Chapter 10

Luna was still shaken up when she left work three hours later. Kai turning up at the warehouse, demanding to know why she’d entered the games, and worse, calling her out on her run from their date—no, fuck that. Don’t call it a date, it was a hook-up.

Face it, the look of hurt in his eyes had thrown her far more than she wanted to admit.

Luna walked faster, trying to erase all thoughts of Kai.

As she made her way to the mouth of the river to meet Marrick, she kept looking behind her. What if he’d followed her? What if he saw her working on her technique as she floundered in the mud? Then she wouldn’t look so damn cool, would she?

Why shouldn’t he watch you? You took illicit photos of him.

A pang of shame coiled in her gut. Hell. She was entitled to hate kraken kind. They’d murdered her family in cold blood. Left her hanging onto a broken plank. Left her to die. She winced as memories of that day flashed in front of her eyes, clear as a movie clip, imprinted on the very cells of her brain. The aftermath was blurrier, but she did recall an albatross swooping, taking her in its big claws and carrying her to its nest on a cliff face. It had fed her, horrible wet fish from its beak, but it had kept her alive.

And finally, when it had dropped her outside a tumble-down house in the marshes weeks later, she’d been strong enough to knock on the door of Edith Bloomnick. Edith was a miserly, bad-tempered human who lived out here, one of a bare few that had gotten stranded after shipwrecks and the like. Outcasts from the human world, mistrusted by the monsters of Motham. Shadow people.

One thing at least bound them together: Edith hated kraken too. Once, when she’d drunk too much ale, she told Luna she’d lost her fisherman husband to a kraken raid. It had helped Luna to feel they had something in common, even if she received no love from Edith.

If you hated enough, Luna realized, you had a reason to keep on living.

So there it was…

She hated kraken. And she hated Kai. And she had to hold on to that, the way she’d hung on to that plank of wood when her parents drowned, and Tomas disappeared in the tentacles of one of their vile kind.

And if her flashbacks helped to keep her strong, determined… so be it.

Fixing her gaze on the cobbled pavers, she slowed her breathing until the flashbacks passed, then glanced behind her once more.

If that kraken followed her here, she’d… she’d stab him in the eyes with her fingers.

And then you’d fucking jump his bones.

Cursing under her breath, Luna broke into a run. Truth was, seeing Kai had been such a shock it had ripped through her armor somehow, exposing her soft underbelly. Made her feel stuff she didn’t want to feel.

Damn it. She’d wanted to hurt him. Who cared if he was hurt?

Focusing on her breath, she picked up her pace, the thoughts receding as she ran, harder, faster, until all that was left was the burn in her lungs.

Finally at the river mouth, she stopped, panting hard, and bent over, hands on her knees, to catch her breath. Straightening, she sighed with relief as she saw Marrick standing near the mud flats. But, oh. Her pulse sped up again. Who was with him?

Harper and… Noah.

Luna groaned.

She had said it was okay for Harper to bring him, and she guessed if she was going to have an audience while she repeatedly fell flat on her face in mud, then she couldn’t wish for two sweeter folk, but she felt so… raw. Like her skin had been torn off. When she was like this she didn’t want to be around people, even friends.

She steadied herself. Pinned back her shoulders and took a deep breath, before calling out and waving with a big fake grin plastered to her lips.

In barely a week she would be fighting the kraken she’d fucked.

Right now, she needed all the support she could get.

“Nooooo. Marrick, you bastard!” Luna shouted.

It was half an hour later and she was covered in mud from head to toe. It stung her eyes, it squelched between her toes and matted her hair, and her only consolation was that Marrick was pretty much covered too.

She heard Harper squeal from the shore. “Go, Luna, you’ve got this.”

She was caught in the crook of Marrick’s arm, but thanks to the slipperiness of the mud she somehow freed her elbow and shoved it hard into his jaw. She heard the snap of her funny bone, felt the pang of the nerve tingling all the way down her arm, and with a howl he loosened his grip, just enough for her to wriggle free. She plopped into the mud, almost losing her balance, then righted herself and dived for freedom. He was after her in a second, grabbing her leg, and she fell, her mouth filling up with acrid slimy mud, but she kicked hard, and made contact with another sickening crack to his jaw.

“Fuck!” she heard Marrick bellow.

