Page 141 of Bonetide

In fact, I think I’m exactly who I was always meant to be.

And what I want, is to get off with this monster fucking me to kingdom come.

“More,” I beg through a gasp, feeling emboldened, “I can take it.”

And so he gives me more, pumping deepening, faster, the water thrashing around us from the violence of our fucking.

I come around him with the drowned women pinning me in place and his black depthless eyes fixed on my face, and it tears through me harder than anything ever has, the worst thing and the best thing welded into one, and I hate how good it is, and I don’t stop, I can’t stop, there’s nothing left of the woman who had any sense.

She’s gone, and I’m not sure she’ll ever be back.

He feels me let go, and something moves through him, relief and triumph and that ancient thing all at once. The last of the light dies out of the sky so there’s nothing left to see but the faint unearthly glow of his own eyes.

“One more,” he commands, his voice is barely a voice now. “I want you to come with me where I belong. Hold your breath, foxglove.”

He takes me under.

Earlier, the water closed over my head, and it was the worst terror I have ever known, my own body stolen, the dark dragging me down to die with the wives’ hands soft and final on my legs.

But now, the same dark closes over me and it isn’t terror at all. He takes me down with his arms around me and himself still buried in deep and I go gladly, sinking into the black because it’s him, because somewhere in the last two weeks I have started to trust the creature that drowns women to drown me and bring me back.

The dead drift pale around us in the dark, held off, watching with their ruined faces. My lungs start to burn but I don’t fight it, I embrace the pain. I keep my eyes open and focused on his, the gleam of them reflecting the bruised sky above. They no longer feel like falling into a black hole because the water around us is the black hole, and that glint in his eye is the only light there is, shining like a beacon to lead me home.

He holds me down in his own element on his own terms and fucks me through the burn, claws at my back, and teeth at my throat, the size of him nearly splitting me open. Right at the edge of everything, life, death, right where the dark went soft and peaceful before, where I’d given up, I come again. And where the wives’ version was death, this is its exact opposite—this is being more alive than I have ever been, down here in the deep with the beast.

Then he brings me up.

Into the sweet air, the indigo sky, and I drag in oxygen in great, tearing pulls and cling to him, and he holds me. I feel the monstrousness ebb out of him by degrees. First, the claws go blunt against my back, then his teeth are safe again when his mouth finds my temple, and the eyes, when I dare to look, are draining back from ink toward that bright ice blue. The thing under the water is just his legs again, or near enough that I can pretend.

He’s just a man again.

But he’ll never be just a man again, not when I have made some peace in knowing the monster.

“There,” he says against my soaked hair, gentling now, the fear finally easing out of him, out of both of us. “There. You’re here. I have you.”

He carries me out of the bay, sets me down on a rock, and gathers my scattered clothes, draping them over me for warmth. Then he wraps his strong arms around me and gently places his chin on my crown. His hands keep returning to my face, my shoulders, the back of my neck, like he still has to keep proving I came back up with him.

I turn my head and glance over at the bay. So much blood and grief and fear in those waters, and somehow, we made something good out of it.

But if I wasn’t wary of the bay after seeing Sinclair get torn to pieces, I’m definitely wary now. As the glow of the orgasms and the adrenaline of our near-death coupling fades, I realize I’m scared. What the women did to me scared me. I felt the loch reach into me and take the wheel, and I felt my own hands undress me and my own feet walk me in to die, and I know now what I didn’t know an hour ago.

They want me.

And they can call me.

And I can’t say no.

Chapter

Twenty-Nine

Well, that was a day, was my second to last thought before I fell asleep last night, utterly exhausted from the day’s events, as if I ran a lot of errands and had a lot of appointments or something. You know, just your run-of-the-mill almost drowning by a bunch of dead women, followed by your run-of-the-mill fucking by the monster in the sea. Boy, that would tucker anyone out.

My last thought though, wasn’t so glib.

I have to fix this.

Because I do. Not just because I came close to dying at the hands of ghosts yesterday—ghosts that seem jealous of me because of Alasdair—I’m also close to being a suspect in a murder case. All because I let him in, and now the bargain is broken, and over time there will be nothing to stop Alasdair from becoming a monster forever.