His fingers clenched on her hips, his body beginning to stiffen. She increased her pace, ready to watch him go over, but her lover was a master at strategy. He put his hands on her breasts and squeezed her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers, jolting her beyond the edge in the instant before he fell.

Chapter 44

Mama and Papa won’t wake up.

—Kaia Luna (7) to Geraldine Rhys

KAIA LAY ON top of Bowen, their clothing set to rights but their hearts pumping and their breaths short. He had one arm around her back, the other folded under his head, a big warm male pillow with more than one hard edge.

Unbuttoning his shirt to expose the warmth of his skin, she spread her hand on him with a sigh. He didn’t have any chest hair, though the last time they’d been in bed she’d discovered a trail lower down on his abdomen. As he’d discovered so many exquisitely sensitive places on her own body.

“Someone’s coming,” he murmured.

Kaia had already heard the low-voiced conversation of a couple on a walk, been lazily ignoring it. “They won’t see us if we stay quiet and motionless.” It helped that she’d chosen a bench in a pool of liquid night created by the dimmed lighting as Ryūjin settled into sleep.

Station dwellers all worked different shifts, but they tried not to lose complete touch with the surface world. It made meetings and research cooperation difficult if the Ryūjin scientists were on a divergent sleep cycle. As a result, the entire station went “dark” for about four hours a night.

She continued to pet Bo as they lay there. He didn’t stop her exploration, not even when she traced the scars above his heart, where the surgeons had gone in. She’d seen the bullet scar on his back, too. The impact site had, ironically, suffered almost no damage; it was inside him that the designed-to-fragment bullet had devastated.

Those, however, were far from the only scars on his body. “What’s this from?” She rubbed a faint ridge on his lower abdomen as Hex came over to curl up in the warm spot between Bowen’s shoulder and neck.

“Security op when I was young. Stealing back data a Psy business had stolen from a human one. I didn’t dodge a knife-wielding ninja fast enough.”

Kaia laughed softly. “A knife-wielding ninja?”

“Fine, you’ve tortured the truth out of me,” he grumbled. “An explosive detonated early, blew a piece of shrapnel into my gut—looks and sounds bad but it didn’t perforate any internal organs, just my pride.” Despite his scowling words, his eyes were closed and he lay boneless against the grass, akin to one of the changelings who liked being stroked. A cat, maybe. Or perhaps a wolf. Maybe even a creature like Kaia. Or maybe he was simply being human.

Kaia had known a great many humans as a child, her mother and father defiant adventurers who wanted to save the world. So foolish, so wonderfully hopeful. So deeply betrayed by the very people they’d fought to help. “If only my parents could’ve known I’d one day exchange skin privileges with a human under the moonlight.”

Bowen ran his fingers through his hair. “Would you be struck from the family tree?”

Kaia smiled. “No. My parents were rebels—they didn’t believe in BlackSea’s isolationist policies. They’d be happy I no longer see humans as a monolithic group. My mama and papa taught me to judge each individual person on their own actions.” But the child she’d been, scared and angry and grieving, had forgotten that lesson.

“Why were you so angry toward humanity?” Bowen asked softly. “It had to do with more than Hugo’s dossier, didn’t it?”

No smile on her face or in her heart now. “My parents fell ill from a virus running red-hot through a human township.” Her mother had been working in the township’s run-down clinic to stem the tide of illness, while her father had driven emergency supplies in and out—Kaia herself had been enrolled in the local school, but her father would pick her up after school and she’d ride with him.

“Why blame humanity for a virus?”

“I didn’t blame them for the virus. I blamed them for not giving my parents the medicines they needed.” Even so young, Kaia—the child of a doctor—had known Elenise and Iosef shouldn’t be dumped in the corridor without even the most rudimentary line of fluids going into their bodies.

Bowen crushed her closer to the hard heat of him. “Corruption?”

“Certain people pulled strings to get their families seen to first, even though they weren’t critical like Mama and Papa—and even though my parents had done more to help than any of them.” Her face went all hot as it had done when she’d been a small girl afraid and suddenly without the voices of the two people who were her world. “They left my parents on stretchers in the corridor, on dirty sheets.”

Scalding wet burned the backs of her eyes. “I ran back to our small home to get them blankets, but someone had broken in, taken everything.”

“Ah, baby.” Bowen’s free hand coming around to cup the back of her head, his mouth pressing a kiss to her hair. “How old were you?”

