax body into his arms only the day before. And despite the fact that Sabrina still stood only inches away, her smooth skin calling to his fingers like bone-dry kindling solicited flames, Nicholas’s past failure flickered scene by scene through his head and threw cold water upon his all-consuming desire.
The frantic search, the headlong flight to scan two rivers, the silence as water ran endlessly beneath probing eyes. They hadn’t found his foster brother right away. Hadn’t found him until the teenager had been in the water for days on end, fish nibbling at skin that had swollen and distorted to turn a slender teenager into the shape of a monster.
Nicholas still recognized him, though. Recognized Sam’s diagnostic carrot-top and numerous freckles. Recognized the aspect of a secret held in too long.
Bile rose in his adult throat now, and it was all Nicholas could do not to make a mad dash for the toilet and spew up the decadent dinner he’d recently enjoyed. Instead, he clenched his teeth together and closed his eyes for a long moment, attempting to bring his stomach back into balance.
And when he was finally able to focus on the outside world again, he found himself in the middle of a minor tornado. A breeze swirled around the room, the curtains slapping shut one after another. Just like that, the water—and the memories they’d dredged up—disappeared as quickly as they’d come.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Sabrina asked then, stepping back into the circle of his arms. Nicholas hadn’t even realized he’d raised his hands to pull her closer until his fingers were rubbing small circles across the thin barrier of her undershirt. The tank top was plain white cotton, but it hugged his mate’s curves just right. And in response, the first hint of returning fire slipped out through his pores, a deep burn of passion rekindling in his belly.
But rather than allowing sensation to stroke his memories away, the shifter opened his mouth and outlined a failure he’d never before admitted to a living soul. The story came out haltingly but honestly. A foster brother lost due to Nicholas’s malfeasance, a bond broken that he’d spent his life buoying up.
The endless guilt that had turned Nicholas into the man he was today—careful, careful, endlessly careful. His fear of failing someone he loved at the worst possible moment...yet again.
“You know it’s not your fault, though, right? Sam was a teenager and every member of that species is daring and reckless.”
“He was my brother. And I let him down.”
Now it was Sabrina’s turn to close her eyes, to gather her thoughts. And when she opened them again, dim light had changed the blue of the sky into the deeper aquamarine of the sea. “Then you must believe that I’m responsible for Steph’s imprisonment, for the terrible futures of those poor girls that my father stuffed into the cargo hold and transported to slave markets up and down the coast. You must think I’m evil.”
Frowning, Nicholas had to force himself not to shake his head at Sabrina’s abrupt descent into stupidity. “That doesn’t even make sense,” he argued. “Of course you’re not responsible for your father’s offenses. You were a child. And you didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Exactly.” Blue eyes flashed as Nicholas fell into her carefully baited trap. “You didn’t know what Sam would do, and you were a child.”
Nicholas drew in a breath to disagree...then exhaled with words unsaid. Because Sabrina was right. It wasn’t his fault.
Sam had been brilliant and lovable...and also a hothead, intent upon pushing his limits. That was simply who he was, just like Nicholas was a secret keeper and Alexander was an unredeemable clown. Asking Sam to stay home, to never let his dreams expand beyond the abilities of his frail human body to support them, was impossible. In the end, the river was just one way out of many that Sam’s grandiose visions could have shattered his fragile life.
For a breathless second, in fact, Nicholas felt that he, rather than Sabrina, was the creature of air. Even without the assistance of wings, he thought he might float up to the ceiling, batter right on through and rise endlessly into the open sky.
For fourteen years, he’d hung onto this guilty secret. Releasing it now felt like casting off a metric ton of ballast and rocketing upward into the stratosphere where the thinness of the air turned even the grim and serious into happy-go-lucky buffoons.
And for the first time in his life, Nicholas realized why so many people relinquished their secrets into his waiting ears then walked away looking refreshed and rejuvenated. It wasn’t because—as he’d always assumed—they expected Nicholas to solve their unsolvable problems. Because he couldn’t fix anyone else’s dilemmas, no matter how many times he tried to manipulate pregnant women into taking on lighter duties or counseled mute wind witches to accept their magic as a tool rather than a terror.
No, it was enough to simply be seen and heard. That was all Nicholas’s knack was meant to do and to be. And for the first time in over a decade, the shifter’s ability to draw out secrets felt like a blessing rather than a curse.
“Thank you,” he murmured, hoping Sabrina could understand the depth of his gratitude even though the emotion was far too complex to put into words.
Then fire once more erupted from his skin as Sabrina’s eyes crinkled up ever so slightly in reply. Attraction cascaded between them like lightning, and this time his lover didn’t deflect the motion as he drew her deeper into his embrace.
“Are you going to show me how grateful you really are?” she whispered instead, breath turning into stroking tendrils of seduction as it flew toward his sensitized skin.
“Yes,” Nicholas answered. “Yes, I think I am.”
Chapter 31
After that, time ceased to have any meaning. Sabrina didn’t know if they spent minutes or hours or days suspended in midair, his wings and her breezes working together to keep them both aloft. Bodies twisted and twined together, clothing falling away as skin became more and more sensitive until the faintest touch brought a moan to the captain’s lips.
