I expected Liam to text me his address but what I didn't expect was for him to tail me like a damn undercover agent.
I first noticed the suspicious-looking sedan a few miles off the research facility. It stayed behind me at a careful distance, too calculated to be coincidence. At a red light, I tilted my rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of his face.
Liam.
I nearly laughed at the absurdity. Did he really think I wouldn't notice?
I dialed Delmar on speaker as I turned onto my street. "Hey, just a heads-up. We are having a guest tonight. Make sure K'liira's out of the tub if she's there, okay?"
Delmar's voice was tight. "Who is it?"
"Liam. He works with me."
A pause. "Understood."
The line clicked dead.
By the time I pulled up in front of my apartment, Liam's car slid smoothly into place behind mine. He stepped out almost as soon as I killed the engine, his expression unreadable.
"You didn't have to stalk me, you know," I said, grabbing my bag from the passenger seat. "I would've given you a ride."
"I didn't want the HMORC people seeing us together," he replied stiffly.
I narrowed my eyes. "That paranoid, huh?"
"Careful, Berry," he said with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "It's not a laughing matter. I know what they are capable of."
I didn't like that tone. I didn't like any of this.
"Come on. Let's get inside."
As we stepped into the apartment, Liam glanced around, his critical eyes scanning the modest living room. "Nice place," he muttered.
He hadn't even finished the sentence before the air cracked with movement. There was a thud, a blur of motion, and Liam was slammed to the hardwood floor with a force that made the picture frames on the wall tremble.
Delmar was crouched over Liam's body, his knuckles grinding into the man's collarbone. The terrifying, slick-black tentacles I'd almost forgotten about burst out from under his shirt like living spears, writhing, glistening, alien. One of them coiled upward, talon-tipped, stopping just above Liam's wide, frozen eyes.
"One move," Delmar growled, "and I'll punch a hole through your skull."
"Delmar!" I shouted, panic constricting my throat. "Delmar, what the hell are you doing?!"
Delmar didn't look at me. His body was coiled, vibrating with something primal. He sniffed Liam's shirt again and hissed, nostrils flaring. "He smells of them."
"What...who?"
"Faringues. Their scent is all over him."
My blood turned cold.
Delmar finally glanced at me, his blue eyes stormy. "It's them...I know it. The ones in the recording. The ones whose scream I heard."
I turned to Liam. His expression had shifted. No longer amused. He looked...quiet. Thoughtful. Dangerous in an entirely different way now.
He shrugged as if this whole thing was some minor inconvenience.
Delmar yanked him to his feet, and we wrestled him into the hallway. Duct-tape across his mouth. Taped his wrists and ankles. I didn't want to admit how efficient Delmar was, like it didn't even made him weeze to manhandle a grown man.
We couldn't risk putting Liam in the guest room or mine, too many windows. He was too large to go unnoticed, too loud to leave unguarded.
So we threw him into the bathroom. Right beside K'liira's giant water tub.
Her head poked out of the water like a curious seal. When her eyes landed on Liam, wide and trussed up on the tiles, she blinked. Slowly. Like a predator sizing up new prey.
Liam, for once, looked truly rattled.
"K'liira," Delmar said coolly, "watch him. If he misbehaves... pluck out his eyes."
K'liira didn't answer. She just smiled, a soft, eerie curl of her lips.
Delmar shut the bathroom door behind us.
I stared at him in the hallway, my pulse thundering in my ears.
"You didn't mean that, right?" I asked, my voice weak.
Delmar didn't answer right away. Then: "That depends on what he does next."
I swallowed hard, my throat dry as ash. "Jesus Christ. I can't believe I just kidnapped a man," I muttered, pacing across the kitchen tiles like a caged animal. The fluorescent light above flickered slightly, casting sharp shadows on the counter and sharpening every jagged thought in my head.
My breaths came too fast, shallow and choppy, my chest rising like I couldn't get enough air. I raked both hands through my hair, fingers tangling at the roots as the reality of what we'd done slammed into me like a punch to the ribs.
This was illegal. Beyond illegal. I could go to jail. I could lose everything, my internship, my degree, my reputation. Everything I'd worked years for, flushed down the drain in a single night of madness.
"What the hell was I thinking?" I whispered, voice cracking. My head filled with images of flashing red and blue lights, of uniformed men slamming on the door, of Delmar dragged away in cuffs, K'liira tranquilized, me in handcuffs.
"Hey," Delmar's voice cut through the storm. I didn't even hear him approach. His hands gripped my upper arms gently but firmly, grounding me. "Kash. Look at me."
I forced my eyes up. His face was earnest, those sea-glass blue eyes wide with concern. His thumbs rubbed slow circles on my arms.
