“Good point,” Danny said.“But they’re going to need your help.”
“Fair enough,” Liam muttered, hopping to steady one of the victims as she stumbled.“Anything else I need to know?”
“You, uhm, do know how to swim, my boy, don’t you?”
Liam almost stumbled himself.“Why?Why do I need to know how to swim?Danny?”
“Just answer the question,” Danny soothed.“And then we know how to plan.”
Liam said, “Yes.Yes, I know how to swim.Why do you ask?”
And then he wished he hadn’t.
“NO,” FELIXsaid as together he and Danny abandoned their post of escorting the girls and left it in the volunteer’s capable hands.
“Fox, I need you to keep your wits about you—”
“I said no, you will not do this!”Felix cried, and Danny stopped as they were running and turned to cup Felix’s cheek.
God, he was still so beautiful, Danny thought as he examined his only love’s worried expression in the light from the electric lamps lining the dock.The high brow and Roman nose hadn’t changed from their first meeting, practically as teenagers.But Felix had grown into his features, looking leonine and regal and masterful.Twenty really was overrated to forty, Danny thought irrelevantly, and he’d always hoped to find out how forty was overrated to sixty and beyond.
He still hoped for that.
“I promised not to leave you,” Danny said softly.“I won’t willingly, you know that.”
“But he’s a monster,” Felix said, his voice sounding wobbly and young, when he’d always seemed the leader of the two of them.
“He is.”
“And you barely escaped last time,” Felix told him, as though the scars, heavy keloid, painful reminders along his rib cage, hadn’t been there for the last ten years to remind him.
“And he has our son,” Danny said.“And we promised none of our children were allowed to get hurt—but especially not that one.”
Felix caught his breath and nodded.“Do you even have a plan?”he asked.
Danny managed to pull himself from the fear of the moment and shake his head.“You, Julia, Leon—when, oh when, will you people stop underestimating me.”
Felix scowled, grabbed his hand, and kissed his palm.“Are you going to share?”he asked in irritation.
“Certainly,” Danny said.
In his ear, Stirling said, “Danny, they’re eight minutes out.”
“Good,” Danny said.“Now I need both of you to listen to me carefully.We can’t risk too much communication—we have no idea when he’s going to figure out we’re all mic’d.”
“Go, Uncle Danny,” Stirling said.
“Go, Danny,” Felix told him.
And while he and Felix strode to the upper parking lot of the dock itself, Danny spilled the plan while the enemy drew near.
“YOU UNDERSTANDwhat to do?”Chuck asked Molly.Liam had brought the last two girls down just as the others were disappearing through the emergency porthole Chuck had carved.After helping them through the hole and into the metal semi-sphere that they’d sealed to the curved bottom of the ship and then pumped dry, Chuck had squeezed through the hole, followed by Hunter, both of them trying not to grimace as their rather bulging biceps were scraped along the freshly melted edges.
Then Molly had slipped into the semi-sphere with far less trouble.
“Once the last of the girls is past the tunnel, I get the fuck out and turn off the pumps as I pass,” she said.“And yes, I can swim to the surface after that.”
“Hurry out of the water,” Chuck said.“After this thing catches fire, there’s no telling what will be in it, chemical wise, and we don’t need your hair to turn green.”
