Blood in the Water Read online

  The driver nodded. He pulled off the main road, and a few minutes later they were driving through an area Monroe had never seen. The houses were smaller here, and many had clotheslines stretched across the side yards. The buildings themselves were brightly painted and cheerful.

  She saw a few stray dogs, some kids playing with a soccer ball in a dusty field.

  The driver pulled into the parking lot of a store. He got out, but when Monroe went to open her door, it was locked.

  “Just a moment, ma’am,” said the man in the back seat.

  “I’m not a ma’am,” she said with a backward glance. “For the love of everything holy, call me Monroe.”

  He smiled, a brief flash of white.

  “And you are?” she asked.

  The driver opened her door from the outside and helped her out. It was embarrassing, and she was glad that the parking lot was mostly empty.

  “You don’t need to come in with me,” she said.

  “Probably not,” said the driver. “But we don’t want to disappoint Mr. Van Buren.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  At least they didn’t follow her down every aisle. They did a sweep of the store, then said they’d wait for her in the front.

  Shopping took every bit of an hour. She couldn’t read the packaging and had to keep calling for help. Literally. By the time she pushed the wobbly cart up to the register, she’d just about had enough of her little island adventure.

  She was tired of feeling helpless. Tired of being dependent on Koenraad. In New York, she’d been wholly self-sufficient.

  It’s temporary, she reminded herself.

  The driver took a different route back, one that ran down the main street of town. They were at the end when Monroe said, “Stop! Pull over.”

  As soon as the truck slowed, she was pulling at the door handle. “I need to get out,” she said, but he was already walking around.

  She hopped out and quickly jogged back the half a block, but Ralph was nowhere to be seen, and the real estate agency was closed, the lights off.

  “Damn,” she mumbled.

  She fumbled her phone out of her purse and dialed the number on the door. Of course she got the answering machine.

  “This is Monroe…” She paused because she and Koenraad were going to get married very soon, right? She suddenly remembered thinking how awful it would be if she took his last name. Her full name would sound like a list of American presidents. And now the pause was going on too long. “This is Monroe Tyler. I met Ralph a few times and it so happens that I’m looking for a job.” She left her number and hung up.

  She felt a little better. It wasn’t a job, or even a job offer… Hell, it wasn’t even an interview. But it was a first step toward getting some of her independence back.

  When she turned, she was disconcerted to see the bodyguards standing behind her, their faces impassive. Side by side, they were clearly related. They had the same cropped curly hair, the same strong noses, the same dimples in their cheeks. Even their ears were similar.

  And those black, black eyes…

  “Look, if you guys are going to follow me around everywhere, there need to be some rules. I want to know your names, and you have to call me Monroe. Otherwise I’m going to make your lives hell.” She pointed at the driver. “Name.”

  “Dunphy,” he said. He didn’t seem impressed with her little speech.

  “Theo,” said the other with a quick smile.

  She nodded. “Dunphy and Theo. Ok. I’m Monroe. And I think this will be a lot easier for me if you act like we’re friends.”

  “Excuse me?” Dunphy asked.

  “You know, don’t stand… like that.”

  He frowned, but he didn’t budge from his wide stance or his crossed arms.

  “Don’t be so conspicuous. People are staring, and I really don’t like that.”

  “But Mr. Van Buren—”

  “Forget him. Let me ask you something. If I tell him I’m uncomfortable with you, will he fire you?”

  “Probably not,” Theo said, but a hint of another smile tugged the corners of his mouth. “He just wants you to be safe, M—”

  “You’d better be about to say Monroe, not ma’am,” she said, shaking her finger at him. Now he was definitely smiling, and even Dunphy looked a tiny bit less like a hit man.

  “Understood, Monroe,” Dunphy said very properly.

  “Was that so difficult?” she asked. Even though she was turning to go back to the pickup, she still caught the look the men shot each other.

  Obviously she was going to have to talk to Koenraad about this.

