CHAPTER TEN
Chase
The waves were trash.
I stood at the edge of the wet sand with my hands on my hips and a pair of polarized lenses sliding down my nose and watched the Atlantic do absolutely nothing for the third hour in a row.
A break that you wouldn’t paddle out for if you were a tourist, much less if you were an athlete who had a contractual obligation to perform on it in front of live cameras.
Tanner whistled, low and unimpressed.
“Glad I came all the way from Cali for this,” he remarked, flopping back onto the sand.
I couldn’t disagree with him. This was pathetic, and a waste of my fucking time. A sea lion shifter could have told you these waves were terrible, and that was saying something.
Did being a shark shifter give me an unfair advantage in surfing? Debatable. When I was in my human form, my strength came purely from hours at the gym and in the water on a board. Good old-fashioned dedication and more meals of rice and chicken than I wanted to count.
But even fully human, I could still feel the ocean, feel it whisper to me—which I was pretty sure wasn’t what normal humans felt.
Was that an edge? Maybe. But so was a personal trainer, more expensive carbon-fiber surfboards, and personal chefs, which I never saw nepo babies complaining about.
But human or shark, these waves were trash.
“I’m going for a run.” I brushed the sand from my shorts more aggressively than was necessary.
“Going to film some thirst traps, more like,” Tanner muttered from beneath the arm slung over his face.
That wasn’t a bad idea. Better use of my time than sitting around here.
I turned the cap I was wearing around, flipped him off, and headed down the beach at a jog.
It wasn’t long before I came across one of those public workout areas. This one was half-decent, with a set of rings, various bars, and, most importantly, a clean rubberized floor.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, deciding what today’s content was going to be. Maybe one of those half-push-up, half-dance videos to a trending song. That sounded like a lot more brainpower than I was willing to extend right now.
Maybe today was just a hold-a-plank-until-failure-and-moan type of day. Maybe add a few hip pulses if I was feeling it. I always loved the comments the ladies left under those videos. These women were feral, and that was coming from a guy who was literally the apex predator of the ocean.
I was still scrolling for a song when I felt I was being watched.
Not by a person. The beach was mostly empty this far from the main stretch on a Wednesday.
I was being watched by a bird.
A one-eyed seagull, standing approximately four feet away on the rubber matting, regarding me with the focused, judgmental energy of a personal trainer.
A mean one.
I looked at it.
It looked at me.
I went back to scrolling.
It took three steps closer and Ilooked up again.
“You good?”
It tilted its head.
