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“I brought your pants,” I said softly, dropping my boots in the sand.
Kai’s face was red-hot when he looked up—and not the cute pink blush he sometimes got, no. This was seriously pissed-off shark-man red.
He took a measured breath and yanked the pants up. “Thanks.”
I plopped down on the sand to pull on my boots while he jerked them up his legs. Silence stretched through the air. And then stretched some more.Damn, even the gulls were uncharacteristically quiet.
Laverne had succeeded in her mission, it seemed.
The mood was thoroughly killed, and now we were both damp and freezing, fully clothed yet lingering in the sand without reason.
A splash in the distance caught my attention, and I looked up to see Laverne’s snout driving into the water like she was a bear trying to snatch salmon from a stream. Maybe that was how sea lions normally hunted, or maybe she was taking her frustrations out on the poor fish.
“So, she calls you Big Brother? That’s kind of cute.”
“Yeah,” Kai said after a pause, his voice still rough with emotion. “Freechia called me that since she was little. She and Laverne used to be inseparable.”
“Freechia’s your sister, right?” Had Laverne wanted her harem bad enough to leave her best friend behind? “She didn’t want to come here with you?”
Kai’s mouth clamped shut. Lines of pain furrowed his face, and I knew at once I’d asked something I shouldn’t have.
“I’m so sorry. It’s none of my business. I don’t know why I—”
“It’s just hard to say it out loud.” His head shook, his chin casting down to the sand. “After the curse, Freechia, she—Well, I was supposed to be watching over her. I was the only brother she ever listened to. She was my responsibility, my father always said, and he was right. He’s always right. She didn’t listen to anyone else. But when the curse hit…”
Kai was breaking, tearing apart just by saying the words. All his energy and joy for life was crumbling in front of me, and there was nothing I could do or say to take his pain away. I leapt up to put an arm around his shoulders, and he fell into my embrace. “I should have been with her, but I’d let her go off on her own, and—” He stared down, haunted. “We never found her.”
“I’m so, so sorry, Kai. That’s horrible.”
“That’s why I came here,” he whispered, his lilac eyes clamping shut like he was desperately trying to hold all the pieces of himself together. “When I heard the Atlantic had captured a mermaid who could still use her tail, well, the rest of my family thought it was crazy of me to come here. That it couldn’t possibly be Freechia. But who wouldn’t do something crazy for their family? I’d goanywhereto get her back, doanythingto find her.”
My heart broke for him. He’d come here looking for his sister and found me instead. Yet somehow, he’d still managed to smile for me on that first day we’d met.
Even though I wasn’t what he was looking for, he still fed me and laughed with me, and actually, truly cared. “You have to know it isn’t your fault. You didn’t cause the curse, and even if you had been there, you would have been a fish, too.”
Kai pulled away, silencing me with a firm shake of his head. “It would have been different. If I was there, I could have protected her.”
My lips fell into a frown. He truly believed it was his fault Freechia was missing? He had no way of knowing when the curse would happen or even that the cursewouldhappen, yet here he was, torturing himself.
Kai took a breath and looked up, his eyes landing on the spot where Laverne was still chasing down unseen fish in the water. “Laverne would never admit it, but that’s why she came along, too. She’s always been like a sister to me, but Freechia and Laverne… They meant the world to each other.”
I looked out at the ocean and nodded, too, seeing Laverne in a new light. “I’m so sorry, Kai. About all of it.”
If I’d thought his smile had been honest, his frown was more so. Stripped down and brittle, he looked vulnerable enough that one careless touch, one wrong word, might just destroy him.
“I wanted to tell you, but I just didn’t know how.” He eased in another breath, and then all his pain, his hurt, was gone. His hand shot up in the air, and it was like a switch had forced itself back on. Kai’s voice carried across the beach, loud and excited, his lips wobbling as they curled at their corners. “Yo, Barren! Hey, man, we’re down here!”
32
Claira
“Whoa, heavy duty.” I pulled two harpoons from the back seat and examined their sharp, forked ends. “These are great. How did your friend find them?”
I eyed the woman—er, mermaid? She wasn’t acting particularly friendly toward Barren, but I couldn’t think of anything else to call her.
She’d pulled up not even five minutes after Barren had called us back up to the hotel. Idling outside the lobby doors like an underpaid courier waiting to deliver a package, she held her lips together as tightly as she gripped the steering wheel of her Mustang convertible.
Maybe she was a courier—though how she’d gotten her manicured hands on a couple of fishing harpoons so fast was anyone’s guess.
