by Elsa Jade
He didn’t doubt she was right, and he was willing to be guided by her.
But he suspected if she knew the depths of his sentiment, the distance she’d force between him and her bed—between him and her heart—would rival the deepest unknown trenches of Tritona.
Crushing the thought like a fragile sunseeker shell he flexed his fingers on her backside. The secrets of the mating storms stay in the deeps,” he murmured. “But considering Tritona’s quest for status redesignation as an open world, perhaps it’s time to bring some of these secrets into the light.”
He rolled her on the narrow bunk, pausing halfway through the rotation to tuck her under him lest they roll right off the bed and onto the floor. Lest they keep falling…
She let out a little squeal of surprise, locking her legs behind his thighs and never letting go, keeping intimately bound with him. “Are you saying you know some of these secrets of mermaid lovemaking?”
“We Tritonyri are fighters not lovers,” he admitted. “But we can’t fight all the time, so sometimes we gossip. And there are rumors…”
Her dark eyes widened in delight, letting in the last watery light of the evening. “Do tell,” she whispered.
Concentrating on the miniscule muscles in the papillae around his groin, he let his longing for her change him, shifting his shape within her.
Her eyes widened in shock. “Oh… Oh! Coriolis…”
“You have to tell me when it’s perfect,” he murmured. “I want to be perfect for you.”
With his echolocation that allowed him to scan her and the sensory array that let his kind hear across the fathoms, he filled her from the inside and teased the delicate nub he’d found between her legs that made her quiver and moan.
Maybe he couldn’t make her stay, but he could make sure she’d never want to leave.
***
He woke before she did, and in the rainy light of the dawning day through the not leaking window, he watched her.
She might not be a full-blooded Tritonan, but the past few days with water that wasn’t poison to her had already changed her. The shadows beneath her eyes had cleared and the sunken, dehydrated dryness skin was now silky and full. Her pale hair… Well, that had always been irresistible to him and beautifully her. He wrapped a strand loosely around one finger, careful not to tug and awaken her.
Because he feared the changes in her dark eyes.
Or maybe this last night with him had something to do with her deep, restful sleep.
She had wanted him near for a precious few hours, but he feared that would change now that she was sated. And even with his protective scaled armor, he didn’t think he could stand to see the rejection in her eyes.
This was the cowardice and despair he had warned his young fighters to fight against. And despite all his years as commander of the western fleet, he would yield this battlefield to save what was left of his heart.
Because at some point during the night, bound together in her hair, and his arms and the musky salt of their shared bodily fluids, the Tritonyri pheromone that his kind exuded to lure mates from the depths had shifted its chemical bonds, not unlike how his body had shifted within hers to make him perfect for her. And now those hormones flooded through his veins, lacing deep into every cell, making her perfect for him. No matter the darkness or the depths or the danger that separated them, he would always be able to find her. Even death would not separate them. From now on, without periodic exposure to her pleasure hormones, the pheromones, he would cease to breathe, and he would die.
She could never know, of course. He would never tell her. Until his cells forgot to exchange oxygenated gases across their molecular boundaries, he couldn’t even be sure it would actually happen. Although there were Tritonan epic poems written to the phenomenon (and a few Cretarni scientific papers seeking to exploit the weakness in their chemical warfare and psy-ops reports) he’d never heard of phenomena triggering in real life, certainly not in his lifetime with the Tritonyri and the Tritonesse kept at such distances and struggling against such dire threats as the very life of their waters.
Maybe he was imagining it. Maybe he just wanted it. Maybe the desperate clutch of his heart when he gently eased free of her warm, soft limbs was just a longing to have her again carnally, as a new sun came up on Tritona.
That longing and his weakness, whether real or wistfully imagined, shamed him. He had responsibilities, not just to his people and his world but to Marisol and her friends as well. He couldn’t let his late-blooming lust and a genetic glitch of self-destructive possessiveness get in the way of his duties.
Even if the idea of giving over control of his life to someone who loved him had an aching appeal after so long of enemies gunning for his demise.
