Chapter 42 #2
“Did you only sleep with me to gain access to your pelt?” She barely got the words out around what felt like a shard of the Marigold’s wreck in her throat.
Nia’s head snapped up, rivulets of fiery hair blowing across her face. Her wide green eyes finally met Zanta’s. “Please don’t hate me.”
She couldn’t. Even when her heart was breaking against the rocks, she couldn’t hate Nia, because she understood.
The pelt was a vital part of her, and if it were Zanta, she’d have done anything to get it back.
Zanta’s hand snapped out, dragging Nia to her over the slippery pebbles and wrapping her into a tight embrace.
Nia’s body shuddered, but she let go of her pelt and threaded her arms around Zanta’s waist in return.
Fuck. Could she hear the way Zanta’s heart was cracking apart?
“I understand.” She staved off a sob by burying her face in Nia’s hair. Nia was alive, and that’s all that mattered. Zanta’s feelings didn’t come into the equation. She could be content with this.
Nia pulled away, and Zanta’s stomach clenched in panic before she realized Nia’s hands were still on her, smoothing away Zanta’s tears. “Don’t cry. I’m sorry. I tricked you, and then I let my feelings get in the way of your crew’s safety. I was afraid I’d lose you, that you’d hate me.”
Zanta’s brow furrowed. “Lose me?”
Nia nodded, not meeting her eyes again. “I’m sorry. I know we decided it was just sex but…I let myself fall for you. I didn’t want it to end, even if you were just using me to feel close to Emilie again.”
Zanta’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. Nia had feelings for her? Nia wanted more than their arrangement?
She surged forward and kissed Nia’s worry-bitten lips, a delirious smile on her face. A small noise escaped Nia, but she surrendered to the kiss readily, her hands fisting in Zanta’s soaked shirt like she would float away.
“You’re not a replacement for her,” Zanta said breathlessly when they broke apart. “I care for you all on your own. You’re joyful and beautiful, and I never want to let you go again. I want to know everything about you. I never want to wake up without you in my arms.”
A disbelieving laugh bubbled up from Nia’s lips, and she kissed Zanta until the sound of waves and thunder faded into the background and Zanta’s head spun with giddiness.
Nia loved her back.
Zanta lay her back against the pebble beach in their little alcove away from prying eyes, bare but for the shimmering Selkie pelt beneath her, and kissed down her neck, collarbone, between her lovely freckled breasts until she reached the junction of Nia’s thighs.
They parted easily with a sigh, and a deeper exhale when Zanta’s tongue found her sweet center.
Overripe peaches and sweet sea air. Zanta tasted her until she trembled.
Pleasure like thunder shaking her apart.
When they were done, Zanta took Nia’s head into her lap, Nia still bare but for the pelt, and Zanta still fully dressed in waterlogged coat, boots, weapons. She combed her fingers through the flames of Nia’s hair, and asked her.
Nia told her everything, truth after truth spilling out like they’d been living at the tip of her tongue ready to leap the whole time.
She told her about Stroud and her mother.
About Stroud absconding with her mother’s pelt, and how over the next decade her mother slowly withered away without that vital piece of her.
How the other Selkies shunned them for being tainted with outsider blood.
She told how Stroud returned to their side because the pelt had begun to dull, and witnessed her mother’s last breaths.
How he’d taken Nia and the green stone eye and brought them into the human world with him.
He’d given Nia her dead mother’s pelt for comfort, but kept Nia’s under lock and key so she couldn’t run.
She only got to take on her Selkie form when he needed her to dive down and retrieve treasure for him, and even then, he’d cut a small piece to keep with him so she could never escape.
She told Zanta everything Zanta had read in the journal and more, without the screen of Stroud’s delusions of grandeur.
Zanta thought Nia must hate Stroud, her own flesh and blood, her own father, for the things he’d done, but Nia said it all with such wistful sadness, as if she didn’t know whether it had happened to her or someone else.
As if she didn’t know whether to love or hate the father who had been both caretaker and jailer.
“It’s been ten years since I got up the courage to escape without my pelt, and I’ve been waiting to die since.” She smiled sadly, leaning into Zanta’s caressing hand. “I guess it’s because I’m half human that I’ve lasted this long.”
“But you’re okay now that you have it back, right?” She couldn’t lose Nia again. Couldn’t bear to watch her slowly wither away like stone beneath waves.
“I think so. There hasn’t been a Selkie and human child since before the Storm Ring. I’m not sure how things would affect me.”
Zanta let out a relieved breath and they lapsed into comfortable silence, until Zanta asked, “Are you coming back with me?”
Nia gazed at the ornate little dwelling in the cliff where she must’ve grown up till Stroud kidnapped her.
Despite its run-down state, it was pretty.
The front held three arched windows, with intricate lattice carved right from the stone to allow air and light, but block out the worst of the sea.
To the side, a small arched doorway led into the dark interior.
“I came to this beach because I wanted to see my home again. But there’s nothing for me here.
My mother is gone, and my own people didn’t want me even when I was an innocent child.
I doubt I’d be welcome now that I’ve grown up in the outside world.
” The wistfulness clung to her voice like the sigh of the wind against the jagged cliffs.
“Do you want to try?” She could repair the Monsoon and take Nia anywhere she wanted to go. As long as they were together.
Nia shook her head and sat up. “If the Lonesome is still out there, we need to do something about it. Or at least warn the Selkies about what’s coming, but…” She took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly like she was feeding it to the wind. “It’s best they never know I was here.”
They finally picked themselves up off the beach. The others would be getting restless by now, wondering where Zanta was. She handed Nia the bundle of clothes—the striped trousers and a shirt, not a dress—that she’d packed. Nia grimaced as she pulled the ugly striped trousers out.
“I can’t go back in my natural Selkie state?” Nia teased. “I’ll race you to the ship.”
“Like you said before, that ass might cause a riot. Then where would we be?”