22. Chase #2
The second wave was already building behind the first.
I reached the shore.
Not again.
The image I’d been trying to shove away for three years resurfaced.
Marcus going under in an ocean just like this, an ocean that didn’t care who was in it or on it.
On a wave I’d called and he’d followed because that was what Marcus did—followed me into things, trusted my read, believed I knew what I was doing.
Because El Tiburón was the best, no matter who got hurt around him.
I dove.
Find her. Just find her.
The thing normal people don’t understand about being a shifter—there is hardly any separation between your human self and your animal self.
There is no moment when your human brain says, I think I’ll become a shark now.
Your body takes over, the body that’s been sitting inside this limited human costume, tolerating the weak eyes and the slow reflexes and the pathetic single row of teeth, and it doesn’t ask permission.
I’d been pushing that part of me away ever since my family had decided it was more important than my sister’s health, that tradition outweighed getting her the help she needed.
I’d been El Tiburón, but I had closed off this part of myself to smile and hold up logos and be what my sponsors needed.
Now, she needed me. I was in the water, and I was fourteen feet of tiger shark before the surface closed over me.
Everything became crystal clear—the ocean’s electromagnetic field snapping into focus. I could feel every current, every disturbance in the water column. I could feel the magic too, Marina’s pull, the ancient magic beneath it, and now a horrible static that permeated it all.
And through all of that, I couldn’t feel Selena.
There was blood in the water.
That was all I needed; my tail pumped furiously.
She was ten feet under me, tumbling. The first wave had her in its vortex, and the second wave’s pressure was pushing down on top of that.
She wasn’t panicking—I could hear her heartbeat now, fast but steady, the heartbeat of someone who knew to hold her breath and wait—but she was disoriented. Limp.
Tiger sharks are not gentle. We are not dolphins. We do not nudge people kindly toward the surface with our adorable bottle noses. We are one thousand pounds of cartilage and muscle and teeth.
I got under her in two seconds. I came up beneath her and pressed the flat top of my head against her stomach—carefully, god, so carefully, more carefully than I had ever done anything in my entire life—and pushed her up.
She instinctively grabbed onto my dorsal fin.
Her heart hammered in her chest, and I felt her realize, in one terrible instant, what she was holding onto.
But she didn’t let go.
I had to get her to the surface, but I couldn’t just get us caught in the waves again.
I angled away from the shore and past the breaks.
We broke the surface together, and she gasped, coughing up saltwater.
Her hand was still on my fin. I could feel her magic going haywire, sparking against my skin in hot little bursts that would’ve been painful if I’d been human.
I slowly swam her to the shallows, difficult to do while keeping her above water. Every part of my shark brain said to bite her, hold on tight, don’t let her get away again.
I shut that down.
When my belly hit sand, I partially shifted. It was ugly and incomplete because I needed hands, because I needed to hold her, because a shark cannot ask a woman if she’s okay.
I hauled myself up onto the shore beside her, laying down on the wet sand and checking her breathing. It was shallow, but there. My senses honed in on a cut on her shin from the reef, bleeding, but not badly.
“Come on,” I said, willing to beg. “Come on, Selena.”
She was still dazed. Then she rolled onto her side and heaved out seawater.
I slowly rubbed her back. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
We’d come into a small cove, the waves here broken by the outcropping of rock that surrounded it. She was on her hands and knees in the sand, still coughing up water as tiny, gentle waves rolled around her wrists.
“You’re okay.”
She glared at me.
She was furious.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack, swimming at me full speed like that!” she rasped around another cough.
“I’m a shark shifter.”
“I know! But that’s different than seeing a sixteen-foot monster coming straight at you.”
“Sixteen feet?” I tried to keep my face solemn and failed. “Baby, you’ve seen me naked. You know it’s not sixteen feet.”
She stared at me. Then she laughed, half a cough, and shoved my chest with the heel of her hand. I caught her wrist.
“You almost drowned me, and that’s where your head goes?”
“You’re the one who brought numbers into this. I’m just protecting my reputation.”
“Your reputation is measured in inches, Perez.”
“Now you’re just being cruel to the man who saved your life.”
Her face softened, and I realized I hadn’t ever seen that before. Her wrist was still in my grip, and I felt her pulse hammering, much faster than it had been in the water. I expected her to retort, I was fine. I didn’t need you. But she didn’t. Instead, her eyes traced down my face, then lower.
