Page 44 of Whispers of the Deep

“Hurry, kairos,” he muttered.

She did no such thing. Mira picked up the robot and then turned to look around the cavern one last time. “It was fun living here, even if it wasn’t all that safe. I’ve never had an adventure like this before. Are you bringing me home now?”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he would never return her to the home of the achromos. She knew too much.

Mira would either die or stay with him for the rest of her life.

He watched as she strode over to the metal remains of her world and slapped her hand down on it. With a guttural groan, something stopped moving in the water and all the lights over their head flickered out. Suddenly plunged into darkness, she was the faintest outline in the distance, lit only by the warm yellow glow of the water where he waited for her.

As she came closer, he could see those bright yellow lights sparkling in her eyes like the rare glimpse of the sun on the surface of the sea. The determination in her eyes only made her all the more appealing. He didn’t even see those strange legs. All he saw was a woman who would fight the very sea itself, if that’s what it took to keep her alive.

That realization made the waters boil around him.

He reached out his hand for her to take, sucking in a sharp breath at the feeling of those strange fingers slipping around his. She didn’t flinch away from the webs between his, and he didn’t mind that she didn’t have them. This strange, fragile creature was a mixture of strength and aching delicacy that turned his mind into mush.

She let him help her into the water, gracefully sliding her legs into the depths before hissing in a sharp breath. “So cold.”

“I will carry you,” he murmured, wrapping one of his arms around her back and drawing her closer to him. “Let me keep you warm, Mira.”

A soft smile crossed her features before she yanked down the first of her face coverings. Magnified eyes stared up at him, blinking a few times and overly large. “Sexy, right?”

The translator she’d attached to his ear wasn’t helpful for the first word. But he could guess by the rounded sounds and the way she quirked her lips before putting the device over her mouth. And oh, it made all the colors in his body flare bright.

Was she... interested in him? Surely not. They were two very different species and that wouldn’t work. They didn’t fit.

But then she swam a little closer to him, wrapping her arms around his neck and slotting her feet back into the fins at his hips that were always a little warmer. Warm to keep his offspring safe should he wish to mate with someone. A position he was certain she did not know was so tempting that it made his hips buck forward.

“Sorry,” she muttered, the words muffled by the device over her mouth. “Let me just get situated.”

Any more situating and he’d be pressing something other than fins between her legs. Angry at himself, he grabbed onto her a little more forcefully than he’d anticipated. But then they were drifting underneath the water, and her fingers slid through the gills on his neck before he moved her arms away from them.

They both shuddered, and he allowed himself to pretend they shuddered for the same reason. Perhaps she was remembering that fateful first touch, when he’d arched into her fingers and she’d played with his gills. And he was thinking about the same thing.

But realistically, he knew she shuddered only because the water was icy.

So, dragging her scent through his gills and letting it play underneath his scales, he speared them out of the cave and into the waiting depths so quickly that no one else could follow them. Surely.

But he thought he heard her murmur something about red lights in the distance.

Seventeen

Mira

Mira had no idea the undines could swim this quickly. He moved like he was made of water, or like he could part it so that nothing hindered his path. Swimming had always felt like she was pushing against something, trying to move through the water rather than with it.

But the undine? Oh, he was part of it. He was the water, and the water was him.

With her toes tucked into his hip fins like he wore a saddle, she could almost imagine that she was born to this. And though she didn’t look like herself at all—the wetsuit wasn’t going to last forever—at the very least, she could pretend.

They soared on their journey, slicing through currents and speeding past all manner of creatures. It was almost impossible to watch all of it happen as they zipped on by. He moved so fast; it was like she had attached herself to a darting drone.

And she suspected this was slower than he’d liked to go. Though he had started with one arm around her waist, now he had the other arm underneath her bottom. Perhaps he didn’t realize that he cupped one of her ass cheeks rather possessively as they swam, or maybe he didn’t have any idea how intimate his touch was, but it certainly made her squirm.

His fingers were just a little too close for her to focus on anything else but where his touch heated. If he moved his thumb even the slightest, he’d brush against her core and she’d really wiggle then. He was handsome. She was interested in a strange way, and all of this was hard to think about.

Mira was a human.

Arges was an undine.

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