"Calm down. It's going to be alright. I tackled him. I bound him. You didn't do anything."
"It doesn't work like that, Delmar!" I snapped, jerking out of his hold, my voice sharp from fear, not anger. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with a trembling hand. "This isn't some fantasy story where the hero does the right thing and everything's fine! There are rules, laws. They don't care who tackled who. He's in my house."
Delmar stepped back, wounded but still trying to understand. "Then how does it work? Tell me. Because my people are being tortured, Kash. Tortured. They're dying in cages and no one gives a damn. You...you...you're the only person who's even listening. And I need to do something to save them."
His voice cracked. His desperation was raw, bleeding out of him like seawater through cracked stone.
I looked at him, really looked at him. His hands were trembling. He was trying so hard to be calm for me while everything inside him must be screaming. I remembered that same feeling. After Dad died, when the world kept spinning like it hadn't just ended. That helplessness. That fire that wouldn't die.
And suddenly, it hurt. The way he was trying to carry this burden alone. For me.
"I'll take care of it," Delmar said, quieter now. "I'll take him away. Somewhere far. You won't be involved in any of this. I don't want anything touching you, Kash. Not this. Not me. Nothing."
My heart thudded painfully. His voice was like a warm wave lapping at the edge of a storm, pulling me under with its gentleness. And I had no words. Nothing adequate. What do you say when someone offers to sacrifice everything for you?
"I don't need saving, Delmar," I said softly, the words hard to find. "It's not me who needs saving."
He blinked at me, uncertain.
"We need evidence. Real evidence. If we want to stop whatever's going on, we need more than stories and instincts and half-heard screams."
Delmar nodded slowly, his throat bobbing as he swallowed. "It's pretty clear he knows," he said, tilting his head toward the bathroom. The tension in his jaw returned.
I exhaled. "Should we interrogate him?"
"Is there any other way?" he asked grimly.
I shook my head.
We exchanged a long look. A silent pact passed between us, this was a line, and we were stepping over it together.
We walked down the narrow hallway. The silence was thick, broken only by the creak of the old wooden floor beneath our feet.
When Delmar pushed open the bathroom door, I expected resistance. Screaming. Anger.
Instead, we found K'liira sitting cross-legged on the tiles, her pale webbed hands resting on her lap, her huge dark eyes blinking curiously as she stared at Liam like he was a strange fish in a tank.
Liam sat slumped against the wall, his wrists still bound, sweat glistening on his forehead. He looked up at us, mouth taped, face tight with confusion, and something else. Fear sure. But something else as well, confusion and fascination perhaps.
K'liira raised her palm to touch Liam when Delmar gave a low, guttural growl, the sound so loud it vibrated the floor underneath me. Less protective, more primal. A warning from something ancient.
K'liira startled at the sound, jerking back from where she'd been crouched. Her body slithered away from him in one quick, fluid motion, her long, webbed fingers trembling. I could see the whites of her wide, dark eyes glinting under the bathroom light. She looked confused. Guilty. Maybe even hurt.
Liam, on the other hand, looked like he'd seen a ghost, or worse. His face had gone pale, his chest heaving beneath the duct-tape restraints. I couldn't tell if he was afraid of K'liira or of Delmar. Maybe both.
"Tell her not to kill him," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. There was a hard knot in my stomach, cold and heavy. I knew what K'liira could do if she felt threatened. We both did.
"She wasn't hurting him," Delmar growled between clenched teeth, but the tension in his shoulders said otherwise. His entire body was coiled tight, like he was barely holding himself back. He turned to K'liira and murmured something in his native tongue. The words were wet and guttural, strange and beautiful.
K'liira gave one last glance at Liam, then slithered out of the bathroom, brushing past me with a nervous twitch of her gills. She disappeared down the hallway, her movements quiet, ashamed.
Delmar turned back to Liam, crouching in front of him. With one hand, he ripped the tape from Liam's mouth in one swift motion.
Liam coughed, his face contorted in fury. "What the fuck are you doing with a nesting female in your house?" he spat, his voice hoarse but clear.
Delmar's body jolted like he'd been slapped. His neck tendrils snapped forward, emerging like whips from under his shirt, sharp and slick and twitching in the air, aiming straight for Liam's face. One hovered a breath away from Liam's eye. Just a flex, and it could be over.
"Shut up!" Delmar hissed, his voice thick with threat.
I stepped forward, trying to focus, trying not to be distracted by the grotesque beauty of those alien appendages. Every time they emerged, I felt like I was watching the ocean open its secrets to me, a living, breathing ecosystem of biology I barely understood.
