Page 19 of Call of the Fathoms (Deep Waters #4)

Nineteen

Alexia

A lexia was relieved that he did, eventually come back. But she had an hour or so with the jellyfish all on her own. At first, it had been a bit of a struggle to keep herself upright and swimming with all of them surrounding her. She’d been so afraid of kicking one. They were delicate creatures, and no matter what she did, her flippers always ended up slapping one.

But she got the hang of it. They were so patient with her, too. Or maybe that was just her mind putting emotions onto them. They were jellyfish, after all. She wasn’t even sure they had a brain. Not one that she could see, at least.

Transparent and aimless, they floated through the ocean and trusted that the currents would bring them wherever they needed to go. It was a peaceful life, and she envied them for that.

Alexia couldn’t even imagine what it would feel like to float through life without worrying about what she was doing or where she was going.

She felt Fortis long before she saw him. Even in the wetsuit, hairs raised on her arms, the same as they always did when someone was looking at her. No one else would be watching her in the ocean. It was a vast, endless place that was more empty than it was full. Until her mind reminded her that there were, actually, a lot of things for her to be worried about in the sea.

Turning toward the source of the gaze, she saw him just beyond all the jellyfish. He was staring at her. Just watching as she floated among the jellyfish, allowing them to bump into her body as they were buffeted by the sea.

Alexia wondered what she looked like. She hoped it was some ethereal moment for him. To see a human, significantly larger than any other of her kind, floating there with the flippers on her feet, making her look even taller. Her hair might be spread out above her, long and graceful, with the ends just barely curling. It was the image she hoped he saw.

In reality, she was certain she looked like some bedraggled horror with tangled hair that flipped in front of her face, a wetsuit that showed every single one of her flaws, and jellyfish that kept bumping her in the face.

With a sigh, she kicked her flippers and headed over to him.

“I take it my time in the ocean is over?” she asked. “You would only be coming back here if we needed to go back.”

“You’ve been out long enough,” he agreed. “We must return.”

Back to her prison. Back to the tight quarters, the darkness, the unending boredom that was slowly eating away at her mind. It almost made her beg. She wanted to plead with him not to bring her back there. Not now that she had a taste of freedom, and that frightened her.

His gills rippled. “Fear?”

She tried to make the emotion disappear, but couldn’t. “I don’t want to go back.”

“It is where you are safe.”

“I can’t...” She took a deep breath. “It’s so small, Fortis. Everything inside that ship is small. There is only darkness and never ending silence. I sit for hours on end every single day, just watching the abyss. My mind is fracturing.”

And she was terrified. So fucking terrified to go back to that tiny room with all those limitations and she didn’t know what would happen to her. What if she couldn’t stop staring into the abyss? What if one day she just decided she’d had enough and leapt into the sea without her mask on?

She’d thought about it already. But being out here, with all this vast, unending space unfolded before her, she could breathe again.

Alexia was even afraid to get close to him now. Would he lose his mind again? She wasn’t sure if she wanted to deal with that again, at least not without understanding what had caused the madness on both their parts.

But at least she knew he thought of her as a person now, and not just a nuisance. So she floated before him, kicking her feet even though her thighs were getting tired. “I am afraid of going back there. I don’t like tight spaces.”

Something in his expression twisted. His brows drew down a little tighter, his eyes narrowed on her, and his lips tilted a bit to the side. And she thought for a moment that he would deny her this. He clearly didn’t want to give her what she wanted. He’d put her back in her cage, no matter what it might do to her mind.

“I do not wish for you to be frightened,” he ground out. “It is an unusual emotion from you, and I find I do not like the taste of it.”

“Then please, don’t bring me back to the ship.”

“There is nowhere else for me to bring you.”

She tried to think of something, anything, that would be in this area. Tau had many safe houses all throughout the entirety of the sea. But Alexia didn’t know where they were, and even then, going to a Tau safe house would alert many people to her whereabouts.

Right now, she didn’t want them to know where she was. She had decided that she was going to make the right choice for herself, and that choice was... this. She wanted to find out where this was going, what she wanted to do, and if she even wanted to continue having feelings and emotions and all the other complicated things that were happening to her.

Alexia decided she wanted to know what life was like if she was making the decisions. Not someone else.

Maybe that was foolish. Maybe there was a better plan, and yet... Right now, that was all she wanted.

She kicked her feet to swim even closer to Fortis. “I don’t care where you bring me, but I cannot go back to that ship.”

He was clearly warring with himself. She could see the thoughts flickering through his mind that if he didn’t take her back to the ship, she wasn’t contained anymore.

She could take a risk. One that might change the entire course of her life. And maybe, just maybe, that was what needed to happen.

“If I were to entertain helping you,” she started, then froze when his entire body reacted to the words.

Spines lifted up and down his arms. Sharp-edged and standing at attention, Alexia knew that if she even brushed her finger along the tip of one, they would make her bleed. As he shifted, she could see the rest of them down his back. Countless spines that had already parted her flesh.

Swallowing, she continued. “If I were to entertain helping you, I would need more proof than what you have provided me.”

“You need more proof that it is a worthy endeavor to go against all who have drugged you and used you for their own nefarious desires?” The expression on his face said he thought she was insane.

