Page 25 of Darkest Dredge

In a blink he was gone, leaving me alone in the dark.

That’s when I started to spiral.

Getting fucked by a tentacle man and then getting filled with his eggs was all fun and games in books. In actual practice, though?

Exhilaratingly terrifying.

Oh fuck. What if they hatched?

Flashes of the movie Alien had my stomach churning. What if they burst out of me face-hugger style? What would Ripley do?

Not far off, a radio crackled, interrupting my slightly nerdy panic attack. I could call for help—should call for help.

I struggled to a standing position in the narrow walkway between mine and Noah’s bunks. Even without the aggression of a storm picking up fast, making it impossible to stand straight, it would have been difficult to use my legs. They were as limp as half-cooked pasta.

Books spilled from their stacks as I tripped over them, and with my heart in my throat, I grabbed for whatever clothes I could find. One of Noah’s favorite shirts that advertised an Alaskan Salmon tinnery. It was a tent on me and smelled of him.

My vision swam with unshed tears.

All this was my fault.

I shouldn’t have pushed him to put on the mask. His hesitance hadn’t gone unnoticed, and I’d asked him anyway. He must have sensed something wrong with it. Yet he did it to please me.

Now, we got so much more than we’d bargained for.

He’d been warped into some kind of eldritch monster and I was carrying its eggs.

My hand dropped to the small hard bump in my lower belly.

And how fucked up was I that I hadn’t hated every second of it?

The purr of the ship's engine jerked my attention away from my internal crisis, my heartbeat pounding in my throat as the anchor started up too. We were moving.

Hope lifted in my chest. Was Noah steering us out of the storm? Regardless of where he intended on taking us, this confirmed that my captain was still alive. Because what were the odds that the fish monster knew how to operate our trawler?

My feet slapped as I made it to the communications area, which was barely more than a closet in the bulkhead where we kept a radio and a chair. I plopped onto the chair, head whirling as the new weight inside me shifted some.

Heat flared in my core, and my thighs squeezed together in a pathetic attempt to quench the ache. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is the Clamburglar. We need help!”

Nothing came back. Every channel came back fuzzy. But it wasn’t exactly static, something maybe meant to mimic static. It made my blood go cold with morbid curiosity. Was Noah’s new form fucking with the radio waves?

When that same eldritch word it had repeated over and over in my head came out of the speakers, my chest squeezed.

This time, it sounded like my captain more than anything else.

“Hello? Noah? Can you hear me?”

“Bea—”

The transceiver smoked, then short-circuited, sending me tumbling back to dodge the sparks.

Okay, so the radio was a dead end. Now what?

Come on Bea, think. I needed a plan. Too bad options were pretty much nilch since the captain was currently distracted with the storm, plus the whole eldritch mutation thing.

It scrambled and fried all our communications and navigation equipment.

I had to get that mask off him.