41. Helsa
HELSA
T he pod door opened and I was already moving.
No assessment. No threat scan. No reading the waterline or checking the sky or doing any of the things I had learned to do in the first half-second of every landing. I was just running, one boot, one bare foot, in the direction he always came from.
My neck felt fine.
That was still strange. I kept rotating it anyway, some part of my brain unconvinced, running its own private audit of the damage and finding nothing to report.
The rise crested and he was right there on the other side of it.
I made a sound I was never going to describe to another living person.
He grabbed me. Both arms, lifting, spinning, and I squealed — completely undignified, absolutely unrepentant — and then he brought me down and his arms came around me. My face found his neck and his scales were moving against my cheek. I held on with everything I had .
He held on harder.
The platform was wet underfoot. The tide was somewhere. The other males were somewhere. None of it mattered.
He was what mattered.
He was warm and solid and real. He smelled like saltwater. And I was alive and so was he and we had done it, we had actually done it. The feeling in my chest was so large I didn't have a drawer for it.
I pulled back.
Took his face in my hands. The amber eyes, the jaw, the scales still moving along his neck and shoulders, completely beyond his control. I looked at him for a long moment and he looked back. Neither of us said anything because there was nothing that needed saying.
Then I raised my finger.
He looked at it.
"Just so we're clear," I said. "I know I'm a lot to deal with. I'm aware of this. I've always been aware of this." I kept the finger raised. "That is not to go giving you any ideas that you can hit me again."
He held my gaze.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
Then he threw his head back and laughed. Full and open and completely unguarded, the sound of it rolling out across the platform and over the water, and I had never heard him laugh like that. Didn’t even know he was capable of it.
"Never," he said. He was still smiling when he said it. "Never again, my mate."
My mate.
I had a drawer for that one now .
He kissed me.
The tide was coming in at the edges of the platform, slow and indifferent and completely unbothered by what was happening on the rock above it. The water rising the way it always rose on this world, on its own schedule, answering only to the moons.
“We already mated once,” I said. “It’s about time we do it again, don’t you think?”
He buried his lips on mine as we consumed each other.
This moment, these Games, were ours.
He pulled me closer.
The tide came in.
Neither of us were paying any attention to it at all.
I hope you enjoyed THE TIDAL GAMES. If you did, you’ll love the next book in the series: THE CLAIMING GAMES.
Here’s the blurb:
“Five…”
I wake up in a glass pod, screaming.
“Four…”
Five blue-scaled aliens are watching me like I already belong to them.
“Three…”
One of them refuses to look away. Golden eyes. Silver markings. A quiet promise in the middle of hell.
“Two…”
He protects me. Claims me. Loves me like I’m the only thing that’s ever mattered.
“One…”
Then he dies shielding me from the final blow .
“Launch.”
The game thinks it’s won.
But I’m not finished with him yet.