Kronos Rising: Kraken (vol.1): The battle for Earth's oceans has just begun.

by Max Hawthorne

  “Ouch . . . ouch!” he winced. “Shit. Okay, that’s enough of that . . .”

  Natalya made a pouty face and stopped her gyrating. “Aw, poor baby! Are my dull, little nails too much for you?”

  Garm cleared his dry throat. “No. I just don’t like – holy shit!”

  The big submariner’s eyes popped as he felt her powerful vaginal muscles lock up, squeezing his manhood like a vice.

  “I theenk you should worry more about my koshka’s bite than her claws,” she taunted. She contracted and relaxed, then contracted again.

  Garm’s look of surprise morphed into a jaw-straining grin. It was amazing; even flaccid she was practically crushing him. What a woman!

  He reached up, pulling her down onto his chest, and kissed her passionately. “You know, you’re spoiling me for all other women.”

  “Ees a good theeng,” Natalya replied, smirking. Her thoroughly pleased look became tense, however, when Garm torqued to the left, rolling them sideways toward the center of his king-size bed, until she was on her back. When he gripped her by the shoulders and tried climbing on top, she became genuinely annoyed. “Wolfie, how many times I have to tell you . . . I don’t like--”

  Her temper began to flare as he persisted in attempting to pretend-mount her, missionary style. A brief wrestling match ensued and, when he wouldn’t stop, she hauled back and cracked him hard across the face.

  “Damnit!” Natalya snarled. “I said no!”

  Garm’s head recoiled from the force of the blow and he flushed red, a combination of anger and embarrassment. “Jesus, Nat,” he cursed, pulling away as he touched a hand to his stinging cheek. “What the hell?”

  “Five hundred fucking times I tell you,” she hissed. “No meessionary positions, never!”

  “What is the big fucking deal?” Garm shook his head then froze as he clocked her volatile expression. Her lips were drawn back over her teeth, her eyes dark cumulus clouds, ready to unleash their fury. It was a dangerous moment; the kind that, mishandled, could end a relationship, even one as casual as theirs.

  “Okay, okay . . . I-I’m sorry,” he said, sucking at his lower lip. He detected the familiar taste of blood in his mouth. “I was just being playful, you know? I mean, c’mon. You kinda put me in a good mood after giving me the ride of my life.”

  Natalya continued to stare daggers at him, but her ire gradually faded. She looked away, her brow crinkling up, then the corners of her mouth curled upward into a smug little smile and she laughed. “I forgeeve you. But only because you have the sense to admeet I am greatest lover you’ve ever known.”

  “As if there was ever any doubt,” Garm chuckled. He flopped back down next to her and pulled her close, kissing her tentatively at first, then gradually more insistently. She started to respond, but then withdrew a few inches, staring into his aquamarine eyes. He gave her a quizzical look, then reached up, his fingers tracing the toned muscles of her jaw and neck, pausing briefly on the quarter-inch scar that decorated the side of her throat like a mole on a model.

  “So, what is it with you and missionary positions?” he hazarded.

  Natalya growled irritably. “My god, you are like beeg, hungry baby, I swear! I do all sorts of crazy things with you – even give you ass sometimes – and you are never satisfied!”

  Garm shrugged. “No, it’s not that. I mean, I’m not complaining. Far from it. It’s just . . . I don’t know. It’s such a mundane position, yet we never--”

  She pushed herself away and sat up. “Ees very easy to explain. I don’t like having man on top of me. Period. Understand?”

  “Of course. But, can I ask why?”

  “No, you may not,” Natalya said. She swung her feet over the side of the bed. “And please don’t ask me again. Ever.”

  “Where are you going?” Garm asked.

  “I have to pee.” As Natalya rose to her full height, a wave of dizziness hit her. She staggered to one side but managed to catch herself on the nearby dresser. She shook her head to clear it then laughed aloud. “Whoa, I am eempressed! You got me cock-drunk, Wolfie. Too many orgasms!”

