Page 3 of Heart of the Deep

What really happened while you were here, Randall?

“So, what’s the plan?” Jason asked. “Cyrus said these things were strong.”

“Nets and tranquilizers,” Larkin said. “We want them alive for questioning.”

“They really talk?”

“Based on Ranger Taylor’s report, they are fully capable of conversation.”

“He seemed to be of the opinion that the creature he encountered talked too damned much,” her father added before finishing off his stew. He placed his bowl and spoon on the table, wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, and met Larkin’s gaze. “It doesn’t matter what they say. You follow my orders. Understood?”

Larkin frowned. “Haven’t I always?”

Nicholas matched her frown, but the set of his brows suggested annoyance. “You know what I’m talking about. Now, more than ever, I need your head in this game. We don’t have room for sentimentality.”

She pressed her lips together. Larkin had worked just as hard as any of the rangers, if not more so, to prove she was as capable as anyone. She’d been Nicholas’s second in command for years, had remained loyally at his side even after he’d given Randall command of his own team, and she could outshoot any man here.

But her father would always see her as a little girl with too soft a heart.

Appetite gone, she pushed her half-eaten bowl forward, scooted her chair back, and stood. “I have followed every order you have ever given me,commander. I will do my duty.”

“I don’t appreciate your tone,ranger,” he replied, “and I did not dismiss you.”

Larkin clenched her fists at her sides. “Permission to be dismissed, sir.”

For several seconds, he wore the hard, angry face of the commander, the man who had led the Culver Hunters since she was a little girl. A man who was to be respected and feared, who did not tolerate slights. But his eyes softened; most men wouldn’t hold his gaze for as long as Larkin. Most men would never see the cracks.

He finally nodded, looked down, and waved her away. “I want everyone loaded up to depart at dawn.”

Larkin caught Jason’s smirk as she turned away from the table. The rude gesture she offered in response left him choking on his stew.

She held onto her sliver of satisfaction as she made her way into the back room. Several other rangers were already bedding down; some would have to wake in a few hours for their watch shifts. She wove between their pallets to the curtained area at the rear of the room. Her father had set it up to allow Larkin and the handful of other female rangers some degree of privacy.

Thankfully, the other women hadn’t yet retired.

Larkin kicked off her boots, positioning them against the wall. She pulled her knife from her belt, slipped it under her pillow, and looped the belt over her boots. Ignoring the snoring from beyond the curtain, she stripped down to her tank top and underwear.

She sat on the pallet and rubbed her hands over her face before taking hold of her braid and pulling it forward. Her fingers brushed through its tip as she stared down at it.

“Where are you, Randall?” she asked softly. An ache flared behind her breastbone. Releasing her hair, she lay back on her pallet, folded her hands over her stomach, and stared up at the ceiling. Randall’s absence was a physical pain she couldn’t shake. She missed him,fearedfor him, but he wasn’t dead. She wouldn’t believe that.

“I’ll find you. I promise.”

Chapter 2

Agrowl was the only warning Dracchus received before tiny teeth sank into one of his tentacles. He twisted his torso to look down at the youngling gnawing on his limb — Jace, Aymee and Arkon’s offspring.

Jace scrunched his nose and growled again. The other younglings giggled.

“He got you, Uncle Dracchus!” Sarina’s face was lit up in triumph. At a year and three months old, she was Jace’s elder by less than half a year, but every week made a difference for rapidly developing kraken younglings.

Her birth had been a memorable event; her parents, Jax and Macy, were a kraken and a human. She’d looked so strange despite her many similarities to her kraken brethren. Her hair and nose were unique among their kind — or had been, until Jace.

One look into Sarina’s bright green eyes after her birth and Dracchus had been caught.

He’d never spent much time around younglings before Sarina. Now he seemed to be surrounded by them constantly.

“He’s pretending to be Ikaros again,” Melaina laughed. She was the eldest of the three children present at seven years old, and looked more and more like her mother, Rhea, with each passing month.

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