This was nothing like the booty calls Sabrina had experienced in port after port. Nothing like sharing physical pleasure with faceless strangers. Instead, she felt something break loose within her chest. Some cold, hard nugget of self-possession she’d nurtured ever since learning about Frank Fairweather’s secret—that morsel of rigidity flared to life now only to disappear into the fire-lit darkness. Gone forever.
“Is something wrong?” Nicholas growled against her sweat-slicked skin. Her companion sounded less like a man and more like a dragon, as if words were almost too difficult for him to muster.
Sabrina understood. She felt exactly the same way.
Still, her companion held back, sensing the change in her posture. A gentleman to the last, Nicholas wouldn’t go for the goal until he was certain Sabrina was riding that wave right alongside him.
Which was all well and good when they were out in the world, picking their way through the intricate dance of captain and first mate, Aerie lord and lowly trader. But, right here atop the pod’s soft bed, Sabrina could have done with a little less gentleman and a little more beast.
So she reached between them to find the hard shaft of his cock, then she guided him into the center of her pleasure. And for one long moment, sensation overwhelmed even knowledge of her own name.
After a minute, a second, an eternity, Nicholas withdrew ever so slightly, friction sending flutters of heated enchantment jolting up her spine. And when Sabrina bent her hips upward to chase his retreat, her partner’s reaction—half hum and half howl—curled her lips into a wide smile.
So she wasn’t the only one entirely undone by the occasion.
“You...” her partner started, paused, gave up.
Sabrina opened her lips to answer. But Nicholas was reaching between them, stroking a nub of throbbing awarene
ss until fireworks exploded behind her eyeballs.
Then she lost all grasp of words.
***
Hours later, Sabrina woke in her lover’s well-muscled arms. The sheets beneath them were faintly scorched; her hair was matted into bedhead the like of which she hadn’t dealt with since learning the glories of braids. And, despite all that, Sabrina was purely, blissfully content.
For the first time in recent memory, she was simply happy.
And, as would be true for any wind witch, fast on the heels of exhilaration came the relentless need to feel wild wind blowing across her face. Not the tame, filtered current carefully managed by the pod’s recirculation system. But real air, a sea breeze to match the heady joy swirling within her stomach and sending energy coursing through each and every limb.
Her body acted before her mind had time to catch up. Stroking one finger across Nicholas’s stubbled jaw, the captain rose and crept toward the door. No need to wake her bed mate. After all, he’d gone above and beyond the call of duty the night before. Had drawn her upwards time after time before finding his own release. Poor guy was probably completely tuckered out.
Don’t want him too tired to do it all again.
Sabrina’s cheeks ached as she grinned wider, stretching unaccustomed muscles on either side of her jaw in the process. She’d fought so long and so hard with the goal of day-to-day survival that she’d somehow lost track of the tremendous difference between contentment and joy. Only now that she’d achieved the latter did she realize what had been missing all along.
Lost within pleasant memories, it took Sabrina longer than it should have to realize that she wasn’t just doing it wrong as she fumbled with the door latch in the dim light. No, she knew how to operate a handle. The problem wasn’t her fingers...the problem was a lock to which she didn’t possess the key.
Suddenly heedless of her bed mate’s well-deserved slumber, Sabrina turned and blew every curtain open around the perimeter of their rectangular space. Metal rings rattled against the overhead rods and fabric swished out of the way to reveal the sea...but a sea considerably darker and murkier than it should have been halfway through the morning hours.
After all, Sabrina’s stomach had growled a reminder of its emptiness as soon as she woke, warning that dawn was long past. Yet the light outside their pod was twilight dim, the shapes of fishes more shadow than reality as they swam through the turbid water nearby. Either the day was severely overcast...or the room that enclosed them was no longer anywhere near the surface of the sea.
“What’s wrong?”
Despite his earlier panic at being surrounded entirely by water, Nicholas was calm and collected now as he literally flew to her side. The shifter’s jaw clenched as he glanced out the closest window, but he showed no further reaction before his hand lashed out to hover above what Sabrina now realized was an intercom mounted beside the door. “Do you need a minute before we put a call through to your Uncle Walt?” he asked.
Mutely, Sabrina shook her head and tamped down her previous joy. The familiar facade of capability and strength was there waiting for her even though captaincy took a second longer than usual to pull back around her shoulders. Finally, taking a deep breath, she reached out her own hand to settle above Nicholas’s, both of them pressing the button as a unit to call up the Raft City operator.
“Hey,” Sabrina opened as soon as a female voice answered. “Is my Uncle Walt around? I seem to have managed to lock myself in.”
Her self-deprecating laughter was cut off far too quickly by Walter’s deep-voiced greeting, his arrival too rapid for Sabrina to think anything but the worst. Because Raft City’s ruler was a busy man. Walter Atwater wouldn’t have been waiting by the intercom to speak to his not-quite-niece, not unless he’d been the one to set their pod adrift in the first place and was expecting this very call.
He still sounded like Uncle Walt, though, when he spoke. “Princess, how are you?”
