Chapter 15 #2
"It's not complicated. She's my friend and my coworker and you shouldn’t try to date her. I told you she was off-limits."
"I don’t see why you’re making a big deal out of this." He runs a hand through his blond hair and looks evasively out the window. “I like her. She likes me. We’re two adults here and it’s not your place to tell me who I can and can’t date.”
"My place?" Jackie's voice stays even, but I can hear the steel underneath. "You mean the place you crashed when you had nowhere else to go? The same place you’ll come back to when things take a downturn with Sylvie? And then what? I’m going to live with you and work with her? This isn’t just about you. It’s about my career and my life here in Saltford Bay.
I’ll still be here, working with her, when you’re long gone because you got bored of life here.
I’m done picking up the mess after you."
Chase's jaw works. He glances at me, a quick, hostile flick, then back to his sister.
"I'd like to talk about this privately," he says. "If you don't mind."
"I do mind, actually." Jackie doesn't move. "This is my home. Orvik is here because I want him here."
His face tightens.
"I don't have to explain my relationships to you." His voice rises for the first time. "I came here to make things right with you. Not to be interrogated about my personal life in front of—" He gestures toward me without looking. "Tell him to leave."
"Chase, you don't get to decide who stays and who goes in my house." The way she says it, with her chin held high and her gaze direct, fills me with pride.
That is when I speak.
"Maybe it’s you who needs to leave." My voice is level as I hold his stare. "You have no right to give orders in her home."
Chase turns to me with the petulant expression of a child scolded by a stepparent.
"This is a family matter," he says. "Stay out of it."
"Jackie is my mate," I say. "What concerns her concerns me."
The word lands in the room like an anchor hitting the seabed. Chase stares at me, then at Jackie, then back at me.
"Your mate," he repeats. "What does that even mean? You know what, I don't care. This isn't your business. You've known her for what? Six weeks, tops. I’m her brother. I’ve known her my entire life."
"Chase," Jackie says. "Stop."
"No, I won't stop." He's facing me now, his chest rising. "You walk into my sister's life and suddenly you're her protector? Her mate? You don't know anything about her."
"I know enough." I take a step forward, my tentacles wild around my head. “And it seems I care more about her well-being than you do.”
"Both of you, stop." Jackie moves past me toward the door. “Now, you’re going to leave and come back another time.”
She walks past Chase and he reaches out to catch her arm.
"Jackie, wait. Just listen to me for one—"
"Let go of my arm, Chase."
He doesn't. His grip isn't hard, I can see that. But he’s still holding my mate when she told him to let go.
"Release her." My voice drops low into the register that makes the water ripple.
"Back off." Chase turns to me. “This has nothing to do with you.”
"Chase, let go." Jackie pulls her arm. "You’re hurting me."
I take one step, my hand closing around his wrist, and I pry his fingers off her arm and shove him back.
I use more force than I intend to. Fifteen years of land-dwelling and I still forget, sometimes, how much stronger I am than a human, and he stumbles backward, hits the edge of the counter, and goes down hard on the kitchen floor.
The silence that follows is absolute.
Chase sits on the floor, one hand braced behind him, staring up at me with an expression that moves rapidly through shock, humiliation, and fury. Jackie stands between us, her hand on her forearm where his grip was, and she is looking at me with something I have not seen on her face before.
"Are you alright?" I ask her.
"I'm fine." Her voice is tight. She turns to Chase. "Chase."
He gets to his feet. His hand is shaking. When he speaks, his voice is rough and quiet and aimed entirely at Jackie.
"So this is how it is," he says. "You're choosing him. A stranger you barely know, over your own brother."
"I'm not choosing a stranger, Chase." Jackie's voice doesn't waver. "For the first time in my life, I am choosing myself. I am choosing what makes me happy. And Orvik makes me happy."
The words fill every corner of the room.
Chase's mouth opens. Nothing comes out. He looks at her, really looks at her, and whatever he sees there is something he expected.
Then he shakes his head and picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.
He walks to the front door. He doesn't look at me and he doesn't look back at her as he closes the door behind him with a quiet, deliberate click.
I watch the door for three seconds. Then I turn to Jackie.
"Pack a bag," I say. “You’re going home with me.”
She blinks. "What?"
"There was a kraken in the cove. There was a kraken at your door." I set the piece of black coral on the counter between us. "You are not safe on this stretch of beach alone."
She stares at the coral. Then at me.
"We can come back to get more of your things later," I say. "For now, I’ll instruct all my patrol officers to keep an eye out for rogue krakens. I’ll tell Callum to assign you to office duty until I figure this out."
"Stop."
The word is quiet in the empty air, but it feels like she shouted.
"You just shoved my brother onto the floor and now you’re telling me where I’m going to live and you want to control my job? Why do you think you get to decide that for me?"
"I’m only thinking of your safety."
"I know that." She holds up a hand. "But you have no proof that whoever was here wanted to hurt me. They could have hurt you or me a dozen times already and they didn’t. I’m not going to abandon my house and stop going to my job for a hunch."
"You have no idea of what’s out there." I hear myself. I hear how it sounds. "I am not trying to control you. I am trying to protect you. You are vulnerable here, alone, on an isolated stretch of beach with no man to protect you."
"I'm vulnerable." She repeats the word like she's tasting it. "I'm vulnerable and too good a person and I need you to look out for me. That's what you're saying."
"Yes, and that’s why I’m going to protect you."
"Enough. You are a good man, Orvik. You are the best man I've ever known.
And I understand that all of it comes from a place of wanting to protect me.
" She takes a breath. "But I have spent my entire adult life being managed by people who loved me.
My father's illness managed me. Chase's needs managed me.
I came to Saltford Bay to start living for myself, and I will not trade one cage for another.
No matter how well intentioned the keeper behind the bars. "
"I am not a cage," I say, but even I can hear how thin it sounds.
"What you're doing right now—standing in my home, telling me where to go, deciding what I should be afraid of—that's not partnership. That's management."
I feel the blood drain from my face.
"You need to leave," she says, the words taking the ground out from under me.
"Jackie, I can't leave you here alone."
"Yes, you can, and you will." Her chin lifts. Her eyes are bright with tears she is refusing to shed. "You can, because I am asking you to, and if you can't respect that, then everything you just said about protecting me is actually about controlling me."
I stand in the middle of her living room. The patterns on my arms are still lit, reaching toward her even as the rest of me understands that I have lost the right to stay.
I look at her for a long time.
She doesn't waver.
I leave.
The beach stretches ahead of me, flat and silver in the early evening light. The water is calm. The lighthouse blinks its steady rhythm in the distance as I walk the shore road back toward the harbor with the growing understanding that I have just lost everything that matters to me.
For the second time in my life.