I push my fingers inside her and Ashley makes a little moan. Just this small sound should shove me into those feelings. It would be better to drown in them than die from this anger and frustration. But what I feel for her stays far out to sea. She keeps her eyes on mine as I work her over, fingers and thumb hounding her toward an orgasm that I know is too fast and too mean.
Not because she doesn’t like when I’m rough with her. She does. Ashley pants for it and comes for it and makes a sweet mess. But because I’m hardly present for this. I’m hardly present for anything.
She can see it in my eyes.
I know the moment it hits her because she can’t stop her hips from circling. She can’t stop the breathy groan that spills from her tongue. But a flicker of fear crosses her blue eyes. “Poseidon—”
The question is clear in her voice. Please, prove to me it’s you. Please. There are a hundred ways to do it. “Come,” I order.
“I can’t,” she says. “I can’t—”
I make her do it anyway. I know her body. I know she won’t be able to resist a relentless, soft pressure on her clit. I know she can’t stop herself when I fuck her with thick fingers like this, and this, and this—
Her thighs shake. “No,” she says. “Please.”
But I wring it out of her anyway. Ashley comes with a wretched, mortified cry, slicking my fingers with more wetness, fluttering around me in a way that normally makes me want to crush her to my chest and hold her close so I can feel her heartbeat.
I can’t do it. I pull my fingers free of her and wipe them on her sundress. Her cheeks get redder. It’s distantly hot between us, but it’s not right, and she knows it. “Nobody heard you, princess. Disappointing.”
At that moment Buddy trots around the corner of the building. When he sees Ashley, his tail wags so hard his body wags too. He’s already looking pudgier, the way a beagle should look, and he comes to Ashley and circles her legs while she rearranges her dress, not looking at me.
Who the fuck am I?
“Princess.” I touch her face. Ashley doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t lean into my palm, either.
“Didn’t you—” She swallows, her eyes meeting mine again. “Didn’t you say you had a meeting? I want to go home when it’s over.”
The rest of what I want to say trips over itself. Refuses to come out. “Let’s go.”
Ashley follows me into the warehouse, Buddy at her side. My eyes skim over the space. Nothing here matters. Nothing anywhere matters. “Poseidon.” I follow Nicholas’s voice to a nearby office and go in. The man with him starts talking as soon as I’m there.
I don’t hear a word he says. My heart is waiting outside in the main room, broken and hating me.
Ashley
I feel vaguely sick, and not-vaguely unsteady on my feet, like the warehouse is a ship and I don’t have my sea legs. I don’t know what happened just now. Poseidon made me come. He’s very good at that. His fingers seem made for my body. The rest of his body is made for mine. Just breathing him in is enough to turn me on. The warmth of coming for him lingers in my muscles.
But outside—
He wasn’t there. The blankness behind his eyes terrified me. He was only there physically, not emotionally, not in a way that matters. I didn’t know how present he was until he was gone. The first people who saw the tide go out must have felt like this—unsettled and afraid. They would have had no way to know if it would come back.
I pet Buddy’s head and take slow breaths. They had to wait. They had to have patience. That was the only way to find out. I don’t let myself consider the possibility that he’s gone for good.
Poseidon’s voice anchors me, and I resent it a little, how the deep, smooth sound calms me like waves on the shore. Maybe he was there. Enough to settle him for this.
Nicholas steps out of the office, takes one look at my face, and walks us to the next doorway. “Are you okay?”
No. And I’m more resolute than ever about keeping the USB drive hidden from Poseidon. We’re too close to a precipice to make a wrong move now. “I’m fine. I brought the drive.” I take it out of my pocket and press it into his hand before he can refuse.
Nicholas frowns down at it. “Did you tell him?”
“No.”
“Do you want to get whipped?” He sounds incredulous. He sounds as guilty as I feel. “Because this is how you get whipped.” Nicholas curses under his breath and pulls me into the empty office. He doesn’t have to say we’ll need to be fast. My pulse races in my fingertips, and Buddy’s tail thwaps against the floor.
Nicholas shoves the drive into a slot on one of the computers and a window pops up on the screen. His fingers move fast on the keyboard, and it’s stunning, actually, how fast he is, how confident. I have never pictured him typing. Never pictured him in the light of a screen like this. In a room like this. He’s comfortable here. But does he belong? I remember the way he was in the hammock on the deck of the Trident. Poseidon said he never really relaxed, but I don’t think that’s true. I think he did, at least in that hammock, when Poseidon was in charge.
“Pictures,” Nicholas says, and I step closer and look over his shoulder.
“Oh,” I answer, through a throat tight with tears.
He goes through the files one by one. Me as a baby, on my back in a crib, a rattle in my hands and a gummy grin on my face. My mom holding me in a beam of light in a kitchen I don’t recognize, pressing a kiss to my round baby cheek. Me kissing her back, clumsy and loving, my baby-fat hands on her face. A bead of sweat runs down my spine. I could have lost this. I could have lost these pictures, and they’re all I have left. I don’t know what my dad might have done to our photos and our things—I can’t bring myself to imagine—but I have these.
“Look, Nicholas.” I wipe the tears away one by one. “Look at that.”
“She loved you,” he agrees, and such easy confirmation almost takes me out at the knees. But I don’t fall. I stay standing. Because pictures like this—they’re priceless. Worth enough to keep in a bank vault. My mother shouldn’t have had to do it.
“Is there anything else?” I want to look at the pictures forever.
Nicholas frowns and types in another string of commands.
At the bottom of the list of images, another file pops into view. “Shit,” he says. And then he clicks on it.
It’s gibberish. Just a long document full of random characters. No words. No nothing. A small hope drowns in disappointment. “That’s nothing.”
Nicholas is staring at the screen, scrolling up and down through the document. “No, Ashley, it’s not.”
Hope pokes its head back above the surface. “What?”
“It’s code. It’s code for something, but we’re going to have to—you’ll have to find a way to decrypt—” Poseidon’s voice rises next door, and Nicholas moves fast. “Email,” he demands, and I rattle it off for him. I haven’t thought about email in so long. Nicholas drags the contents of the thumb drive into a new email with no subject line or text. Message sent.
He yanks the thumb drive out of the computer, his face twisted with heavy guilt. More than anything, he hates keeping secrets from his captain. “I’m sorry,” I tell him.