  Her phone rang as Dunphy pulled onto the street. “Mom!” Monroe practically squealed.

  “What’s going on? Are you ok?” Her mother spoke quickly, nervously.

  “What? Yeah. I’m fine. Why would you think otherwise?”

  Her mother sucked in a breath. “For starters, you disappeared. Then you called me five times in an hour. What was I supposed to think? And where are you?”

  “Tureygua,” she said. “Didn’t you get my email?”

  She could practically hear her mom blinking in confusion. “I thought… I hoped that was a joke. What about your apartment? Your job?”

  Monroe swallowed. “I quit,” she said, and when her mother stifled a gasp, she felt even worse. “I know it seems crazy, Mom, but I met someone.”

  “Thomas?”

  “No, we broke up—”

  “When?”

  “Just before the wedding.” Yeah, this did sound crazy. “I met someone else. He lives down here, and we’re together, so I’m going to stay for a bit. Here. On the island.”

  “I don’t really know what to say,” her mother said. “This doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t you, Monroe.”

  “Everyone’s always telling me to be more spontaneous,” Monroe said with a weak laugh. She’d meant it as a joke, but her mother didn’t take it that way.

  “What you’re being is erratic,” her mother said. “You worked really hard to get that job, and you’re going to throw it away because you met some guy?”

  Monroe decided not to point out that being regional manager of a pet supply company wasn’t her dream career, and oh, yeah, she’d already quit so there was nothing to argue about. Her mother just wanted reassurance. “I’ve got a job down here. Real estate. It pays better.” She crossed her fingers as she said it and prayed lightning wouldn’t strike her dead.

  There was a sigh. “Help me understand, Monroe. Are you having a mid-life crisis? Who is this guy, anyway?”

  A mid-life crisis at twenty-six? But arguing would get her nowhere. “His name is Koenraad Van Buren, he’s an entrepreneur—”

  “Is that a euphemism for a scam artist?”

  “No!” Monroe said, horrified. “He’s quite wealthy, actually, not that it matters.” She sighed. “Why don’t you take tomorrow off? Call in sick to work or something. We can fly you down for a few days. He’d love to meet you, and I’m sure when you see us together, you’ll realize this isn’t as crazy as it sounds.”

  Her mother exhaled. “I’m absolutely going to come down there, and I’ll pay my own way.”

  “You’ll come tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yes,” her mother said, and her tone had an air of finality; she might as well have said, Damn straight I’m coming down, and I’m taking you back with me.

  Monroe hung up the phone. Dunphy had continued to drive the entire time, and she didn’t have a very strong data signal anymore, but it was enough to check her emails.

  She immediately wished she hadn’t. Her boss was pissed about being left in the lurch, Thomas wanted to know when they could have dinner, and Tara wanted to know what the deal with Spencer was because he’d taken her number but hadn’t called. And of course her mother was freaking out. As she scrolled through the messages and saw the progression from mild concern to controlled panic, she felt awful.

  She really was the worst daughter ever.

&nbs
p; Well, she was going to make sure her mother had an amazing time, even if that meant letting Koenraad pay for nice hotels and dinners and tours.

  If her mother didn’t like Koenraad for some reason…

  And then Monroe remembered the mating scars on her back. It would be impossible to hide them unless she wore a sweater all day.

  An email popped up, a flight confirmation from her mother. Monroe had never known her to do anything so quickly online. It was almost comical.

  The last of the signal bar faded from her phone screen, and a popup box alerted her that she had no data connection.

  She was almost happy about it.

  “Think the storm is gonna hit real soon,” Theo predicted from the back seat.

  Monroe peered out the window. It was definitely a little cloudy, but she’d seen plenty of afternoons like it since arriving on Tureygua, and she had yet to see a storm.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Theo said. “And it’s gonna be a nasty one.”

  Chapter 9

  Koenraad tried calling Monroe, but he went right to her voicemail. Now he regretted not giving phones to the bodyguards before he left.

