Chapter 1 #2
I was suddenly angry at that comment and glared at him. "Why are you here?"
"Bubba sent out a signal to Jax that I intercepted." He disappeared under the water for a moment then came back up. "Jax and Blake will be here shortly with a boat."
I didn't quite believe him. "Bubba barely left us."
Ivy shifted next to me and brought her legs to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She was shaking, and if I watched carefully enough for the blink of the light, I could have sworn her lips looked blue and her face deathly pale. We needed to get her warm.
"He sent a signal through the water. Only my family can comprehend it. He's right under here, keeping other sharks away, if you'd like for me to get him and have him confirm for you."
What a smartass. Now I understood where Jax got his attitude.
"No," Ivy grit out between clenched teeth.
His eyes finally went to her. She was staring at him with wide eyes. I scooted carefully to the edge of the buoy, getting closer to Finn. I was ready to defend my friend if he had an issue with her knowing.
"If they're coming, then it's time for you to leave." I bared my teeth at him.
The sky was starting to gray as the night turned to day. It hadn't seemed like that much time had passed, but maybe being lost at sea makes the passage of time unmeasurable.
A flash of purple jumped over the buoy, landing on the other side with a small splash. "You heard my daughter. Leave."
My mom's head came into view and I was surprised that it looked human. She swam toward me and rubbed her hand over my leg that was hanging over the side of the buoy.
"Natalia." Finn's jaw clenched, and I bet if I could see his hands they'd have been in fists. "What are you doing here?"
She turned to face him and they locked eyes. He stared at her with a mix of anger and want. It was the same way Jax used to stare at me before he got his head out of his ass.
"I'm taking my daughter." She had her hand on my foot that was hovering right by her head. "Where's the knife, Riley?"
I was sick of everyone always wanting the knife from me. It was mine, and they had all taken it. Ivy reached over and put her hand on my fist that I hadn't even realized I had made.
"Dylan Gale took it." I was going to get it back from him somehow, someway, and then stab him in the chest with it. "That's why we're out here. He forced us off his yacht."
"The swim coach?" Finn dipped under for a moment again. "I looked into him and found nothing out of the ordinary. He's an extremely private man."
"Well, you didn't look hard enough. He was able to have some control over Ivy and said he was a siren." It was probably really easy for him to keep himself hidden with the ability to control people to an extent.
"That's impossible." Finn looked as confused as I felt.
I looked at my mom for confirmation, but her mouth was pressed in a hard line. Her silence was acknowledging she knew something but wasn't about to tell us.
"We just need to get that knife back." My mom was practically growling and looked at Finn. "This is all your fault!"
"How is it my fault, Nat? You're the one that left me for an asshole who was hellbent on destroying my world! Why is that?"
It was like Ivy and I didn't exist anymore as Finn and my mom locked eyes. I knew why she had really left him. He should have been thanking her.
My mom had gone silent and was staring at Finn. If we had been on land, he would have shifted from one foot to the other.
"If Poseidon finds out I let two sirens-" Finn didn't get a chance to finish what he was saying because my mom did some acrobatic move, grabbed me around the waist, and took off.
I was so shocked that I wasn't processing the fact that we were slicing through the water at a high speed. Just how fast could she swim?
"I'm going to jump and you need to breathe." She held on tight and we flew from the water, giving me just enough time to take a breath of air.
Her voice was distorted in the water and I wanted to talk to her so badly, but despite my leg having a patch of scales, I still had human lungs. Since when had my life gone from perfectly normal to me being slightly upset I didn't have underwater breathing?
She jumped again, and the action made me giddy inside. I wanted to turn my head and look at her tail, but the jump was so brief I needed to focus on getting air.
"He's right behind us." She suddenly dove down and made a U-turn right under him. I didn't know much about swimming as a triton or siren, but she knew what she was doing.
I could barely see anything but caught a flash of blue. We took another jump out of the water, but before we went back under, my mom grunted and we crashed into the water in a tangling of bodies.
Her arm let go of me, and my head popped above the surface. The sky was peach and it would have been spectacular to watch it change, but instead, I looked around frantically for my mom.
I wasn't sure how much time passed before she finally surfaced several feet away. Finn came up in front of her and she slapped him across the face before she pinched his nipple so hard he squealed like a dolphin. "That's for terrorizing my daughter."
"Let go! Let go!" His face twisted in pain. "I'm sorry."
"Tell her that." She still had ahold of his nipple and was twisting it with quite a bit of torque. That had to hurt.
Finn looked at me and hissed in a breath. "I'm sorry."
"Tell her what you're sorry for." She twisted it even more and I bit my lip, trying not to laugh as he let her practically snap it off. He could easily have swum away or fought her off.
"I'm sorry for making your senior year miserable and torturing you." He looked up to the sky as my mom let him go.
He rubbed his nipple. "You need to apologize to me."
"Me? Apologize to you?" My mom should have been an actress. She would have been great on a telenovela with all the dramatics she was throwing at him.
She suddenly took his face in her hands and their lips collided in a kiss that looked like it hurt. I flinched and covered my eyes; I did not need to see that.
I peeked through my fingers to find them staring at each other. "Are you two done? I think my eyeballs are burning."
"Don't be so dramatic." My mom swam a few feet away from Finn. "Both of you."
She was one to talk. She was the one that just took off with me on a high-speed aquatic chase that resulted in her twisting her ex's nipple.
"Before you interrupted me by taking off, I was going to say that I was going to let you go." Finn was breathing heavily, and my guess was it wasn't from the chase. "I would never turn you in."
"How kind of you." My mom rolled her eyes and then poked him in the chest. Hard. "You tortured my child."
"I did what had to be done," he said through clenched teeth. He was losing his patience. What happened when put-together Finn West lost his patience?
"On whose orders? Poseidon's? It's doubtful he would order the torturing of someone he thinks is human." She snorted. "You follow him blindly."
I was looking back and forth between them. It was as if we weren't just chilling out in the middle of the ocean with the sun rising and the water making soft sounds as it moved.
He ran a hand down his face. "Nat, I-"
"I left you to protect you, Finn."
Everything around us went eerily silent as they stared at each other. Finn's eyes were pained as he stared straight at my mom. He dipped under the water briefly as he seemed to do often.
"My son is coming." He looked in the direction we had come from and not even a minute later, the faint sound of a boat motor could be heard. "I need to go try to find Gale."
My mom growled with gritted teeth. The noise was so animalistic that I gasped. She patted my arm and then hugged me. "He has my knife." Didn't she mean our knife?
As the boat came into view, my mom and Finn dove under the water, my mom's purple tail splashing as they left.