“Seven.” Scared and alone in a distant land. “We didn’t have a built-in comm and the thieves took the organizers. My mother should’ve had a phone in her pocket, but it was gone by the time I found them on the stretchers—after my father didn’t come to pick me up from school.” She’d run over to the clinic with a friend who lived close to it, figuring he’d been held up and she’d sit in her mother’s office.

“I want to kill the bastards who did that to you.” Bowen’s muscles rock hard under her, around her.

“I finally found a nurse who’d worked with my mother and she snuck me into the supervisor’s room so I could use the clinic’s single comm to call my aunt.” Her parents had made sure she memorized a list of emergency call codes. “BlackSea airlifted my parents to one of our own clinics, but even with how fast the clan responded, it was too late. If they’d had the medicines in time . . .”

Kaia had sat and watched their chests rise and fall because of the machines and she’d willed them to wake up even knowing it was far too late. “I began to hate humans the day my mother and father stopped breathing.”

“I’m sorry, Siren. I can’t blame you for it.” His exhale was rough, his hold warm and strong. “I ran on hate against the Psy for a long time.”

That he understood and didn’t judge her for her pain-fueled anger, it meant everything. “What changed?”

“A little Psy girl in the street who rushed to pull a kitten to safety when it would’ve tumbled into a canal, Ashaya working so hard to build a shield for humans, empaths helping to heal broken human minds, the old Psy woman at the grocery store who carefully adds up her purchases before going to pay . . .”

Another kiss pressed to her hair. “The adult me knows not all Psy are powerful or wealthy or ruthless. I see them struggling to survive same as humans and changelings. But even then, I can’t forget what the Psy as a group have done to humanity over the centuries.”

Kaia petted his chest. “It’s hard, isn’t it?” To forget. To forgive.

“You’re stronger than me, Kaia. Thank you for not kicking this human to the curb.”

She smiled, and it was shaky. “Some things are inevitable.”

Even when they were the worst possible choice for a woman.

Kaia was a cook in an undersea station for a reason. It was safe. People didn’t get shot going about their business. And because strangers couldn’t easily come or go, the station wasn’t exposed to potentially devastating diseases. As she’d learned as a child, while changelings were tough, they weren’t immune to deadly pathogens. Should there be an outbreak on land or even in the floating city above, the station could be sealed; at least some of her friends and family would survive.

She wouldn’t, once again, lose everyone she most loved in a single horrific event.

Bowen Knight wasn’t safe, would never be safe. The woman who called him her own would have to accept that each and every day of her life. Kaia’s scarred heart didn’t have that capacity—it was as well that was a road she wouldn’t be asked to travel . . . because Bowen would leave her one way or another.

To the surface, she thought fiercely, she’d lose him to the surface and to the land that was a nightmare she could never again face. Her world was the deep and the ocean close to Ryūjin, and, very rarely, Bebe’s isolated little island with its five palm trees and two fruit trees amid rocks and sand.

Kaia hadn’t walked on inhabited land since she was seven years old.

Chapter 45

We’re heading to Ryūjin. Apply for leave.

—Edison Kahananui to his brothers Armand, Teizo, Tevesi, and Taji

“I HAVE TO go.” Kaia’s voice twined around Bo in the darkness, the sadness in it tempered by the warmth of who she was at the core: a caretaker.

. . . all that girl knows how to do is love.

Bebe was right; love was at the core of Kaia’s psyche. Which made her terrible loss as a child even harder to think about. From “the three Lunatics” to a single lonely girl. Rolling them over so that she was below him, Bo nuzzled at her nose in the way she’d done to him when they were alone and in bed, and he silently called himself a selfish bastard for being unable to let her go even when he knew the scars that marked her.

“Are you sure?” he asked with another nuzzle.

Her smile was a glow. “I have to wake up in a few hours to bake pastries. I promised the children.”

And his Kaia was a woman who kept her promises. “I’ll walk you to your room.” Rising to his feet, he held out a hand and tugged her up. Then, bending, he scooped up Hex and placed the mouse in his front pocket.

When Kaia slipped her hand in his and swung their clasped hands back and forth, Bowen’s blood surged with a youthful joy he hadn’t felt since before that bloody day in the barn. He felt old more often than not. A man burdened with a thousand worries, his entire adult life spent attempting to put humans on the chessboard on an equal footing.