  He knew she was safe. Theodore and Dunphy were two of the most trustworthy shifters he knew. They were absolutely lethal with their bare hands, and if a fight took place near water, even bullets wouldn’t stop them.

  But it would have been nice to connect with Monroe, to apologize in advance for being late. It would be a nice change from apologizing after the fact.

  He was at his mansion. He knew from experience that there was a path, mostly free of the sick, to Eden Underwater, and he could pick up a few more changes of clothes after he got back.

  He sent Monroe a text, telling her he should be back within a few hours. As he stripped off his clothes, he hoped he was right, that it wouldn’t turn into one of those days where he followed trails to dead end after dead end until well after midnight—or until the storm left him stuck deep in the ocean until the winds died down.

  There was a simple solution. If he couldn’t catch Brady’s scent, he’d leave. All he really needed to do was eliminate Brady as the attack shark. That was his goal. No blindly searching for hours in the hopes that he’d get lucky and stumble across his son.

  The reef where the attack had taken place was an easy, twenty-minute swim. Koenraad was careful, his senses alert. If the attack had been by a shifter who expected the Council to send someone to get him, then Koenraad wasn’t immune from an ambush.

  It would have been easier to swim deeper, but he needed to change depth frequently in order to expose himself to the maximum amount of water.

  To his relief, he reached Eden Underwater without catching even a hint of his son.

  It wasn’t difficult to find where the attack itself had taken place. The blood molecules were well diffused, but Koenraad was able to pinpoint the location without too much trouble.

  He swam in the area for a few minutes. He didn’t smell Brady. Didn’t smell any other shifter, either. Or any shark.

  Cursing the sick, he doubled the area he was scrutinizing. Then tripled it.

  There were simply no clues.

  Time to head home.

  He took a slightly different route back on the chance that he’d catch something. His mind was already on Monroe, on how they’d spend the night—in bed, the storm raging outside. He hated being apart from her, had hated it even before mating and claiming her.

  He was so deep in his thoughts that when he first caught Brady’s scent, it took him a moment to process it. He’d had Brady on his mind so much that he almost thought the scent was a memory that had pushed its way to the forefront of his mind.

  But no. Brady had been here. Recently.

  Very recently. The scent was overwhelming, and Koenraad knew that Brady was most likely still in the area.

  Every other thought fled from his mind. This was his chance. He could feel it. If he didn’t catch Brady now, he might not get another opportunity.

  His skin was on high alert, sensitive to anything in the water that might be Brady’s size. But he didn’t feel anything.

  As he circled, narrowing down the possible area Brady could be in, he wondered if the sick had interfered with his electroreceptors so much that they weren’t working. Kind of like how they hadn’t been working for Darius and Victoria when Koenraad had approached them in the water two days earlier.

  But that didn’t explain why he was able to sense other things: schools of fish, two sea turtles, jellyfish, a few small sharks.

  Try as he might, he just couldn’t feel Brady.

  But oh, he could smell him. At the moment, his son was surely within thirty feet of where Koenraad swam. The scents were so strong that they presented a vivid image in Koenraad’s mind. He hesitated, unsure what to do next.

  So he continued his desperate loop.

  Twenty feet.

  The sheer concentration was exhausting him. He sifted through every molecule of water. Had the sick screwed him up so badly…

  A dark shape flashed past him, and in an instant Koenraad gave chase. He wasn’t going to let his son get away again.

  It took an hour for him to herd the young shark back toward the inlet, but as determined as Brady was to keep his freedom, Koenraad was even more desperate to keep his son from harming and being harmed.

  And Koenraad had experience on his side. He’d patrolled the coasts of Tureygua for two years, and he’d learned a thing or three in that time.

  It was relatively easy to run Brady to exhaustion, but to be certain, Koenraad did it over and over again, pushing his son, forcing him to expend precious energy. Brady had to know what Koenraad had in mind, but he just wasn’t fast enough, nimble enough.

