The other dough had rested enough by now that she could prep the second set. Her kitchen helpers could be trusted with the cooking part of the process, with her supervising.

While they did that, she’d get to work on a batch of cookies. Her last lot had been hoovered up so fast she was half-convinced certain cookie fiends were hoarding them in their rooms. Might be time to send Hex on a spy mission.

“Kid was limping.”

“Scott’s a teenager who can swim in the black.” Kaia rolled out another circle. “More sensible than most, but his brain’s still developing its danger sense.”

“What did he do? Try to wrestle a shark?”

She flicked Bowen a glance—and felt a nearly physical shock of sensation when their gazes collided. “I’m fairly certain he wasn’t looking for trouble.” Her heart thudded. “But neither did he get out of the way fast enough.”

Eyes of such a deep brown they appeared black in this light continued to hold her own, the currents arcing between them white fire she could almost see.

“Kaia.”

A shiver rippled over her skin.

Forcibly breaking the eye contact, she dived back into work. But her mind was racing, spinning. Why was her body reacting to him? Why was she reacting to him? It wasn’t as if she was starved of choice should she want skin privileges. Ryūjin’s population aside, the station had visitors from the city on a regular basis. Kaia, too, could swim up whenever she pleased.

More than one clanmate had made her an invitation. And yet . . .

“Shit.” Metal hitting china, Bowen’s fork clattering onto his plate. “Muscles are spasming.” Rising from the stool with a wince, he began to stretch with slow, intense attention to detail.

Kaia wondered if he ever did anything any other way as she kept an eye on him. Should he begin to topple over, she’d summon one of the group of clanmates who’d come in to grab coffee a couple of minutes earlier and were now lingering nonchalantly in the external part of the kitchen.

The five women were too scared of Kaia’s wrath to invade her domain, but that didn’t stop them from staring in Bowen Knight’s direction with unabashed interest. BlackSea might’ve managed to convince the rest of the world that they were mysterious and aloof loners, but everyone seemed to forget that a great number of water creatures preferred to hang about in large groups.

Forget mysterious, the oceanic flow of gossip was second only to the massive currents that formed the North Atlantic Gyre.

Her eyes narrowed as she noticed the precarious way Bowen’s jeans were hanging off his hips.

“Does your mouse eat human food?” he asked after shaking out his body like a large dog settling its skin.

The curious cats—all of whom were single females—made eyes at each other.

“Give him a hunk of that yellow cheese on your plate,” Kaia said absently as she finished accordioning the last dumpling. “I’ll be back in a moment.” She headed to the knot of watchers. “Drooling over a man just out of a coma?” She glared at them. “Shoo.”

“But Kaia,” one whispered, “he’s so . . . rough looking. That stubble, the tumbled hair.”

“Yeah. Like Malachai. He can dive with me anytime.”

Kaia shook off a shudder at the image—Mal was like her brother; she did not want to visualize his love life. “Fine. Keep drooling, but do not go near him.” The instruction had nothing to do with her painfully uncomfortable response to him; Bowen needed to eat, not fend off amorous offers. “And especially no offering him tentacle skin privileges.” She pinned the most likely offender with her gaze.

Oleanna giggled as she stole a flower from a friend’s braid to tuck behind her right ear. “Not my fault so many humans have a fetish.”

Throwing up her hands, Kaia took the risk of leaving Bowen alone with the horde while she went to her quarters. It didn’t take her long to find the belt Edison had forgotten the last time he’d visited. The oldest of Atalina’s five younger brothers—and the cousin to whom Kaia was closest—had crashed in her room on a mattress on the floor.

He’d kept her awake half the night with hysterical stories from the city, his sense of humor so dry most people saw him as stoic and quiet. But that quiet existed, too; Edison had a deep well of silence within, an unshakable inner peace. As a heartbroken little girl, it was fifteen-year-old Edison whom Kaia had allowed to hold her, Edison whose hand she’d clutched when the clan consigned her parents’ bodies to the deep with a song of mourning that pierced her childish heart.

Returning with the belt to find Bowen unmolested but all the watchers giggling and blushing, she thrust the battered black leather at him over the counter. “Put this on before you give your fan club a strip show.” He’d obviously lost weight during the coma and his jeans were barely hanging on to his hips.

