Page 27 of Queen Takes More
Alone. Always alone.
It was hunger for companionship that drove me back to Undina’s nest. I ached for home. Someone to talk to. A blanket in the corner of a storage shed. It didn’t have to be much.
But I couldn’t cross the blood circle.
Her own child, carrying her blood, but forbidden to cross into her nest. Bound from the safety of home.
That awful finality had filled me with rage, freeing the kraken inside me once more, and yes, I demolished everything I could lay tentacles on. I tore up the beaches. I destroyed the fishing grounds and broke the ships into kindling. I leveled every tree on the island that wasn’t inside the circle.
The sea rose to my call. Giant waves pounded the shoreline, flooding inside the nest where I couldn’t cross. A child’s temper tantrum… in the body of a giant sea monster.
When I finally shifted back to my human form, I’d been consumed with guilt and horror. People had died because of me. Our nest had suffered irreparable damage. Even as a boy, I’d recognized that it would take years for the fishing grounds to recover and the fleet to be rebuilt.
So I’d agreed to be caged to protect them. They locked me in a cave on a reef that flooded with salt water at high tide. I learned how to stay in the kraken form—simply to stay alive. The bars were blessed with Undina’s magic and etched with runes to keep me contained. They worked, even when I transformed to the kraken.
My family was safe. That was all that mattered.
When Undina came to see me years later, I snapped back to my human form so quickly that I was left shaking and weeping on the rocks. I’d thought she was freeing me. Maybe she’d missed me, or had second thoughts about imprisoning me. Maybe she could love me. Just a little.
Instead, she’d given me to Marne Ceresa, and the last bit of hope I’d ever known had withered up and died. Until my queen freed me from the bottom of that cramped cage and willingly gave me her blood.
I still didn’t know why she’d called me as Blood. I would have helped her against the queen of Rome even if she’d left me at the bottom of the pool. I certainly didn’t know why she’dkeptme.
Nor why she’d freed me now.
But I couldn’t resist the call of the sea. Cold bottomless depths. Pressure building as I sank like a stone into its salty embrace. I could stretch out my tentacles as far as I wanted, flattening my giant body out to slow my descent. No iron bars. No magical bindings to chain me. Only the whisper of my queen’s bond in my head, her sweet promise that she’d be waiting.
Waiting for me.
Even here in these ocean depths, I could feel her. A shining beacon filtering down through miles of dark water. A sweeter call than any legendary siren.
My queen. She’d saved me. She’d freed me. And now… she called me.
Home. To her.
I shot upward effortlessly, parting endless blue until my head broke the surface of the water. Her grotto steamed around me, making my kraken hiss and draw up tightly into a squirming ball of tentacles.
Fuck. I’d forgotten to shift as I neared the surface.
And now that I was here…
I couldn’t find my control. I couldn’t concentrate. My mind crackled and sparked like a massive lightning storm on the horizon. I was grotesque. She hadn’t given me permission to shift. A powerful, formidable queen might use such a creature to defend her nest, but she couldn’t possibly want tokeepme as Blood. Not her. I’d seen how she loved them. I’d seen her feed them and touch them and hold them…
And damn me to the Mariana Trench because I wanted her love too. Even knowing how impossible that foolish longing was.
Shara Isador sat on the rocky ledge, dangling her legs in the steamy water. Smiling. Even when one of my tentacles flopped out completely against my control and brushed her ankle.
She didn’t flinch away. She didn’t close her eyes and shudder. She didn’t turn away or call one of her Blood…
Looking around quickly, it finally dawned on me.
Even the big alpha wasn’t present. He’d actually left his precious queen alone. With a monster.
With me.
“Amazing.” She reached down and swirled her fingers in the water. My tentacles writhed in bliss as the tiny ripples of her touch cascaded through the water to me. “I can feel how much cooler the water is, and it tastes salty. Hopefully it doesn’t kill the tree or the vegetation.”
She looked at me, head tilted, as if she expected me to answer. Even though she hadn’t asked a question.