  Brady’s only advantage was in being smaller, and Koenraad knew how to use that against him, constantly setting up little opportunities for Brady to slip through his defense, then thwarting the move at the last second.

  Now for the difficult part. He needed to get Brady into the inlet, but the gate was closed. To open it, he’d need to shift human.

  But if he left Brady unattended for even a second, he’d muster up the energy to swim off.

  So Koenraad forced him right up to the gate.

  Brady’s movements were frantic, even more desperate. Koenraad knew they’d both have nightmares about this later, but failure wasn’t an option.

  When the boy was exhausted, Koenraad launched himself out of the water, shifted, then opened the gate just enough for Brady to enter.

  In a flash he was back in the water. Brady had fled, but he hadn’t gotten far. Koenraad drove him toward the gate, nipping at Brady’s caudal fin.

  When Brady saw the small opening, he practically flew through it.

  Koenraad shifted human and slammed the gate closed. He could see his son circling the inlet, his movements jerky.

  Koenraad would feed him in a minute. First he had to pull the top of the gate closed as well. Now the fact that the inlet was closed off was well visible to anyone standing on the beach or passing in the ocean. It didn’t matter. Brady wasn’t going to be in there very long.

  When everything was locked to Koenraad’s satisfaction, he dragged himself onto the beach. He was going to need a few hours of sleep to put himself back together, but that would have to wait.

  He grabbed his pants and shook them. The phone tumbled onto the sand.

  Exhausted, he leaned over to collect it. Brady was launching himself out of the water, then crashing back with loud splashes.

  Guilt almost drove Koenraad to his knees. Seeing his son like this, desperate, terrified, was intolerable. But the alternative was worse.

  Koenraad scrolled through his phone book until he found the number he wanted. He pushed the button and held the phone up to his ear.

  Brady was slamming against the gate.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice said.

  “This is Koenraad Van Buren. I have a shark I need removed
immediately.”

  “It’ll have to wait—”

  “No. Now. Money isn’t an object. I’ll triple your fee.” He watched as Brady hurled his body recklessly into the gate. “You’re going to need tranquilizers.”

  Watching Brady get drugged and loaded into the special truck was painful, and Koenraad found himself questioning, repeatedly, if he was doing the right thing.

  An hour later they were at the aquarium, Brady in a holding tank in the rear, and Koenraad was staying close until the tranqs wore off.

  Everyone else was gone. The aquarium had closed for the day, and the night employees had performed their jobs quickly so they could get home before the storm hit. As far as the employees were concerned, Brady was just a young white shark who’d been injured, and only the fictitious veterinarian listed on the file would be allowed to deal with him. The other employees would steer clear. The aquarium’s current owner had given Koenraad carte blanche without asking any questions.

  It was one of the advantages of being a Van Buren.

  Koenraad half-squatted against a wall that faced the enormous tank. It ran three-quarters of the size of the room, and was equally deep. There were plenty of fish and plants in there, and Koenraad just hoped Brady didn’t eat any endangered species.

  His fingers steepled in front of his face, he contemplated his next step.

  The most important thing was to keep Brady from harm. Maybe it was also the most difficult step. But he couldn’t leave his son in a watery prison forever, even if he wanted to, which he wholeheartedly did not.

  The truth was that white sharks couldn’t be kept in captivity, and at the moment Koenraad didn’t know if Brady was more shark than human. Great whites died in tanks. One hundred percent of the time. The clock was ticking. They had a week, tops.

  Brady wasn’t going to be here anywhere near that long.

  Koenraad pressed the tips of his fingers to the middle of his forehead and closed his eyes so he could better focus.

  He had two problems. First, Brady had attacked Monroe. Whether the young shark was responsible for aggressing the other humans was frankly irrelevant. If what Brady had done ever came out, he’d be put to death.