The old man looked at him. “Your father did what the island told him to do.”
Roen bobbed his head, unable to relate to the man’s deep delusion.
“You do not believe me.”
“Look—what’s your name?” Roen asked.
“You may call me Naylor.”
“All right, Naylor. Get to the point, because—”
The man held up his hand and leaned forward. “Silence, Roen. I see your father was right about you. You’re too full of yourself. You’re too used to getting things your way. But on this island, you’re not king. You haven’t earned your place yet.”
Roen lost his patience, but did everything in his power not to show it. This was a game of chess where these strange men held most of the pieces and his only weapon was timing—waiting for the right moment to get the hell out of there. “What do you want?”
“First, I’d like you to sit. Then I’d like you to listen.”
“And after that?” Roen asked.
“Then you choose.”
CHAPTER SIX
Roen sat for over an hour while Naylor spoke of absolutely nothing. And when he said nothing, he meant nothing. Random garble about how certain plants obtain moisture by channeling the frost that forms on their leaves. That sports were theatrical events meant to fill a primal void created by the lack of bloodshed men craved. How Aphidius ervi, the parasitic wasp, had such a keen sense of smell that it could tell if a potential aphid host carried a certain bacteria that could harm its eggs.
“All very fascinating, Naylor. But what does any of this have to do with me?” Roen asked.
“The point, Roen, is that Mother Nature is not static. She is driven by the soul and life energy of this planet, and she will fight to survive just like any creature. She will kill to defend herself. She will adapt when necessary.”
“And?”
“And you are one of her adaptations, Roen. As are all of the men on this island. We were created for one specific purpose: to serve her, to protect her most precious possession.”
Roen gave him a slow nod. “I’m guessing you’re about to tell me what that is.”
“The island, Roen.”
Every time he thought this place couldn’t get more demented, it did.
“I see you still do not believe me.” Naylor’s voice crackled, and he hacked up a ball of phlegm, which he swallowed. “However, even you know the ocean is the source of all life. Without it, Earth would simply be a lifeless rock. But it is the ocean that brings us rain, that carries nutrients from one end to another, that breathes life into our world. It flows like a vast circulatory system similar to that of the human body. Even our very own veins carry the same solution of salt.”
Roen was quickly losing his patience with this pointless, abstract, nature lecture that reminded him of his father. All he could think about was Liv and not just because he felt concerned for her safety. That look on her face, when those men had attacked, wouldn’t stop gnawing at him.
“All right,” Roen said. “So the ocean is a big pool of earth blood. What do you want? Money to save the planet? Because if that’s what this is about, I can give you enough to hire an army of lawyers to stop whatever companies you’re after or to build a wildlife refuge or whatever the hell you crazy bastards like. But it is truly time for me to—”
“You’re missing the point, Roen. To keep breathing, to keep her blood flowing, she needs a heart. Just like you. She cannot survive without it.”
Roen stared blankly, knowing the punchline to this sci-fi fantasy was right around the corner.
“This island is her heart,” Naylor said. “And she has chosen our people to protect it.”
All right. I didn’t see that coming. These people were some sort of naturalist religious cult.
Naylor closed his eyes, tilted back his head, and inhaled deeply, seemingly in his own world. “If you quiet your mind, you can feel her pulse, her energy and life force beating all around us—inside us. Landlovers have not evolved to perceive this sort of energy, but we have.”
“So you’re saying you’re not human.”
“I’m saying that we are not.”
We. He said “we.” The man believes I’m one of them.
“Of course,” Naylor continued, “we are related to humans. The first of both our kind crawled from the ocean’s salty womb onto the shores of this very island. Eventually, they lost their tails as well as the ability to breathe underwater—similar to reptiles who were once fish. Some eventually left the island. Our ancestors, however, stayed behind, evolving separately from landlovers for a million years. Not so different from the creatures of the Galapagos, only our island is a part of us. Our island is alive and speaks her will.”
“The island speaks to you.”
Naylor nodded. “Have you not heard her voice? That little whisper in the back of your mind that you cannot explain?”
Yes, he had. But…
Naylor held up his hand. “It is a shock for everyone when they find their way here, but I trust you’ll adjust with time and find your place. You are a Doran.”
“Meaning?”
“A Doran has led us since our ancestors slithered onto shore. The island always chooses a Doran. Always.”
“You think I’m here to lead you?”
Naylor nodded. “Like everyone who is brought here, the island sees a purpose for you. Of course, we haven’t had two Dorans on the island at once for a few thousand years—she has always brought our new leader after one dies. So I suppose you’ll have to fight for the position.”
His words were like the cherry on top of the crazy-bastard cake. As for whichever Doran was on this island—there were many Dorans in the world—he could have it. “If I don’t fight? If I choose to leave?”
“You can’t run from who you are.”
“I’m Roen Doran. I own a ten-billion-dollar company that I built with my own two hands. I have a life, and it’s not here.”
“No. That Roen is a façade, a mask. The real man, the man you were born to be, is just beginning to work his way to the surface. You can run back to your old life, and you can pretend, but from the moment you stepped foot on the island and sipped our sacred water, the real you began to awaken.”
