Page 35 of Ruining His Smirk

“Shut it down?” the driver, John, asked.

“No. Leave it running. Put it in neutral, but keep the engine on so she can hear us.”

Huh. Interesting. If it were me, I would shut it down so we could have the quiet to search for her.

Braddock lowered his binoculars and looked down at me. “Humpbacks don’t echolocate. They don’t use sound to map what’s around them the way dolphins and toothed whales do,” he explained in another eerie moment where he seemed to have read my mind. I had a flashback to our fencing match. How he had been the most formidable opponent I’d ever sparred against, despite being a lighter man than me. I couldn’t explain it, but we both had this instant connection. We could read and predict each other’s subtlest movements. It had been thrilling until he cheated.

Now I appreciated him being able to anticipate my unasked questions. I nodded.

“She needs to hear the motor,” he continued. “If we go silent, she may not know exactly where we are and may come under the boat.”

“Ah.”

He resumed scanning. Several long minutes passed. No one said anything.

“Landry.”

“Yeah?”

He held the binoculars with one hand and reached for me with the other. Before I could ask what he was doing, his gloved palm closed around the side of my head. His fingers pressed near my ear, and he turned my face firmly toward a section of water off the bow.

“Look there.”

I did.

“Don’t take your eyes off that patch.”

His hand remained on me for another second, holding my head in place as though he didn’t trust me not to look elsewhere.

“I’m looking, but I can’t see anything.”

He was pointing to a patch of water some fifty meters out. The water there remained infuriatingly ordinary.

“Keep looking. I saw her down there.”

My eyes started to sting from refusing to blink. The silence aboard our boat felt heavy. Four men waited around a patch of empty ocean as though we had gathered for an appointment and the guest had neglected to arrive.

Then the sea exploded.

9

Garrett

A column of water blasted upward off our right side. It erupted with such violence that I thought the ocean itself had broken open. Not where Braddock had told me to look. Closer, right near our boat.

Someone shouted. It might have been me.

An enormous dark shape drove out of the sea, rising almost vertically, water pouring from its skin in sheets. I stared slack-jawed. She was the size of a fucking bus, towering over us in the most awe-inspiring sight of my life.

Lady’s ridged throat broke free of the water, white pleats shining beneath the dark sweep of her head. Barnacles roughened parts of her skin. Long fins opened away from her body as she surged upward, and the sheer size of her destroyed every scale my mind tried to place around her.

I had seen cattle larger than men. Horses powerful enough to throw a rider twenty feet. Machinery so enormous I could standinside it. None of that prepared me for a living body that size lifting itself out of the ocean.

She rose higher than seemed possible.

I craned my neck back, staring up at a humpback whale suspended against the brilliant blue Antarctic sky.

Then Lady twisted.