At least his vaunted Tritonyri battle prowess would let him sneak unnoticed from her bed. Except as he shrugged into his mantle—leaving off his battle skin as he rarely did, but reluctant to waste time rigging all the fastenings—he sent one cautious ping her way to confirm she would be well while he was away. And she was awake.
Oh, her eyes were still closed and her breath was deep and even in a facsimile of restful sleep. But the barest hint of tremor in her lashes told the truth. Told him too that he would not like what he saw if her eyes opened. To spare them both the agony of her rejection, he slipped out of the sleeping quarters, closing the portal silently behind him.
Despite the urge to flee—what an embarrassment he’d become—he prepped a small meal from the in-room supplies. The water alone was healing her, but she needed more than that to stay strong. From the battle skin slung over his shoulder, he opened one pouch to find a small jar of the lava-leaf that she’d enjoyed. He’d meant to give it to her last night, before their…distractions. He set it beside the bowl of porridge and finally made his escape.
As he emerged from her quarters, Lana was coming through the portal adjacent. They blinked at each other for a moment.
“A hie kharea-wy,” she said.
“Good morning,” Lana,” he muttered.
“Is Marisol—?”
“Miss Wavercrest is still asleep,” he said over top of her question.
She gave him another slow blink. “Miss Wavercrest?” Her sly smile was even slower. “Seems a little late for that.”
“Indeed it is late,” he said as blandly as he could manage. “She should be awake by now.”
“I’ll just knock then, shall I?” she prodded.
“I have other commitments this morning,” he said, backpedaling. “But I will check in later. I’ve assigned Gayo and Kadyn, whom you meant yesterday, to your personal guard. If you have need of anything, have them summon me.”
“I’ll be sure to let Marisol know to call them.” Lana smirked at him.
And all this time he thought the little Earther was the nice one. He inclined his head and swiveled on his heel to stalk away.
“Oh, Commander,” she drawled. “Is there anything else you need to tell Marisol when she wakes up?”
“Wish her sweet currents, please.” He didn’t look back as he marched away with no protection under his mantle nothing but his own wilting wishes.
He fled the little Earther even faster than he had the tall one.
Since he’d moved all of his personal belongings from the Bathyal to empty quarters in the spaceport, he didn’t have far to go to hide. Fortunately, he encountered no one else on the way. In the small hygiene facilities in his private room, he cleansed the evidence of his night skin. But the memory of her touch had sunk far deeper than that. As his own hands followed the path hers had taken through the night, his muscles jerked, he gripped his eel as he’d done so many times on lonely, frightened nights, as she had done just last night. But his own touch was nothing compared to her hand, her mouth, the wondrous depths of her chasm.
The release he brought himself was only fleetingly satisfying, like porridge without the lava-leaf.
Angry at himself, he dressed in more layers than was his usual. And
left his quarters.
As he stepped out the door, he nearly crashed into Damiara.
She narrowed her eyes at him, and in that moment, he was so very, very grateful that he had not encountered her before making it to his rooms. “Tritonesse, a hie khar—”
“Where were you last night? I came by to discuss our strategy with the council rep, but you didn’t answer my hail.”
“My apologies, Tritonesse. I must’ve been sleeping and didn’t hear your call. I fear I was more exhausted from the long journey than I realized.”
Her eyes narrowed even more. Oh, she might not have caught him, but she knew. “You rise to serve Tritona,” she said in a low voice that thrummed with a Tritonesse-ra’s lethal resonance. The strongest Tritonesse could kill with their voices, and while Damiara wasn’t there yet, he had no doubt she would be one day.
He bowed his head, regret weighing on him. Why hadn’t he matched to her? She was strong and lovely in the way of a pure-blood Tritonesse, and her dedication to Tritona equalled his own.
Instead, he’d lost his way and his heart to a woman who could never know that she’d taken his very breath.
“I rise to serve now,” he murmured.
