Blood in the Water (16 page)

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.

That grocery store paperback hadn’t been bad at all.
 

It wasn’t like she had a job, and it would be months before she could begin any graduate program.
 

She’d settled on getting a literature degree, and she was still putting together a list of schools. There was no hurry. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life being the spoiled, idle wife of a billionaire, but a few weeks of relaxation wouldn’t hurt anything.
 

In fact, this was the first time she’d had a real vacation that didn’t end in disaster. Yeah, she was gonna savor the hell out of it.

She walked through the exercise room and into the spa. The spa wasn’t staffed, but Monroe liked the showers here. The best part? Not having to worry about Koenraad coming in while she still reeked of sweat.

After indulging in a long, hot shower—Koenraad told her the boat was extremely eco-friendly and efficient—she dressed in a white bikini and a flowing white sundress with yellow trim.
 

What did she want to do now? She wondered what everyone else was up to.

Some of the staff was busy making lunch, and they shooed her out. Koenraad made them do it, Monroe was sure.

The bodyguards, two at each end of the boat, were watching the water.
 

Personally, Monroe thought Koenraad was being a little paranoid. They were on the ocean, for heaven’s sake. What the hell was there to worry about?
 

She heard splashing on the port side of the boat, and she rushed over. A moment later, an enormous great white shark shot into the air. The muscular body twisted, then dropped into the ocean.
 

“Spectacular belly flop!” she called out, though she didn’t know if Koenraad could hear her.
 

Monroe watched enviously as he and Brady played in the water. She hadn’t been in the ocean even once since they’d left. It was too much of a risk with Brady.

At first she hadn’t minded, but it turned out she missed bobbing around. Or maybe she missed bobbing around with Koenraad, and someplace a bit more private than the on-board swimming pool.

With the entire yacht crewed by shifters, privacy wasn’t even an illusion.

She poured herself a cold glass of water, then climbed to the uppermost deck and stretched out in a shaded lounge chair. The book she’d started before the spinning class waited on the small table.

“Hey.”

Monroe started. “You’re too quiet.”

Koenraad grinned down at her. Since they’d left Tureygua, he seemed to have shucked off the mantle of seriousness. It was nice to see him fully relaxed.

“Have you decided about New York?”

She groaned.

“You’re the one who promised your mother,” Koenraad said. “I think you should fly back when we reach Tureygua.”

She groaned again. Why had she let her mom corner her like that?
 

“It won’t be so bad.” Koenraad tilted back his head to shake his hair out of his eyes.

“That’s not what you said at first,” she said suspiciously. His initial reaction had been disbelief, followed by an explanation of how difficult extended periods of separation were for mated shifters.

“I don’t want to piss off my future mother-in-law. And I was thinking… You can fly up and I’ll follow on the boat. We wouldn’t be apart for long.”

She thought about it. The idea of spending time in Manhattan with Koenraad frankly thrilled her. Island life was fine, but she was starting to miss New York. All her favorite restaurants… shopping options beyond cotton dresses… first-run movies… museum exhibits… exuberant musicals… “That could be fun, if you think Brady will be fine.”

“He’ll be fine.” Koenraad smiled. “I’ll buy your ticket today. Second question: what do you think about spending two days on a tropical island before we head back to Tureygua?” He crouched next to her so that they were more or less eye level.

His sculpted face, always handsome, had turned radiant now that he was no longer stressed all the time. In the sun, she could see the dual shades of blue in his eyes: dark with a light blue ring around the edge.
 

“Tureygua is a gorgeous island,” she pointed out when she realized that not only was she staring, he was still waiting for an answer.

“It is. But this one has two advantages. First, it’s currently uninhabited.”

“Who owns it?”

He grinned. “Not me, though I’ve been trying to buy it from the owners for some time. I sent an email asking for permission to spend a few days, and we’re good to go.”