Maybe she was.

“What you are against is what has defined my entire life. Tau is not the best of the cities, but it is in control. You ask me to go against those with power simply because it is the right thing to do. But I am not convinced that human kind can be better. I am not convinced there is another road to take.” She held up her hand when he would have interrupted her. “And I am not convinced getting rid of Tau will fix anything.”

In fact, she feared it would send their cities into more ruin. Everything was run by Tau. How much food was dispersed, medication, politics. Every city even looked to Tau for decision making. Without that, humans were capable of great chaos. They needed a firm hand. That was what the Originals had found centuries ago, and nothing about human nature had changed.

“We have to try,” Fortis said. “The entire sea is at stake. And I know that means very little to achromo ears, but it is the only home we all have left.”

The truth in those words rang true. This was the only place for them. They couldn’t live above the water and without the sea... They would all die. It would end in human selfishness. Thousands of people choosing to die rather than admit they might have been wrong.

Her throat tightened. “I feel a great deal of fear in making this decision, Fortis. If I help you, if I betray everything I have ever known, there is no going back. And this choice will have to be made based on the information a single undine has given me after weeks of torture in the darkness and cold of the ocean with the threat of death wrapped around my throat.”

His spines snapped back into place. “You believe I am coercing you to make this decision?”

She hadn’t wanted to word it that way, but... “I think you did what you believed was right. You took someone who had information, who could give you what you wanted so that you could save your people. I cannot say if I was in your position that I wouldn’t have done the same thing.“

“But you cannot make this choice and believe it is your own?”

All she had to do was look back into the darkness below them. The deep waters, the abyss that hid so much from her view. “I started seeing things in the darkness,” she whispered. “Terrible, awful things that I’m certain were just my mind conjuring up my greatest fears. But any longer in that ship, and I think I might have started to believe what my mind showed me.”

The truth was rather painful to admit. She was terrified of what would happen if she went back to those close quarters, constantly worrying about heat and food and the state of her body. She shouldn’t even be tired right now, but she was. Weeks on end of her body wasting away had made it so that even kicking her feet for this long on her own had her breathing hard.

She didn’t want him to know that. Weakness was the one thing that a guard like her should never show. She was genetically modified so that she would never be weak.

But he noticed, because he was ever so good at noticing everything about her. Fortis reached for her waist, holding her with one hand underneath her armpit as though she weighed next to nothing. “You need more proof,” he growled. “Then I will give you more proof, virago.”

Alexia’s hands were crushed between them and her palms pressed flush to the muscular planes of his chest. Sucking in a deep breath, she flicked her gaze up to his and saw that he was staring at her with an equally confused expression on his face.

Perhaps neither of them knew what to do with the sparks that had been building between them. She hadn’t even noticed it was happening. Or maybe it was all in her head because she’d never felt this way before.

Alexia justified the feelings with that thought. She had never once been attracted to anyone. The medication she’d been taking ensured that she wouldn’t know what sexual desire felt like. Not even when faced with hours upon hours of an orgy that never seemed to end. All she’d been able to process was that it was rather boring standing around listening to everyone moaning around her.

It made sense that her body would try to make up for lost time. It was unfortunate that he was the only person here for her to lust over. Maybe if it had been another one of the guards, it would have made more sense for her to react like this.

But she tried to think of the other guards who were far more similar in build to her as they darted away from the jellyfish and she just... wasn’t interested. She remembered their broad, bulky muscles and the sweat that dripped between their abs. But her body didn’t react to the thoughts. Not even when she remembered being pinned by them, with the heavy weight of a man’s legs on either side of hers and his face so close after wrestling.

Everyone in Tau talked about how the male guards were incredibly attractive. The Originals had built the men that way. Powerful, perfect examples of male prowess.

Maybe she was just thinking of them wrong. Maybe she needed to think of the Originals themselves, because they were the ones who everyone was modeled after. They were centuries old beings, and that had to count for something.

But every Original she could think of didn’t make her body react like it did to Fortis. Not a single one of them. They were all small and weak. They were soft in the midsection, or just soft in general. She didn’t like their hair, the way they carried themselves, or their voices. All of it was wrong no matter how many times she tried to slot herself into a romantic thought.

Fortis shifted his grip on her hip, turning her slightly so that she could see more of their journey, and all she could think was that his hands were so large. The webs between his fingers were strange at first, but now she ignored those and instead thought only of the claws that scraped against her skin. And... Fuck. That was all it took, and her entire body lit up like a bonfire.

His grip turned bruising, but if he was struggling with the scent of her again, he did not say. Instead, he just kept his attention ahead of them in the ocean and barreled forward at an impressive speed.

Maybe if she just focused on the destination, all these confusing feelings would go away. After all, she couldn’t be that attracted to an undine.

Right?

Clearing her throat, she asked, “Where are we going?”

“Where few of your kind have been before. You wanted proof that this is worthwhile, virago, and I am providing that to you.”

Proof. Okay. She could work with that. Proof that there was something insidious that bloomed deep within the heart of Tau. Perhaps with that proof, she could make her choice without fear of what might come.