Her green eyes glittered. “You seem still tired, Cori. Maybe now is not the time.”
He straightened. “Have the tides ever waited for us?”
This time, she looked away, just for a moment. “If they did, it was just a trick of the winds, and the water rushed back the faster because of it.”
There was a weariness and sorrow in her tone that ripped into him. He’d never considered what life was like in the trenches during the war. If he’d ever paused to wonder, he might’ve thought it was at least better than fighting. But trapped and waiting, either for plasma fire or the seeping death of toxins, must’ve been like a slow desiccation for a strong Tritonesse like Damiara.
He almost reached out to her. But he stopped himself. It wasn’t his place, not as a mere Tritonyri, definitely not as an inadvertent traitor to his last mission.
“Onward then,” he said. “Tell me your strategy.”
While she updated him on the Tritonesse schemes, he followed her out to a balcony that overlooked the array of landing pads where perhaps someday visitors to Tritona would land. They would marvel at the pretty mountains, perhaps, but then turn eagerly to seek out the pure, sparkling waters…
Someday.
Right now, the pads were empty since all Tritonan ships—few as they were—were patrolling against possible Cretarni incursion. Oblivious to the misting rain, a small crew of Tritonyri were patching the craters in the plascrete that other Tritonyri had made not so long ago.
The ridiculous tragedy of it wrenched a wordless grunt from him, as if someone had punched him in the gut.
Damiara had gone silent as they stared down but now she glanced at him. “Infuriating, isn’t it?”
“I wish…” The words and the wishes thrashed inside him like his young fighters, gaffed and stranded.
“We all do.” Her mouth twisted. “Some of the other Tritonesse think mistakes were made.”
“Of course there were. It was war.”
The shelling had twisted or ripped away most of the security railing around the balcony, and Damiara wandered toward one of the gaping verges. The updraft caught the hem of her mantle, tangling around her feet. Underwater, such a drop-off would mean nothing, but here, a fall could hurt. Or worse. His hand fisted with the urge to yank her back, but it was her expression that stopped him.
“What if they are right?” Her pensive gaze lifted past the scarred field to the mountains, gray and looming through the clouds. “What if there was another way and we missed it?”
Frustration cracked his control like another hole opening in the plascrete. “I thought the Tritonesse agreed to immigrants and investment.”
She grimaced. “That was before the Cretarni stole the IDA profile payment.”
“But I still brought back Marisol…and the others, plus the Atlantyri specimens. Surely that is worth more to Tritona than one lost bride price.” The defensiveness in his voice made him wince.
“Our scientists have been working continuously on the genetic information you sent us even before your return. There may not be a place anymore for those long-ago creatures, not in our waters now.” She turned to face him straight on, her chin lifting. “The Tritonesse aren’t sure there is a place for us anymore.”
He took a startled step back. “Not our place…” Fury whipped through him, honing his tone like a hai-aku’s bladed tooth. “That is not why we fought. My Tritonyri didn’t die so that we might abandon what’s left.”
“What is left?” Her shout was even more furious. She lashed out with one hand, indicating the devastation. “The poisons have seeped down past even where our strongest can go. Cori, I tried. I journeyed out to the abyss, but I couldn’t make the dive. The hypoxic zone was too wide for me to cross. I couldn’t breathe…” She wavered, as if just the memory was making her faint.
She was too close to a fall for him to maintain Tritonyri decorum. Striding forward, he took her arm and drew her gently away from the edge. “What did the Abyssa’s omens say?”
Damiara glared at him, ignoring his rescue. “That’s why I made the journey. There’ve been no omens.”
He stared at her. “Since when?”
Biting at her lips, she glanced away. “For awhile.” When he growled under his breath, she snapped back, “What does it matter? Long enough that the war is between the Tritonesse now, a war of words.” Her glower made it clear what she thought of words, and he might’ve laughed if the situation wasn’t so dire.
“Is the Abyssa…still alive?”