  Garm smiled, staring covetously at her ass as she regained her poise and made her way into the bathroom. After she disappeared inside, he lay there quietly, staring up at the ceiling. His body was immobile, his hands clasped atop his broad chest. Even his breathing was virtually imperceptible, and if it wasn’t for an occasional blink, he could’ve been mistaken for a reposing corpse.

  He was still ruminating when she popped back out a few minutes later, naked as a jaybird. Her gleaming white teeth shone as she gave him a huge smile. “Deed you mees me?” she purred as she sat down on the end of the bed.

  “I’ll take the fifth,” Garm said, winking.

  Natalya’s eyes swept his quarters, finally focusing on a framed parchment print that adorned a nearby wall. She read the title aloud. “The Kraken by Lord Alfred Tennyson.”

  “It’s an antique – a gift from my mom,” Garm replied, watching as she became engrossed in the classic poem. “She joked that it should be required reading for all CDF captains.”

  “Ees very impressive,” Natalya said. “A beet on the dark and morbid side, I theenk. But, as you say, appropriate for such as us.”

  She finished reading and turned back to him. Her nipples were perked up and, as she leaned in close, she ran her nails playfully across his chest, tactfully avoiding the angry indentations she’d left.

  Garm could see she was getting in the mood again and glanced at the wall clock. One of the advantages of being a woman was you never had to worry where your next erection was coming from. He was still refracting, however, so some stalling was in order.

  “What shall we do now?” Natalya asked huskily.

  “How about a game?” he ventured.

  “A game? I love games! Like pin my tail on your--”

  Garm smiled and shook his head. “No, I meant a real game.”

  “Oh.” Natalya frowned. “What kind of game?”

  His eyes bored into hers. “Let’s play ‘Truth or Dare.’”

  “Ah, I remember thees game . . .” She ran her fingertips absentmindedly down her collarbones as she spoke, her hands eventually cupping her heavy breasts. She glanced sideways to make sure he was watching, gauging his level of readiness, then turned and nodded. “Okay, why not? Eet will be fun. But we must have rules.”

  “Go on . . .”

  “Eef player refuses to tell truth, dare they do must be crazy but possible. And not too dangerous – no sweeming naked in Kronosaurus cage, for example.”

  “Agreed.”

  She regarded him intently. “And no asking me about meessionary position.”

  Garm nodded. “Of course.”

  Natalya sat up straight, a gleeful look on her face. “Wonderful. So, what ees dare to be?”

  “Ladies first,” he said through a lopsided grin.

  “Very well . . .” She glanced upward, her mind wandering. A moment later, her face lit up. “I have eet! Eef you refuse to geev truth, you must go to cattle pens on lower level and geev, how you say, reem job to one of the bulls?”

  Garm made a face. “Ugh, that is absolutely awful. Where do you come up with this stuff?”

  Natalya chuckled. “Ees a fantasy of mine.”

  “You fantasize about me eating a cow’s ass?”

  “Why not?” she teased. “Half the time you’re full of shit, anyway.”

  Garm frowned. “Okay, fine. Now it’s my turn.”

  She gave him her most dazzling smile. “Take your best shot, loverboy.”

  “Oh, I will. If you refuse to tell the truth, you have to get down on your knees and blow Admiral Callahan--”

  “What?!?”

  Garm chuckled. Natalya’s look of revulsion was the kind you wore when you rushed into a seedy gas station, desperate to drop a deuce, only to find the toilet clogged and filled to the rim with a viscous foulness that defied description. “I’m not finished,” he said with a m
alicious smirk. “You have to finish the ‘job.’ That means no spitting. You swallow his load. And you have to let him record it, and he gets to keep the copy.”

  As she shook her tawny locks, Natalya was reminiscent of a pissed-off lion scattering a horde of flies. “You know, you are one warped, tweested son of a beetch, Wolfie. I thought I was bad, but you . . . neveroyatno!”

  “Thanks, babe,” Garm said with an amused grin. He reached over and, despite her stiffness, drew her close. “You’re pretty unbelievable, too.”

  Natalya nearly succumbed to his charms, but then pulled back. She sat up straight, completely at ease in the raw, then took his hand and shook it. “Very well, Captain Braddock. We have deal. But since you are such a gentleman, we shall do, as you say, ladies first.”

