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I was in water still. Moving.
And—drowning.
“Oh my God,” I thought out on the ’qa, coming back into my own body, same as I had had to when Ceph and I first met. I was trying to breathe. It wasn’t working. I couldn’t get any air in. This was horrible, horrible, my heart was thudding, I was panicked—and—I had to get my helmet off.
“Elle, what are you doing?” Cepharius thought at me, just as panicked as I was. I opened my eyes and saw him—we were still in the dark somewhere.
Couldn’t fully rule out some sort of underworld.
But I would work on that later, right now I just needed to get my helmet—off!
A burp of spent air floated up from my suit, then I was completely underwater—and somehow still alive.
“Elle?” Cepharius grabbed me tight—but my lungs weren’t being ripped away from other tissues in my body.
I was still holding my breath.
He took my face in his hands. “Relax, Elle of the Air,” he said, with the beginnings of a smile curving the edges of his lips. “Breathe.”
I had to—I had no choice. I opened my mouth and let all the water in and?—
I had gotten a second chance at life.
Under the waves—with him.
I heard and felt stunned silence go out on the ’qa, and then Cepharius had me out of my suit entirely, removing pieces of armor and my wetsuit, until I was naked, swimming beside him, and very much alive.
“My mate lives!” he shouted to the ’qa with pride—and everyone around us cheered.
It took me a bit to figure out what precisely had happened. I didn’t remember so much once the extreme hypothermia started to set in—but Ceph told me there was a bright light from the ship that’d run over me, and that it’d said some nice things before it left.
“It healed you, Elle—it gave you back to me,” he said with awe.
“We did watch that little alien change form a lot,” I said, still getting the hang of existing underwater. “It called it ‘cell-shifting,’ remember?”
I wondered what the Earth could’ve done with knowledge like that. If the aliens had stuck around, if we would’ve been able to get rid of cancer—or if, like Donna suggested, we’d currently be having World War Three.
“Will you miss it?” Ceph asked—because we both knew there was no going back to the air now.
I looked up. Despite the darkness that hung above us like a cloud, my heart felt light. “Not in the least,” I promised him. “For all that I’m a woman of my work—there’s no research project in the world that could ever top that.”
We swam back by the habitat on our way out of the trench. Once the power went out, the magical generator must’ve stopped working, because the whole space had filled up with water.
The krakens oohed and ahhed over seeing the inside, swimming through the spaces, reliving the story from both Ceph’s and my memories. His brother was kind enough to retrieve all of Ceph’s carvings from my room for me—the tiny kraken figurine and dildos alike. Cepharius thought this was hilarious, while I sort of wanted to die, but he put all of them in his pockets, in case I wanted them for later.
I couldn’t imagine when later would be, though, as we were surrounded by krakens who’d known him since childhood, his brother, and his friends—especially when all of them were so interested in me.
None of them denied that I was his mate; they all could feel that it was true, but most of them had never met, much less touched a human, and after I confused far too many of them with visions of my stories, Ceph said no one else was allowed to touch me until we made it back to Thalassamur.
And when I asked him where that was, he said that it was home.
chapter 68
CEPHARIUS
I spent two weeks tending to Elle, introducing her to her new world underneath the waves, mapping out a journey I would take her on as soon as she was well enough—there were so many sights I wanted to show her, and many of them were from civilizations she’d only read about, that had crashed below the waves and been forgotten.
We were in my old room in Thalassamur, having evacuated all of Gerron’s toys from it for me and Elle and privacy. Gerron was working on forgiving me—and luckily for me, he was entirely enamored with Elle.
