Chapter Eleven
Orvik
Five days.
Five days since I kissed her on the dock and dove into the harbor like a coward. Five days of rerouted patrol routes and invented reasons not to answer my phone, and one genuinely catastrophic attempt at carving a harbor seal that now looks like something dredged from a nightmare.
I set down the knife. The driftwood stares back at me, accusatory.
The knock comes before I can find a reason to ignore it.
Three times. Deliberate.
My bioluminescent glands answer before my brain does—warmth flooding up from my sternum, patterns pulsing beneath my skin in a surge I cannot suppress. I press my forearm hard against my ribs and breathe through it.
I open the door.
Jackie stands on the dock in a jacket thrown over what appears to be her pajamas, hair loose around her shoulders, chin lifted at the angle I have come to recognize as her preparing to be difficult.
She holds up her arm.
The patterns are right there on the inside of her wrist. Faint, blue-silver, tracing the lines of her veins into the tender skin of her forearm. My own patterns blaze in immediate response, and I have to grip the doorframe to keep my expression from showing what I feel.
She cannot still have those marks.
I stare at them, my mind cycling rapidly through everything I know of kraken biology. The transfer of bioluminescence during intimate contact is documented. Its persistence on a human is not.
The marks should have faded. I noticed them after our kiss, but I never expected them to stay. Five days.
They haven't faded. The thought sends tiny spikes of satisfaction into my brain, like the whispering of some monster behind my ears. No matter how much I want to tell myself otherwise, I want to see them on her skin. I want to see my marks on her.
I want her.
"Well?" Jackie says. “Are you going to shut the door in my face or let me in? Because this is getting uncomfortable.”
I shouldn’t let her in. I should do as she suggested and shut the door in her face. Shut her out of my life. For her own good.
But I’m not that strong. Not when the blood in my veins boils and my patterns itch under my skin. Not when my entire body is screaming at me that it found its mate.
If Jackie were a kraken female, it wouldn’t be a problem. She would be feeling that same biological urge I’m feeling. But she’s not. She’s human.
“Sorry,” I finally blurt out as Jackie’s eyes become thunderous and she tilts her head like she’s about to storm off into the night. “Please come in.”
I step back from the door and she walks in, her body brushing just past mine. Her scent goes to my head and I grip the doorknob so hard it hurts. I shut my eyes and count to three before closing the door and turning to face her.
Jackie takes a wide glance around at the sparse furnishing, her eyes landing on the floor-to-ceiling wall of windows I set up against the ocean. For a brief moment, my entire being swells with pride as her jaw slacks while she takes in the view.
Then I shake it off. I’m not courting her by showing her my nest and hoping she’ll find it attractive enough to accept my mating proposal.
Jackie turns away from the view of the ocean slowly, then looks straight at me in a way that makes my tentacle beard tingle.
"What are these?" she asks, holding her wrist toward the lamp.
Okay. So she’s not going to beat around the bush. I should have figured she wouldn’t.
"Bioluminescent residue." The words come out subdued and cold, but I can’t help it. If I lose control now, I won’t regain it easily. Not when she smells like this, safe in my nest. "It traveled to you when we touched. Well, when we kissed. It’ll fade."
"It's been five days." Her eyes move from the marks to my face. “When will they fade?”
Something inside me bares its fangs at the notion that the marks will fade. I don’t want them to fade. I want them permanent. Which is why I need to make her leave as soon as possible.
"I don’t know." I exhale and shake my head. “They’re not even supposed to transfer to you. You’re human.”
She tilts her head and narrows her eyes at me. "So they have some special meaning or something? No one will tell me anything."
I knew this moment was coming. I know she deserves the truth. I still look down at the ground like a teenager afraid to ask his crush on a date.
Because what if I tell her and she rejects me? What if this isn’t what I think it is?
“These are mate marks.”
I hold her gaze as my words make their way into her brain. I miss nothing of her reaction, from her eyes enlarging to almost comical proportions to the way she opens her mouth like she has something to say, then closes so hard it makes an audible sound.
She’s not exactly reacting like this is her dream come true. I should have known.
“Mate marks?” She finally speaks, but her voice is high-pitched and her throat is bobbing up and down. “How is this possible? We just kissed.”
Just kissed? She’s been haunting my every waking hour since the day I met her.
“What can I say?” I scoff and I hate the jaded sound of it. “It’s kraken biology. It’s not something a land dweller would understand.”
She goes very still at this and her lovely face looks wounded as she shakes her head again.
“So it’s just biology? It’s not something that you want. It’s just something that happened to you?”
I want to say no. I want to tell her that I want nothing more than to take her in my arms, settle her in a soft nest in the middle of my home, and keep her there.
But I don’t. Because whatever exists between us, it cannot be a true kraken mating. And even if it were, I wouldn’t be worthy of her. I’m an exile, a kraken without a ship and without a future. She deserves a male who can keep her warm and fed, who can protect her from danger. I’m not that male.
“It’s not something a kraken decides,” I say, and I hate myself for the way I sound. I sound cold and detached. “Those marks will fade in time. You have nothing to worry about.”
For her, they would. For me, they were a part of myself as much as the tentacles on my scalp or the gills at my ribs. She was a part of me now.
But I wasn’t about to impose this on her.
“Is that what you want?” She presses her lips together and holds my gaze. “For the marks to fade and me to walk away?”
She swallows and lifts her chin. I open my mouth to say that yes, it’s what I want. For her to leave and never come back. For her to stay safe and away from me, away from an exiled kraken with nothing to offer.