  “No problem.” Garm leaned back on the pillows, his big hands clasped behind his head. “Bring it on, darling.”

  “Oh, I am going to, dahling . . .” She rubbed her hands together in anticipation as she mulled over her choices. A moment later, she did a Ramirez, her neck straightening like a piece of rebar. “Ah, I have eet. You remember that boxer you keeled in the ring, da?”

  “Yes.” Garm did his best to appear detached, but his molars ground together. He knew where this was going.

  “I watched the fight online,” Natalya confessed. “At first you were like zombie during staring contest, your head down, just looking at canvas. He must have thought you were scared because he began taunting you.” She held up a finger. “But just before you break to go to corner some theeng happened . . . you looked up at heem and your eyes, they meet. Your expression changed. Eet was like a crocodile: cold, dangerous, not human. Your opponent saw eet, too.” She nodded. “He was scared, realized he was in beeg trouble. Then bell rang and . . .”

  Natalya folded her vascular arms across her chest. “I want to know what happened. Not during fight, but before. Tell me what make you snap. What make you become a monster that keels a man with bare hands?”

  Garm hesitated, the memory doing roadwork through his mind. He could see it all; moreover, he could feel it. Finally, he sighed wearily. Barring shoving his head up a steer’s anus, there was no getting out of this.

  Oh well. It’s not going to be pretty. But it’s what she wants.

  Garm tried unsuccessfully to clear his throat, then reached for the glass of water on the nightstand. He took a slow sip, swishing the cool liquid around in his mouth before swallowing.

  “The Lopez fight should never have happened,” he began, setting the glass back down. He head did the pendulum thing, trying in vain to dislodge some of the regret. “I told them, but nobody listened. I was . . . not myself, Nat. You know what I mean?”

  Natalya nodded. “You know that I do.”

  “Seeing my dad go out like that, trussed up like a maniac: the blood, the pus, the screaming . . . I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since. Not in real-life, not even in a horror movie.” Garm hunched forward and let slip a mournful breath. “He was a great man. He deserved better.”

  He formed a steeple with his fingers and peered into the center of it. In his mind, it was the tiny ship’s chapel where they held his dad’s service, shortly before his burial at sea. He could see it as if it was happening here and now.

  “When they sent me into the ring, I was still reeling.” He took one finger and poked an impression in the mattress between them. “My feet should never have touched the canvas that night.”

  “I understand,” Natalya said. Her gray eyes shone with a mixture of empathy and curiosity. “But what deed you feel before the opening bell? We all have an animal inside us. What set yours free?”

  Garm’s gaze became a “thousand-fathom-stare” as his mind struggled to embrace emotions he was ill-equipped to process.

  “When you experience the death of a loved one, it doesn’t just leave with the pallbearers,” he said. “It stays, it drapes itself over you and you wear it like a hooded garment. People can see it in your eyes and, when you’ve lost something so great, life itself loses all meaning. Things like fear of imprisonment or death vanish temporarily, and when people look into your eyes they see death staring back at them.”

  Natalya licked her lips and nodded. “So, when Lopez taunted you, he--”

  Garm’s eyes latched onto hers. “He wasn’t a bad guy. He was just doing what fighters do – trying to psych out an opponent. But by provoking me, he unwittingly gave me an outlet for all that rage I had bottled up. And in the ring--”

  “Men die and eet is legal.”

  Garm exhaled slowly. “Even if it wasn’t it wouldn’t have mattered. At that moment, I just didn’t care. Lopez was what I needed, an adversary I could unleash my fury on. And he paid the ultimate price for it.”

  “Ees that why you gave a beeg chunk of your purse to hees family?”

  He wagged a finger at her. “Tsk-tsk. Only one question per turn, my nosey, ‘leetle’ Siberian tigress. And you had yours.”

  Natalya chuckled. “I don’t know wheech I find cuter, you trying to eemitate my accent or that funny nickname.” She lay naked on her side on the bed, her head propped up off one elbow. “Okay, you played fair. Now ees your turn to ask me question. Go on, geev eet your best shot.”