“How can we know? None of us have gone that deep.” Despite the hard set of her expression, her lips trembled, and when she lifted her gaze to him again, her green eyes were shadowed. “Maybe none of us will ever again.”
When she threw herself into his arms, he was almost as shocked as if she’d thrown herself over the ledge.
She was a large woman, and he could do little more than grab her and haul her close to stop them both from falling as she sagged into him.
But still her momentum jerked him around, and he found himself facing back toward the portal where they’d exited.
Where the Earthers stood watching.
Over Damiara’s bent head, his gaze caught on Marisol’s. Her dark gaze was unreadable, but one pale brow arched, saying everything.
“Dami,” he said quietly. “This isn’t the end. We aren’t going anywhere.”
She glanced up at him, her puckered expression piteous. “You can’t say that. You’re just a Tritonyri.”
Carefully, he put her back on her feet. “We still have a chance with the council rep.”
She sniffed. “Another soiling offworlder.” She followed his glance. “Like them.” Spinning away from him, she stalked toward the Earthers.
After a startled heartbeat, he hurried after her.
“You win, soilers,” she called. “You wanted a trial before the Abyssa. So let’s go.”
Lana took a rightfully wary step back, but Marisol held her ground. “What do we have to do? I’ll be ready.
“Dami.” He grabbed her elbow, much less gently this time, stopping her in her tracks. “You said you’re not even sure the Abyssa is still there.”
The Tritonesse-ra smiled at the Earthers with too many teeth. “What better way to find out?”
Chapter 11
The Bathyal was descending, flinging wet spray and pebbles from the tarmac, when Marisol emerged from the port, one bag slung over her shoulder. Unbidden, her steps faltered, and Lana had to skip sideways to avoid bumping into her.
Although maybe she needed the shock.
“What’s wrong?” Lana whispered. Ever since they’d seen Coriolis with Damiara yesterday, she’d been tiptoeing around as if the divots and cracks in the port might still contain live ordnance. Marisol wasn’t sure if Lana was m
ore worried about the dangers of the Tritonesse trials—or whether Marisol herself was going to be a threat.
But her night with the commander had been just as she ordered: one night. So how could she begrudge him turning to the Tritonesse-ra? Damiara was much more his type. Literally.
“You’re growling.” Lana sidled another step away.
It was one thing not to talk about her unreasonable regret when it was all her fault, but silencing the inadvertent noise in her chest was harder. She swallowed down the lump in her throat, as if that could bonk the primitive jealousy back into remission.
“It feels strange to be getting back on the ship when we just got here, as if we are going home.” Even though she’d always intended to go back.
“We can’t go back, not yet,” Lana said, urgency pitching her tone higher. “You still need the water here, and my zaps have gotten so bad I can’t touch any of the controllers in my room without making the water turn on. We have to go see the Abyssa, not run away.”
“Going to see her was my idea.” Marisol cranked her jaw to one side. “And I’m not running away.”
“But you thought about it, didn’t you?” Lana clutched her own small bag—all they were allowed to bring—to her chest. “And because you’re rich and powerful and beautiful, you’ve always had that option.”
“Until I didn’t,” Marisol muttered, stung by the accusation.
Because it was true. She’d taken lovers—emphasis on take—and then left them. She’d thrown money at some of Earth’s worst problems without being affected herself. Even when she herself did suffer, she retreated to a remote estate where all her needs were served with a side of pure spring water in a crystal decanter. And now here she was on a dying planet, insisting on speaking to their queen or resident goddess or whatever so that she could solve her own issues and return to…
What? What was back on Earth for her? What crusade—small or serious—had won her heart?
To her annoyance, her gaze arrowed instantly to Coriolis who had ducked into the spewing water and rock to oversee the loading of the Bathyal. As a Tritonyri, he’d been born and raised to fight, without a choice. He’d been willing to give up his life to the war and then take a random stranger as his mate, all for his people and his world—while she’d dabbled haphazardly in every cause that applied for a Wavercrest grant and took the accolades as her due. She’d never gotten her feet wet or her hands dirty.
