Chapter 14 #2
“Hello?” I called.
My voice rose into the height of the ceiling and vanished.
No answer.
I waited, listening.
The house was never truly silent. Water moved through pipes, filters were an ever-present buzzing behind walls, and somewhere far off, the ocean pushed itself against the cliffs.
But there were no footsteps, no Ben calling out in greeting, no Tobias appearing like he’d been summoned by my bad decision-making.
Maybe they hadn’t seen the alerts..?
That was weird, but I supposed it was possible, although I found it difficult to believe they were both asleep so early.
Whatever.
It was fine.
I just needed to find my phone.
I kept my steps quiet as I moved down the hall, though I wasn’t sure why. The path was familiar now. Past the long window facing the water, through the hallway where the air always seemed just a little cooler, and toward the room Tobias had made mine.
My office was exactly as I’d left it.
The monitors and the desk lamp were dark. My work tablet sat where I’d placed it, asleep. The cold brew bottle I hadn’t finished waited near the couch, probably room temperature by now.
My phone was not on the desk.
Not beneath the papers.
Not beside the monitors.
Not on the sofa.
Not in the bathroom.
I checked every obvious place, then three stupid places, then stood in the middle of the room and pressed both hands to my face.
Where the hell had I left it?
Since my last solid memory of it involved the puffer tank, I nodded and left my office for the main aquarium wing, already imagining the phone abandoned on the ledge near the supply cart at five percent battery.
That was when I heard voices.
Faint, and coming from somewhere deeper in the wing.
My body relaxed immediately, relief flooding through me at the thought that someone was home and I wasn’t just wandering alone through an empty mansion at night.
Then I paused.
Because Ben’s voice was there, but it sounded wrong—tight and stripped of warmth, nothing like his usual friendly and teasing self.
Tobias answered in words I couldn’t make out, but the tone alone made the hair on the back of my neck rise.
I should have called out.
That would have been normal.
“Hey, it’s me. Sorry, I left my phone.”
Instead, I walked toward the voices.
The door to the main wing was partially open, light spilling through the gap and cutting across the floor. I pushed it in the rest of the way and stepped inside.
Tobias and Ben’s absence from the entry corridor confirmed my suspicion that they were farther inside.
As I looked around, it felt as if I had entered a dream.
Not a pleasant one, necessarily, but not a nightmare either.
Something suspended between the two.
The main aquarium wing always felt removed from the rest of the house, but at night that separation became almost absolute.
During the day, there was my tablet chiming softly, feeding tools clinking as they were set out on trays, notes murmured under my breath while I moved from system to system.
Even when I was alone, the space felt occupied by work.
Now, it belonged entirely to the water.
Dim light drifted across the floor in fractured bands as animals passed behind glass.
The tanks glowed from within, each one its own impossible little world suspended in darkness.
Coral structures rose like submerged ruins.
Fish moved between them in muted flashes of color, less bright than they were during the day, as if even they understood that night required quiet.
My shoes made almost no sound against the floor, but I still placed each step carefully, as though the room had become something sleeping that I did not wish to wake.
The reef tank was nearest, its moon-cycle lighting washing the coral in dim violet and blue. Tiny polyps extended into the current, pale and soft, opening themselves to whatever the water carried. Everything inside that world looked peaceful.
Untouched and normal.
Ben’s voice reached me again from somewhere deeper in the wing, too low for the words to survive the distance. The tone was what mattered—still strained, still missing every easy note I had come to associate with him.
I kept walking.
Past the lionfish habitat, where ornate silhouettes hovered beneath faint amber light, fins spread like delicate weapons. They turned as I passed, slow and synchronized, watching me with a stillness that made them seem carved from warning rather than flesh.
Past the puffer tank, where Puff Daddy did not rush the glass.
That was the first thing that truly frightened me.
He always rushed the glass when he noticed me. Always. But tonight, he remained near the back of the enclosure, half hidden behind a structure, one dark eye visible.
Watching.
Not me, maybe.
Something beyond me.