  Garm leaned forward and ran his fingers over the soft curves of her hip and ribs, stopping when he reached her muscular shoulder.

  “How did you get that scar on your throat?”

  Natalya’s reaction was far from what he expected. Her face turned paper white and the gasp that escaped her lips was a mouse-like squeak. A second later, her athletic body tensed and she jolted upright. She retreated to the far end of the bed and sat there, glaring at him like a wild animal caught in a snare.

  “You . . . bastard!” she spat, her face contorting with barely-contained fury.

  “Oh, c’mon,” Garm said, trying to defuse things. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “It . . . it . . .”

  “Hey, I told you my truth,” he reminded.

  Natalya contemplated him with eyes like the dark slits in a knight’s helmet before looking away. “You are smarter than I thought, Garm Braddock. Very well, we shall feenish what we started. Or rather, what you started.”

  She pursed her lips, drawing in a deep breath, and then started talking. “My family was from a Russian fishing village called Kaliningrad, located between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea.”

  “I’m not familiar with the area,” Garm confessed.

  “Ees a very old settlement, of Prussian ancestry,” she said. “Eet was once called Königsberg, and was named for a fortress built by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades.”

  Natalya’s jaw tilted proudly up as her head swiveled in his direction. “I am descended from those knights.”

  “Really?” Garm sat up straight. “Now, that’s interesting.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, shaking her head. “When the Red Army overran the town at end of WWII, the German population fled for their lives. Those who deed not were slaughtered. My great-great-grandmother’s husband was keeled een the battle. She was taken prisoner by Russian general. He . . .”

  “Fell in love with her and asked her to marry him,” Garm finished.

  “Da.” Natalya nodded. Name of town was changed to Kaliningrad and life continued. They stayed on and their descendants became feeshermen who spend their days drinking beer and trawling the Pregolya River and the Baltic for cod and herring.”

  “Sounds like an idyllic life for some.”

  “For my parents, eet was,” she concurred. “But one day their trawler disappear, vanish without a trace. I become, how you say . . . orphan?”

  Garm nodded and, as she ran her tongue over dry lips, he reached for his water glass and offered it to her. She took a quick gulp and held onto it.

  “Eet was bad time. Insurance company said eet was no accident and refused to issue payment for either boat or life insurance policy. I was only fourteen. I had no mone
y for rent or clothes, not even food.”

  “Didn’t you have any family?”

  “I was told of uncle, here een United States, but I deed not know how to find heem. I was on my own.”

  “Man, that’s rough. So what did you do?”

  Natalya licked her lips and swallowed. “I took job working for local man. He buy and sell feesh. He was a . . . feesh-monster?”

  “Fishmonger,” Garm corrected. His grin faded fast. Judging by the way she avoided his gaze and her sorrowful expression, he was beginning to regret the need to satiate his curiosity.

  “He was beeg, gruff man, but nice,” she said. “At least at first. I spend my summer loading and unloading feesh and ice een storerooms and working store. Eet was hard work, but kept my mind off losing my family.”

  A scary thought began to loom on the horizon of Garm’s mind. He tried and failed to dismiss it; he had a bad feeling about what came next.

  Natalya stopped talking. Her eyes went blank as she peered back into her past – a past she obviously wanted to forget. Goosebumps pricked up all over her body and she reached for a nearby comforter. Wordlessly, she draped it over her shoulders, a cotton chrysalis to cover her nakedness.

  Garm cleared his throat. “Look, maybe this was a bad idea. I--”

  “Be quiet, Wolfie,” she warned.

  Natalya swallowed the lump in her throat and then waded into it. “One night, after close of shop, feeshmonger approach me in back room. He grab me and throw me onto pile of crates . . .”

  Oh fuck.

  “I was skeeny, fourteen-year-old girl, but I knew what he wanted,” she said. “I beg heem to stop. I fight back, yell and start to scream, but he pull a beeg fillet knife on me and tell me he cut my throat if I make any noise.”

  “Jesus, Nat . . .”

  Natalya silenced him with a look. “He . . . cut my clothes off and push me down on crates. Then he climb on top of me and . . .”