“Not so hot, Uncle Walt,” Sabrina said, trying like the dickens to sound uncertain and young. “Nicholas and I got, um, wrapped up in things last night. We overslept...and now the door doesn’t want to open. Think you could send someone over to let us out?”
Silence was her only answer, and despite herself, Sabrina reached out to take Nicholas’s hand. Then a motor whirred in the wall and a massive screen slid down out of the ceiling to cover one of the long window walls.
Even in the Before, the display would have been ostentatious. Here and now, when electronics were scavenged rather than manufactured, the setup was worth nearly as much as her entire ship.
Then Sabrina stopped assessing Uncle Walt’s wealth because an image of the Intrepid popped onto the screen. Her airship no longer appeared serene and graceful the way it had the night before when backlit by a fiery sunset. Instead, actual flames licked at several spots on the rigging, four dragons swooping so close they were in danger of setting additional surfaces alight.
“It’s time to stop playing games,” Walter said after giving her ten long seconds to take in the full peril facing her livelihood...and threatening both passengers and crew alike. “You have something on your ship that belongs to my friends. They’d like it back. Now.”
Zach. Charlotte. Steph. The egg. Sabrina knew Raft City’s ruler was only concerned with the final two, but other faces flitted through her head in the time it took to open her mouth. Faces of her engineering duo, who had returned to the Intrepid despite her original first mate ordering all sailors to rebel against their captain in a united front. Faces of Dominic and Donald and George and Charlotte, new crew members who she was just beginning to learn but who had clearly been battling dragons while she was safely tucked away in Nicholas’s super-heated arms.
Wind began raging around the small space in response to her anger, and Sabrina didn’t bother tamping the currents down. No point in appearing small and innocent now. Perhaps Uncle Walt should remember that her magic was a force to reckon with...assuming she made it out of this watery coffin alive.
“And what exactly do you expect me to do about that while shut up in a cage?” she demanded.
Once again, the screen answered instead of their captor. The original long shot of the Intrepid shrunk, twisted, then the display split down the middle with a very familiar vision taking up the right-hand side.
Sabrina assumed the original view was being filmed from somewhere in Raft City proper using yet another expensive pre-Change item—a zoom lens. But this other footage, while grainier and less vivid, was also far more up close and personal. The camera broadcast an image so recognizable that Sabrina could have drawn its features from memory, regardless of her nonexistent draftsmanship skills.
“That’s my deck,” Sabrina said aloud, surprise startling words from her lips that she hadn’t meant to share with the enemy.
“It is,” Uncle Walt answered smugly. “Gunnar gave me access to the feed as soon as I alerted him to your presence. Not sure how you missed a dragon planting a bug right in the middle of your precious ship, but that’s neither here nor there.”
He paused, giving Sabrina sufficient breathing room to reply. But she was instead remembering far too vividly her own meeting with the gunmetal gray dragon. Remembering how Gunnar had swooped onto her deck to present a message he could just as easily have relayed via Gleason the day before.
Somehow, in the midst of saving the Intrepid from flaming ruin, Sabrina had failed to notice the electronics that had been Gunnar’s true purpose in invading her inherited ship.
“Well,” Uncle Walt continued, sounding vaguely disappointed that Sabrina was too gobsmacked to banter. “You’re in luck because the device works both ways. I’ll patch you through now, and you can speak with your crew. Tell them to open the hatch and send the female dragon and her egg out onto deck. Then, for the sake of my friendship with your father, I’ll bring your pod back to the surface and allow you to continue on your way unharmed.”
On the left side of the screen, one of t
he dragons—perhaps Gunnar himself—lost patience with the lack of movement from within the closed-up ship. Flying toward the massive balloon, he hovered so close that his wings brushed repeatedly against the shiny surface. And despite the flame-retardant chemicals embedded into the thick canvas, a thread of smoke spun upward, followed by the tiniest tendril of flame.
Her airship was on fire.
“Don’t take too long now,” Uncle Walt admonished. “You know dragons. So very volatile. I’d hate to see everything your father worked for go up in flames.”
Chapter 32
Nicholas held his breath, waiting for Sabrina to make a decision that would prove all of his recent actions right...or wrong. Because he’d known when he first met her that the Intrepid was far more than a simple possession in her eyes. It represented freedom and independence, safety and security. Perhaps even more importantly, the vessel allowed its captain to recreate the honorable business she’d thought her father was running before Frank died and left her holding what amounted to a bag full of steaming shit.
The Intrepid helped Sabrina rewrite the past. So why would she willingly give up her ship for the sake of a shifter who she barely knew?
“That’s not going to work,” the captain rebutted, turning her poker face away while Nicholas’s mind raced in twenty different directions at once. “My crew won’t obey a command of that caliber unless I make it in person. If you want me to do your dirty work for you, Uncle Walt, you’re going to have to bring this pod up to the surface and give me a ride back to my ship.”
With an effort, Nicholas tamped down his initial urge to spin the captain around so he could look directly into her face. Her stiff backbone told him less than nothing, the hard line of her shoulders revealing not a single ounce of humanity that might suggest she was simply playing Raft City’s ruler and planned to assist Steph as soon as she was released from the pod.
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