Page 60 of Song of the Abyss

“There are parts of me that can help you.” He cleared his throat. “It won’t hurt very much, but it will feel strange.”

She struggled to pull away from him, but he didn’t let her. He couldn’t. If he thought for a moment he was hurting her, then he wouldn’t be able to do this.

Biting his lip, he whispered again, “I promise it won’t hurt.”

She wriggled, but he held onto her with his short arm while he lifted the tentacle to her neck. He would make sure she could breathe. That was all he could do for her as they fled from this dying building.

Anya stiffened in his arms as the cord slid into her throat. He could feel the seal was good. They were connected. More than he had ever hoped to be connected to her because right now, he was breathing for her. He drew them underneath the water, pressing a kiss to her lips as he carried her into the depths.

Low and resonating in the water, he murmured, “How I wish I could keep you. But I cannot. No matter how much I want to.”

22

Anya

Anya couldn’t stop touching the stinging wound on her neck. Not that it was that bad anymore. Now it was just a bruised sensation in her throat, but there was the very unnerving and strange feeling of someone else breathing for her.

The tentacle appeared to be some kind of tube that allowed his air to transfer into her lungs. Right into the cord of her throat that she normally would breathe out of, but now it was him doing it for her.

And how awful was that? The sensation was terrifying and so unnatural, and yet, here she was. Not struggling, even though she knew she could yank it out.

Like a loose tooth, she had a hard time focusing on anything else. There was a tube in her neck. Daios was breathing for her. They were under mountains of water, and if that tube jostled loose, she wouldn’t stand a chance at getting to the surface on her own.

His arm shifted around her back, and then he grabbed onto her elbow and pulled her hand away from the site where the tube was sticking underneath her skin. Apparently, she shouldn’t fiddle with it so much. She needed a distraction, or she was going to rip the damn thing out without thinking.

Taking a deep breath, she turned her attention to the words he’d said. What did he mean he couldn’t keep her? Anya kept her arm looped around his neck, hugging herself tight to the heat of his body as they moved through the sea.

While they were swimming, she found it hard to say anything at all. The sea ate away at her sanity in tiny little chomps, like they were surrounded by itty bitty deadly fish that wanted her to lose her mind. She hated how little she could see. She didn’t have the faintest idea where they were going, or even how he knew where they were headed.

He sure seemed confident, though. But she had a sneaking suspicion that was his superpower.

The longer she was around this strange man, the more she realized that about him. He looked at the world like it had something to give him. Daios took whatever he could from every interaction, every moment. She’d always been afraid to do that. But he just didn’t care. He took what he wanted, and he didn’t mind that others might not like that about him.

Anya wished, for just a few seconds, that maybe she could be like that too.

His arm tightened around her waist, maybe suspecting where her thoughts had gone, or just knowing that she needed him to. That strong arm bracketing around her back was more than enough to ease the anxiety rolling in her stomach. Maybe it shouldn’t be that easy.

On one hand, she realized she knew nothing about the man. Or his species. He wasn’t exactly a talker, and that certainly didn’t make it easier for her to know any of these things.

On the other hand, he seemed to know her intuitively. Every time she was nervous, he lit up those lights for her to count. When she was cold, he brought her in closer to his heat and made sure all her limbs were appropriately tucked into the warmest parts of himself. Even when she had her eyes open, he would look down at her like he knew she was looking up at him.

She didn’t know what that meant. They hardly knew each other, and yet, he knew her.

It was unsettling; she decided. Very unsettling.

But another voice whispered in her ear that this was what she had always wanted. She wanted someone who knew exactly what she needed. Just like she could do the same to him.

She could feel the moment they were getting close to their destination. He stiffened against her, every muscle in his body tensing with either anger or fear. She didn’t know which yet. He stopped as the water cleared in front of them, revealing a section of the ocean where a city had been swallowed by the sea.

It wasn’t much of a city, more like a town, she supposed. There were at least twenty buildings, all in various states of decay. But it was clearly a town where people had once lived before the sea levels had risen.

She’d seen a place like this before in research articles. A team of scientists from Alpha had come across a similar town. But this one looked like it had been underwater for much longer. Spears of sunlight glimmered through the water, highlighting the broken walls and the shattered glass that was barely visible in the sand that slowly took it all back.

But then her attention turned to something else.

A dome.

A small one, of course. Not even remotely close to the size of her city, but it was a dome just like Alpha. Clearly built by the same person who had designed her city. Even from this distance, she could see there were working lights within it. And there was another undine floating above it.

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