“You’re half—” she said, her voice barely there.
“Oh, yeah. It can be hard to shift back when I’m—”
“When you’re what?”
Terrified.
“When you went under, I panicked.”
She looked at me for another long moment, and I braced for the fight, for the jab.
“You came in after me.”
“Of course I did.”
She closed her eyes again. “Chase…”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Thank—” But then a wave rolled over us, and she hissed as the saltwater washed over the cut on her leg. There was blood in the water, and the smell of her hit the back of my throat. Everything in me lit up at once.
The shark wanted the blood—not to harm, never her, but out of a deeper need, primal and insatiable.
Find it. Hunt it. It’s mine. The man wanted her mouth and her weight and the perfect sounds I got her to make.
And under both, now too loud to ignore, a voice that told me to hold on to her and never let go. No matter what, don’t let her go.
“Selena.” It came out too low, raspy. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s a scratch.” But she’d gone still, watching me, and she’d grown up around shifters—she knew what stillness meant in one of us. “Chase, your eyes…they’re black.”
“I know.” My fingers dug into the wet sand on either side of her, but I didn’t touch her, holding myself an inch above her, every muscle locked against the pull.
The half-shift tugged at my skin, refusing to finish in either direction.
“Give me a second. The blood—when you’re hurt, it’s—I have to ride it out, or I’ll—”
“Or you’ll what? Eat me?”
She wasn’t afraid. That was the problem.
Her pulse still fluttered under the soft skin of her throat, but not from fear.
She was humming beneath me, ripples of her magic snagging on my much keener senses.
She tipped her chin up, saltwater beading along her jaw, the cut on her leg ribboning red into the shallows, and she looked at the worst, hungriest, least human part of me with her eyes wide open.
She didn’t look away.
“Am I supposed to be scared of you, Perez?” she asked with a small smirk.
“You should be a little scared of me. Just try to remember me swimming at you underwater again.”
“We’re on my beach now.” And we were. I recognized it now, the spot where we’d first met. Her hand came up. It found my jaw, the half-rough skin that wasn’t completely human, and the magic jumped between us, the line still open. I wasn’t sure it ever closed anymore. “Don’t ride it out.”
“Selena—”
“I was drowning,” she interrupted, “and you came for me. You’ve helped me, more than I want to admit. Me, my beach, and the turtles, of course.” Her thumb moved along my jaw. “I’m right here. Let me help you.”
That was all the permission I needed.
She tasted like salt and lime, like the magic that had drawn me in from miles out to sea, and the second my mouth found hers the shark stopped fighting me because it finally had what it wanted, what it had wanted since before I’d known what it was.
Her.
“Slow,” I made myself say against her mouth. “Your leg—”
“It’s a scratch. I told you.” She got a fistful of my wet hair and tugged. I made a very unapex-predatory sound. “Don’t you dare go careful with me now.”
But I finally heard what she meant underneath it.
Don’t underestimate me.
“I wouldn’t dare, baby.”
She pulled me down again, and I went, my mouth finding hers. The kiss had teeth in it—hers, then mine, careful even half-gone. She wrapped her hurt leg around me anyway, dragging me closer until everything quieted.
There was no noise, no static, because I was entirely focused on her.
I’d pushed the shark down, suppressed it, for years. Now, I stayed in between, and for the first time, I didn’t feel the need to choose. Her hands trailed over my shoulders, my jaw, the rough patches of skin, and she didn’t flinch from any of it.
“You’re staying like this,” she said.
“Can’t help it.” Half-true. “When the blood’s up…When you’re hurt.” I made myself breathe through the pull of the cut on her leg, the iron thread of it in the shallow water. “You should probably see what you’re dealing with.”
She raised an eyebrow in question, but then her gaze slid down my face, my chest, to where the man really ended and the shark began. Her eyes widened.
“Two? I mean…I guess I knew that, I just didn’t—” She shook her head, cutting herself off.
“That going to be a problem? We can stop if you don’t—”
She caught my jaw again, her grip firm. “No, I like the real Chase Perez.”
That undid the last of me.
“Don’t worry, baby. I’ll make them fit.”
Before she could retort about the cheesy line, I moved lower, biting the soft skin along the way until she moaned. She arched against me, her magic flaring as I bit harder, my teeth nearly breaking skin over her hip.