The change unsettled me deeply, sending a cold, crawling awareness down my spine.
The voices came again, closer now.
Ben said something sharp, almost breathless. Tobias replied with one word, too indistinct to understand, though that hardly mattered when the suspense had already closed around my throat.
My fingers tightened around the strap of my bag until the material bit into my palm, and as I reached the turn into the predator corridor, I hesitated.
That was the moment I should have stopped.
I should have backed away.
I should have remembered that Tobias’s house was full of cameras and security systems and strange, locked corridors and rooms I still had not been allowed to enter.
I should have thought about the fact that Ben sounded wrong, and Tobias sounded worse, and perhaps there were reasons people did not walk quietly toward conversations they had not been invited into.
But I kept going.
When I looked around the corner, my gaze landed first on the box jelly tank—the largest curved kreisel-style system I had ever seen and one of my most frequent observation spots.
It was one of the quietest places in the wing.
One of the prettiest.
And one of the deadliest.
The jellies drifted in continuous, controlled motion, their translucent bodies catching the blue-white glow until they looked less like animals and more like pieces of moonlight suspended in water. Long, delicate tentacles trailed behind them in ribbons so fine they seemed imagined.
Beautiful things.
Impossible things.
Dangerous enough that every part of their care demanded respect.
Ben’s voice came again, a harshness to his tone that I had never heard from him before. “We need to move him higher first.”
Him?
The word caught in my head and stayed there.
For a second, my mind refused to go any further than that, but then something shifted near the tank platform.
A wet, heavy sound.
Not a splash.
The sound of something being dragged.
I took one more step, and the rest of the room opened into view.
At first, I saw Ben.
He was braced near the access platform, sleeves shoved past his elbows, blond hair damp at the temples. His posture was tense, both hands locked beneath the arms of something heavy.
Someone heavy.
Tobias stood on the opposite side of the platform, his dark shirt damp where water had soaked through, rolled sleeves clinging to his forearms. His hair had fallen out of its usual immaculate shape, a few strands hanging near his forehead, his expression focused with the same terrible precision he brought to everything else.
Between them was a man’s body.
My mind rejected the whole image so completely that it broke it into fragments instead.
A drenched sleeve dragging over the platform edge.
A shoe scraping once against the floor.
A limp hand hanging with its fingers curled inward, its skin gone grey.
Water streaming from soaked fabric in steady rivulets and running toward the drain.
There was no blood, and somehow, that made it worse.
There should have been blood. Something red and dramatic and obvious enough to tell my brain what to do with what it was seeing.
Instead, he only looked wet.
Slack.
Wrong.
Like something alive had been emptied out of him, and his body had been left behind as an afterthought.
Behind the glass, the jellies continued to drift, serene and luminous and indifferent, when it finally clicked in my mind.
My stomach rolled at the thought.
Ben grunted, shifting his grip. “Careful. His leg’s caught.”
“I have it,” Tobias said, reaching back toward the water with one gloved hand and freeing the man’s leg from whatever had snagged near the access panel.
That was when my bag slipped from my shoulder and struck the floor. It wasn’t loud, but in that room, against all that water and silence, it sounded deafening.
Ben’s head snapped toward me first, his expression cold. No boy-next-door smile. Just shock, naked and immediate, before horror coursed in.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispered, dread dripping from those words.
Tobias went very still, back seizing up.
And then he turned.
And as he turned, the sound of the blood rushing through my veins drowned out everything else.
For one suspended second, Tobias did not look like the man who made me breakfast and remembered which foods I hated.
He did not look like the employer who listened patiently while I talked too long about water quality or feeding responses or the behavioral intelligence of animals most people only admired from a distance.
He looked like something shaped by the darkest depths of the sea, his gloved hand still half-raised from the tank, water trailing from his wrist in slow, shining threads.
His shirt clung damply to his chest and forearms, the fine material ruined by saltwater, but he wore the damage with the same composure he wore everything else. His jaw was set, his mouth still and unreadable.
His eyes found mine, and for the first time since I had met him, Tobias looked unmistakably shocked.