No room for sympathy; he’d nearly dragged her into the dungeon.

She made another strange hop/dive, clumsy in the ankle-deep mud, and reached the parameter, a piece of rope they’d slung over a rock as a makeshift boundary to the ring. It wasn’t the real deal, but it was good enough. After four years, in which Marrick had been dragged into the dungeon by Acha, they could simulate a pretty good mock-up.

Luna pumped a victorious fist in the air, panting as she held onto the rope to stop herself from slithering back into the mud.

Marrick was smoothing the mud off his jaw and moving it from side to side. She could see where her body had made contact, it was already swelling.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

“Don’t be. You did good. That second whack with your foot was what finished me. I saw fucking stars. You were on fire.”

“Thanks. But at the end of the day, we have four limbs, and they have eight.”

“And you have the dexterity and slither of an eel. Don’t forget that.”

“I’ve been working out with hoops at home.” Yeah, sometimes for hours, doing jobs around the house with that damn plastic hoop circling around her waist and hips to improve her ability to wriggle. That and her swimming underwater, the techniques that allowed her to hold her breath for longer.

Truth was, she was as good as she was going to get.

And she had another advantage. The photos of those damaged tentacles. “Marrick, I—have to tell you something…”

“Yeah?”

“Er…” She stalled, unable to bring herself to do it. Finally, she shrugged and muttered, “Just, you know, I don’t say thank you often enough. But thank you. For all your help. For believing in me,” she finished gruffly.

“Don’t go soft on me, moon girl.” Marrick laughed.

After they’d washed off in the clearer water upstream, and put their clothes back on, Harper and Noah came bounding over. Harper hugged her. “Yuck, that mud stinks, eh?”

“Yep, not the best. I need to go home and have a real good wash.”

“Why don’t you come and eat at the café?” Harper urged. “It’s my night off. Half price mate’s rates.”

“Good idea,” Marrick said. “We could go to the club first, get cleaned up and then get a bite to eat with these guys.”

Luna shook her head. She couldn’t face being with people tonight. Sometimes the effort to maintain social interactions exhausted her. Always checking in, trying to stay on top of the emotional and social cues. She sometimes wondered if she was made this way or whether it was because she’d grown up without affection, without touch.

What would it be like to get close to someone, really close? To be cared for, nurtured? Somewhere inside her she remembered a mother’s gentle touch, her father sitting her on his knee as they navigated across the ocean. Kissing her baby brother’s soft, sweet-smelling cheek. But it was like another Luna.

These days, she had to brace herself for the touch of others, unless she was fighting.

Or fucking.

Gods, she was a weirdo for sure. That’s what Edith had constantly told her. “You’re a weird little critter, aren’t you? Ugly little thing too.”

So many mean things Edith had said to her, as Luna had worked her fingers raw, cleaning house, selling shell pots at the fairy bazaar on weekends, cooking meals—all the things Edith was too lazy to do herself. Really, she had just been Edith’s slave for her whole childhood, in return for a crust of bread and a hard bed to sleep on.

“We could go back to my boat, if you prefer.” Noah’s words pulled her back to the present. His eyes were kind. He got that she didn’t want to go out. Such a nice selkie, so rare in Motham—most of them were complete shysters. “I could cook up some fish I caught earlier today.”

Luna’s mouth watered. “Tempting, but no, thanks. It’s been a long day and I need to sleep.”

Ha, sleep. That was something she didn’t do well either. Because of the dreams. The nightmares.

But she didn’t tell anyone about them. Didn’t get help. Therapy. What a total waste of time that would be, even if she could afford it. Talking wouldn’t bring her parents back or help her find Tomas, it would just open the wounds deeper.

Harper pulled a sooky face. “We want to look after you this week, make sure you’re okay, babe.”

“You stocked up my fridge. Thank you, that’s more than enough.”

Luna had been touched when Harper and Noah had turned up two days ago with bags of food and filled her cupboards and fridge. “Let me know when you need more. We don’t want you to have to worry about feeding yourself for the next couple of weeks,” Harper had explained.

She didn’t deserve their friendship.

What did she ever give back? To them? To anyone?

All she did was train, train, train.

And if she won… and managed to get the kraken to tell her the truth about that night.

If she found out that Tomas was dead.

What would give her life purpose after that?