But this wasn't the time to be awestruck. I forced myself to breathe, to speak.
"Ask him, Kash," Delmar said without turning, his eyes still locked on Liam.
I nodded, grounding myself. "How do you know she's nesting?" I asked, my voice sharper than I intended.
Liam gave a bitter laugh. "How do I know? Really? You think I came to your house just for kicks?" He glanced between me and Delmar, his tone coated with disbelief. "Why the hell do you think I've been following you? Keeping track of you? And honestly confused at why you were with Peter."
"I don't know," I said slowly. "Why don't you tell me?"
"I'm a marine vet, Kashton," Liam said quietly, his voice rough, like each word scraped its way out. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the bathroom, the harsh light overhead turning his face pale. "I was recruited under a classified post-doc training initiative. At first, I thought it was related to a hidden genome program, marine DNA sequencing, synthetic regeneration, that kind of thing."
He looked up at me, and the haunted weight in his eyes made my blood run cold.
"But I was wrong. It didn't take long to realize I was being trained for something else. Something... darker. I signed an NDA that threatened prosecution under homeland security law. But the real horror didn't hit me until I met my first Faringue."
Delmar stood behind me, unmoving, arms folded, tentacles twitching slightly under his shirt like they were eavesdropping too.
Liam's jaw clenched. "They weren't cryptids. Not animals. They were people. Highly intelligent marine beings being kept against their will. Sedated. Studied. Tortured."
I stared at him, mouth slightly open, the word tortured echoing in my skull like sonar.
"This isn't new, Kashton," Liam continued. "This didn't start ten or twenty years ago. It's been happening for decades. Since World War II. There were rumors of aquatic anomalies off the Pacific, sightings in the Mariana Trench, back then they called it 'Project Leviathan.' When the war ended, those files didn't vanish. They just went black."
"What?" I managed, barely breathing.
"I knew your father," Liam said, his voice lowering further. "We weren't close, but we talked. He was obsessed with proving the existence of merfolk, your words, not mine. But what he didn't know... was that the very people he was trying to find were being hunted, by the same government he trusted to help him."
My knees weakened, and I braced myself against the doorframe, the air suddenly too thick.
"When your father came close, when he had proof, they didn't discredit him. They didn't refute him. They erased him. Silenced him before he could publish. Before he could drag them into the light."
"And you knew all this?" I snapped, my voice cracking with disbelief. "You just stood there and let them destroy him?"
"You think I had a choice?" Liam barked back, eyes flashing. "You think I could just waltz into a police station and tell them the U.S. government is running an underwater prison for sentient marine species? That the president's office personally authorized it as a matter of national security?"
He stood, breathing hard now. "This isn't a college scandal. This is a machine built on fear, control, and secrets buried so deep no one wants to dig them up. And now you...you're digging. Loudly."
I opened my mouth, but he wasn't done.
"They know about you, Kashton. They're watching. You've already been flagged. And Peter..." he gave a bitter laugh, "God, I don't even know what game he's playing."
I froze. "What do you mean?"
"He knows who you are. He knew from the day he saw your application. He is the scientific head of the Faringue Program. Has been for five years."
"No..." My voice faltered. "No, that can't be. Peter is... he's—"
"Stupid? Love sick? Into you?" Liam spat. "Yeah, I'm sure he is. But that man isn't what he pretends to be. When he's around you, he's someone else. That's why I didn't rat you out, I was curious to see how far you'd go. I thought maybe you were just a clueless intern who caught his eye. But now—" his eyes flicked toward the hallway where K'liira had vanished "—and I think you're truly reckless."
He leaned forward, voice barely above a whisper. "You've got two Faringues in your home. Two. One of them nesting. Do you have any idea what you've done?"
Silence blanketed the room like a tidal wave crashing over everything. My ears rang. My hands were cold.
Delmar shifted beside me, slow and steady, but I could feel the rage thrumming beneath his skin.
"What you're doing..." Liam continued, almost in awe now, "is suicide."
"What were talking about with the director?" I asked a little bit nervously.
"There are currently 12 Faringues in Captivity in HMORC. And he wants to keep them alive because captivity is killing them slowly."
I saw Delmar go stiff with unease.
"Your confession does not mean I am going to let you go," Delmar gritted.
"Atleast open my hands, the tape is cutting my blood circulation," Liam demanded.
"No." Delmar snaped but saw I walked to him and loosened his ties.
"Delmar, relax. I don't think he is one of the bad guys."
"Kash," Delmar moved in my personal space placing his warm palm on my cheek. "This is bigger than I imagined. I don't think it is safe for you to be involved in this."
"I am already in, Delmar. I have been in the day I followed the mystery behind my dad's death."
***
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