Roen stood. “All right. I listened. Now I’m choosing: to leave. And I’m taking the woman with me.”
“She is not yours for the taking.”
“Then whose is she?” Roen asked, tamping down the anger building inside.
“The island will decide tonight during the claiming ceremony. Anyone who wishes to place their claim on her may step up to fight.”
“You’re all a bunch of sick bastards.”
“What’s sick is your naivety and blindness.” Naylor stood from his chair with a quick motion. It was then Roen noticed the man might look old and feeble on the outside, but his gestures and mental sharpness were not. “How do you think your company became so big, Roen? Have you ever asked yourself that?”
“Hard work.”
“Perhaps, yes, but it’s no coincidence that your ships always find themselves welcomed by the ocean’s peaceful waters and have never been attacked. Not even in Somalia. The island looks after her own. She’s looked after you.”
“We have armed escorts through international waters. It discourages pirates. And I just had a ship go down a few weeks ago.”
Naylor smiled. “Yes. In a freak storm. A storm that ultimately led you here. Because it was time for you to return home.”
“This isn’t my home.”
“You were conceived here like the rest of us. And like everyone else, she called you back to serve. Do not deny you felt her flowing through your veins, pulling you home.”
What he’d felt was a sense that something bad was about to happen. And it had. Now it was time for him to leave. With Liv. Even if that meant calling his ship and bringing men back to take her by force.
“I listened. I chose. I want my cell so I can call my people,” Ro
en growled.
“Aren’t you going to stay and place a claim on the lovely woman? I hear she has twenty suitors fighting for the pleasure of bedding her this evening.”
Every cell in Roen’s body filled with rage. The thought of anyone touching her made his blood sizzle.
“The island brought her here,” Naylor added, “which means she’s special and makes her quite the catch. It’s never happened before. Not once.”
That made no sense to Roen, but nothing here did. “If anyone lays a finger on her, I’ll kill them.”
“One man against us all? I think even you, Roen, recognize a battle you cannot win. And if you plan to leave and return with some of those men from your ship, think again. The island’s defenses go far beyond a few hundred very cutthroat men. You’d need ten armies to overtake us, and by the time you return for Liv, she will have spent the night enjoying another man’s cock between her legs and possibly have his seed in her belly.” Naylor pointed his finger at Roen. “The moment for killing and fighting will be tonight.”
So they’re all a bunch of ocean-hugging rapist psychopaths who enjoy killing each other. Roen wanted to light a match to this entire hellhole of an island.
Roen rubbed his lightly stubbled jaw. “I have to thank you. Because before I found this place, I believed I was one fucked-up, heartless sonofabitch. But after meeting you gentlemen, I feel like a goddamned saint. Of course, you set the bar so low given how you’re all serial rapists, but still. It’s nice to feel like the good guy for once.”
Naylor laughed. “I’m going to enjoy watching the island tame you, Roen. You’re like a wild beast begging to be broken in. But you’ll come around. The island always gets what she wants. As for the female, I assure you that Liv will be in the giving mood for the man who wins her. I bet she’ll give nicely too once she’s recuperated a bit. Maybe I’ll take a run for her myself since I hear that she looks like she knows her way around a hard cock.”
Roen swung and landed his fist on Naylor’s jaw, knocking him to the ground.
Naylor grunted as his head hit the ground with a thump and Roen jumped on top to wrap his hands around Naylor’s neck. “I’ll fucking kill you!” The men from outside burst into the room.
“No!” Naylor held up his hand. “He’s still a weak landlover. He’s not hurting me.”
He wasn’t?
Roen squeezed with all his strength, but the man’s neck felt like solid rock. “What are you?” he whispered.
Naylor grinned. “Same as you, Roen. We are the sons of the sea. We are mermen.”
Roen jerked his head. Mermen? “You’re fucking insane.”
“We may have lost our tails, but that doesn’t change who we are, Roen.” He glanced at the men. “Remove Mr. Doran and show him to the shore.”
“Why?” one of the men asked nervously.
“He says he wants to leave—” Naylor flashed a wicked grin “—so let the man leave. He can swim home.”
The men grabbed Roen and yanked him to his feet.
“I’m not leaving without Liv,” Roen grunted, trying to yank back his arms.
Naylor nodded, and the men dragged Roen outside through a short stretch of forest to the rocky shore. It was so dark he couldn’t see his own feet.
“Get the fuck off me!” Roen roared.
They tossed him onto the wet sand. “Enjoy your swim, asshole,” one of them said, the rest laughing. They quickly disappeared back into the forest. “Oh, and watch out for the maids. They have sharp teeth,” one called out from a distance.
Roen stood and dusted the wet sand from his bare chest. Fuck. He needed to find Liv but had no idea where she was. Even if he knew, it was pitch black, the stars and moon covered in a thick blanket of clouds. He didn’t have a flashlight, weapons, or—
“Goddammit!” he yelled.
Suddenly, he heard the faint sound of an animal howling. He looked around, but didn’t see anything—not that he expected to. The sound of one howl—maybe it was more of a moan—turned into the sounds of dozens.