But the words don’t come out. No matter how hard I try, the words refuse to come out.
Because I’m too weak to push her away as I know I should.
“It’s not that simple,” is all I manage to say. “You have no idea what you’re doing to me or what risks you’re taking by being with me.”
"Then why don’t you tell me." She steps forward, her eager, perfect face lit by the fading orange light of the sunset. ‘Explain it to me, and then it’ll be my choice to make. Sounds fair enough, wouldn’t you say?”
It did. It sounded wonderfully, intoxicatingly fair enough to give her the choice. My tentacle hair stirs at my nape despite trying my best to control them. Hope is a stubborn creature, after all, and the slice of hope that Jackie could decide to stay…
Decide that she wants the marks… That she wants me…
That hope lures me in as surely as a siren’s call toward a deadly, rocky shore where my heart is sure to be shattered and drowned.
But drowning in Jackie’s arms sounds like the sweetest of deaths.
“Fair enough.” My voice sounds wrong. Dark as the deep and surrounded by a growl that I can’t suppress. “You want to know about kraken mating, human?”
I take a step forward, not bothering to soften my stance or my tone. She’s asking for the monster inside me to come out and play. She’s about to see it.
“Yes, I do.” She licks her lips and holds still, painting the very image of a confident, strong woman.
But she doesn’t know that I can feel her heartbeat pounding through her thin human skin. She doesn’t know that I can feel her breath on my tentacles, her fear mixing with her pheromones.
Gods of the Deep, I want her. I shouldn’t. But I do.
I look at her face in the lamplight, at the marks on her neck glowing faintly in the dim room, synchronized with my own patterns without either of us touching.
She waits.
"A kraken's body identifies its mate through bioluminescent response.
The patterns," I say slowly, lifting my own arm, where the faint patterns are pulsing a luminescent glow, “are produced when a kraken is in the presence of the person their body has selected.
" The words feel inadequate and exposed in the air between us.
"When that other person is a kraken, the response is mutual and immediate. It’s also irreversible. "
Jackie is very still as I speak and I know she’s hanging on my every word. She’s probably about to run away screaming.
"When that other person is also a kraken," she repeats my words. “But what about when it’s not?”
“I don't know,” I answer truthfully. “Krakens don't mate with other species as far as I know. I have no knowledge of this occurring before."
Her expression shifts. Something moves across her face that I cannot immediately read, and she looks down at her wrist. The silence stretches.
When she looks back up, her eyes are bright. Not angry. Something closer to pain.
"So you think your body made a mistake," she says carefully. "And now you're trying to figure out how to correct it."
"No—"
"It's alright." Her voice drops slightly. "You don't owe me anything. I can leave if you want, now that I understand."
Her eyes stray from me to the door and she moves.
Something inside me snaps at the thought of her leaving and never coming back. Somehow, I figured I could fight this. I figured I could watch over her from a distance, keep her safe and watch her be happy.
I figured it could be enough, just to see her live her life. I was wrong. It’s not enough.
I don’t think I could ever have enough of her.
"Jackie." I lift my arm, effectively blocking her path to the door. "That is not what I said. You are not a mistake. If anything, you’re the exact opposite of a mistake. The problem isn’t you. It’s me."
I stop. She is looking at me now with an expression that is entirely unguarded.
"You are everything I never dared to dream of," I say. "You are kind and smart and braver than I could ever hope to be."
Her breath catches.
"Then why—"
"Because I am an outcast." I hear how blunt it lands and I cannot soften it.
"I have nothing to offer you. I should have a treasure trove of gold, pearls, and jewels to set at your feet. You deserve this and more." The pearl sits against my ribs like a stone. "I’m a stranger in this land and I’m an outcast in the ocean. I have nowhere to call home. How can I claim you as mate when I can’t even offer you a vessel to sail the seas? "
The room is very quiet. Jackie uncrosses her arms and takes a step forward. Her beautiful, soft face is unreadable as she looks up at me.
That thing in my chest coils and my tentacle hair does the reverse. My tentacles wiggle and reach in her direction, their bioluminescent patterns expressing things words cannot.
How I long for her. How I wish things were different. How I wish I were worthy.
“You’re unreal.”
She crosses the space between us and I do not move, because I don't know what she's about to do and I cannot tell my body to prepare for anything.
She reaches up and puts her palm against my cheek.
The bioluminescence detonates.
It races from the point of contact across every inch of my skin simultaneously.
My patterns are flaring brilliant blue-green, my tentacle hair unbound and reaching for her, the pulsing light filling the boathouse and spilling across the water visible through the porthole.
And on her skin, on her face, on the inside of her wrist pressed warm against my jaw, her marks bloom in answer. Brighter than they have ever been.
Permanent and blazing and entirely, devastatingly mine.
She doesn't flinch.
"I don't care about your past and I don’t need gold, pearls, or jewels," she says.
Her thumb traces along my cheekbone, and my tentacle beard reaches up to her, tickling and softly embracing her hand.
"All I care about is who you are right now. And you’re a good man, Orvik Fenmoor.
" She pauses, and the corners of her mouth tilt up in the faintest of smile.
"You're a bit of a jerk sometimes, too."
My beard tentacles twitch as my entire being hangs on her words. Her surreal, unbelievable words
"But you're a good man."
Then she goes up on her toes and her mouth lands on mine, warm-blooded and soft.
And I know with absolute certainty that what comes next cannot be stopped and that I am not going to try.