A slow smile that reached the darkness of his eyes and made her stomach clutch . . . and had certain people fanning themselves. Lifting her rolling pin, Kaia tapped it against her other palm. The fan club continued to watch, unrepentant and gleeful.

“Thanks.” He got off the stool and, lifting up his shirt, began to slip the belt through the loops on his jeans. The action revealed the still-hard plane of his belly, though it was more concave now than she guessed was normal for him. A dark line of hair arrowed down and into his jeans. It was a view available only to Kaia . . . who didn’t look away.

“Done.”

Dumplings all prepped for cooking, Kaia made a production out of checking her recipe organizer. “Shortbread,” she said aloud.

“Oatmeal raisin, too!” cried she-of-the-tentacles. “Please.”

“If you scat right now.”

A pause, but Bowen’s admirers finally decided they really wanted the cookies. “Bye, Bo.” The women waggled their fingers in his direction.

“Ladies.” Waiting until they were alone once more, he sat back down on his stool.

Hex chose that moment to scramble down the counter and to the floor. “You want me to grab him before he makes a grand escape?”

“No. Hex knows the way home.” Her pet moved quickly out of the kitchen. She knew he’d find his way to the seaward wall and sit there watching the deep in rapturous quiet.

“Odd pet for a cook.”

Kaia could see no risk in sharing this truth with him. “My boy cousins put a mouse in my bed when I was twelve.” None of the six had played a single trick on her while she was in the black hole of grief, instead surrounding her in warmth and affection and more compassion than most people would believe possible from a bunch of rowdy boys.

“They thought I’d scream. I didn’t.” The miscreants had been trying ever more devious tricks since then—every so often, the younger four could still talk Edison and Mal into joining in.

“Hex doesn’t look a day over one or two.”

“His full name is Hex Luna the seventh. The mouse life span is sadly short.” Flippant words, but Kaia had mourned the death of each Hex. She would’ve never adopted Hex II if Edison hadn’t turned up with the mouse six months after the first Hex’s death.

“Love him, Kaia. He needs it.”

Her big, tough cousins kept doing that, and she kept not being able to give the new Hex back. Each one had their own personality, their own way of being. This Hex was mischievous and loved to explore where Hex VI had been a homebody who mostly enjoyed sleeping—with very rare excursions to run on his wheel.

And though Kaia hated death, she’d come to terms with it with the Hexes—because when they died, it was after their natural life span. And in that life span, they were pampered and protected and loved.

It was the unexpected or unnatural losses that destroyed her.

Her eyes landed on Bowen and she thought of the ticking time bomb in his head . . . and of the untested compound in his brain. If the chip imploded or the compound failed, there’d be nothing natural about it.

It would destroy Bowen Knight right in the prime of life.

Chapter 13

“We can bandage up his physical wounds, but it’s the damage done to his heart and his mind that’ll scar him.”

“My gentle, sweet boy. What will this do to you? Who will this make you?”

—Jerard and Leah Knight on their son, Bowen (13)

BO THOUGHT OF the plate of Scott’s favorite food, of the cane thrust under his hand, of a room made warm so he could sleep comfortably and wondered how Kaia expected him to believe she just shrugged off the deaths of her pets.

“I was thirteen when my pet hamster died,” he found himself telling her. “I cried for a week at night, when no one else could see me.” It had happened four days after he killed in desperate defense of himself and his best friend, four days after his mind was violated so badly that he’d still been suffering ice-pick migraines, blood vessels bursting in his eyes from the pressure.

Kaia’s expression stilled. “That’s not a very macho admission.”

“You’ve seen me flat on my back in bed, a million wires coming out of my body,” Bowen said with a shrug, though he could feel a dark flush creeping onto his cheekbones. “I figure that ship has already sailed far, far away.” Unfortunately.

“What was your hamster’s name?”

“Toric the Destroyer.”

A twitch of Kaia’s lips. “Did you ever get another hamster?”

Bo deliberately forked up a bite of food, took his time chewing then swallowing. “No. Guess I grew out of it.” He’d buried Toric in his parents’ back garden and planted a tree over his small body.

That tree now provided a home for birds, and shade on a sunny day. And it reminded Bo of the boy he’d once been, a boy who’d held long conversations with his pet about the best way to lay siege to the ogre’s castle in his favorite game. That boy seemed a mirage of the past now. A ghost who had never really existed.

“No, you didn’t.” Kaia looked at him with a disturbing intensity. “You were too sad to get another pet.”