Roen froze and turned his head toward something yellow flickering and bobbing in the waves. As his eyes focused, he noticed hundreds of them. Holy bloody fuck. They were eyes. Something large, cold, and wet slithered across his foot. Shit. He turned and ran into the forest. Branches smacked his face and lashed his arms. He didn’t know what the hell those things were, but the men had called them maids.
That’s when it hit him. Naylor had called themselves—I can’t say it without feeling crazy—“mermen.” Did that mean they believed those creatures were mermaids?
As Roen ran, his foot caught on a rock and his body hurtled into the darkness, landing on his side and knocking the wind from him.
He lay there for a moment, catching his breath, the thumping sound of his heart pounding inside his ears. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. His heart was so goddamned loud he couldn’t hear his own thoughts.
He placed his hand over his chest, wondering if it might explode. That’s not my heart. The beat inside his chest moved to another rhythm—fast, like a galloping horse. This other sound was like a war drum.
Had Naylor been speaking the truth about the island? Roen didn’t know, but the sound beckoned him to fight for Liv, to shed blood. Yes, he wanted to kill something. In particular, those assholes who’d taken her.
“Help! Let me the fuck out of here!”
Roen sat up, wondering if he’d imagined the sound of Liv pleading for her life.
“Fucking let me out!” he heard her scream again.
Roen got up and started running.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Liv was in a goddamned cage barely tall enough for someone five feet in height, let alone five seven. And it certainly wasn’t wide enough to lie down—if that was the position she chose to be in, which she did not. Because lying across cold rusty bars wasn’t something any human being chose. Just like she wouldn’t choose to wear an all-white, nearly transparent, strapless dress that was really just a long piece of linen cloth wrapped around her body and tied behind her neck. It was a bathing suit cover-up at best.
How she’d gotten there, she could only guess. But the likely answer was that Holden had put something into her IV to knock her out.
How else was he going to give you a sponge bath? She couldn’t believe some stranger had touched her entire body while she was unconscious. That’s so wrong I don’t even know where to start. And no, just because the man was a doctor didn’t make it right even if she appeared to be untouched in any sexual sort of way.
These men need to be flogged and hung by the gonads. Every damned one of them. And that went double for the men who’d attacked Roen. Words couldn’t describe how afraid she felt for him and how badly she wanted to see him again.
The only good news was she felt better now that she’d had plenty to drink and saline pumped into her body. The bad news? She was in a fucking cage. In the middle of a huge goddamned room that, well, looked like something straight from the Dark Ages or Lord of the Rings. The ceiling reached so high it faded into blackness. And the walls, which appeared to be carved from solid rock, sweated with moisture that gathered into narrow channels along the edges of the floor and flowed away from the main entrance—a soaring doorway that looked like it had been hacked with hand tools. The water then gathered in an eerie iridescent green pool at the far end of the room about fifty meters away.
Other than that creepy pond, the only other light came from a large fireplace to her side. But the smoldering logs were no match for the chill inside the vacuous, glorified cavern.
“Let me the fuck out!” she screamed, rattling the rust-coated bars.
She knew no one would come strolling by and say: “Oh dear. Who has locked you in this dastardly cage? Let me free you immediately, milady.” But dammit, standing there doing nothing felt just as ridiculous. She’d rather make some noise than be a good little lamb marching to slaughter.
After twenty minutes or so of screaming, Liv cro
uched down to rest her back. She let her head fall forward and closed her eyes, trying to think of something—anything—positive. She couldn’t let go of hope. That would be the true nail in her coffin.
You have so much to live for, Liv, so much to fight for.
An image of her little sister, Dana, popped inside her head. Dana was only five years younger, but once Dana reached her later teens, people said they looked like twins. Liv, however, still remembered the first time she held her sister—her very own, living baby doll. At least, that was what she’d thought at the time. The tiny fingers and toes and those pink little lips were so precious, exactly like the doll she’d gotten for Christmas, only way better. This one yawned and blinked at her with big eyes. This one felt so warm in her arms. As they grew older, Liv did more and more of the helping, eventually the sitting too. In some ways, it was their relationship that eventually sparked Liv’s interest in her field of study. Human connections. Bonds. Love. All that stuff. Dana was like this little anchor of light in her heart, and Liv wondered why. Why did she love one person above another? It wasn’t that she didn’t love the others in her family or her friends, but Dana was special. She always would be.
“Liv!”
She swiveled her head toward the gaping doorway that led outside into the dark night. Standing there, wearing only a red cloth tied around his waist, was Roen. His hard rippling abs and chiseled chest glistened with sweat. His arms swelled with ropes of hard muscle and his thighs were no different. Holy crap. She’d never seen a more sinfully beautiful, menacing-looking man.
Gripping the bars of her cage, she swallowed the lusty lump in her throat. “Roen?” she croaked. “You’re all right?” Of course, that was a stupid question. The man was better than all right.
He stared with a fierce, possessive look in his eyes that sent her heart racing. As surprising as it was, she liked him looking that way at her.
“Did they touch you?” he growled.
“No. Ohmygod, I thought you were dead.”
His green and hazel eyes maintained their intense gaze for several moments. Then he flashed a smile that made her heart do a little flip. “Not today.”