She shook her head. “I wasn’t planning on swimming.”
“How do you go to the beach and not swim?” I teased.
She snorted. “You’re silly.”
“You’re beautiful,” I countered, taking off toward the water at a run.
“Koa—!”she called, laughing.
Hearing her laugh was the most magnificent sound in the world to me.
Cold waves crashed around my calves, then my thighs. I dove forward, arms cutting through the surface as the world muffled into the roar and rush of the sea. Salt stung my eyes as bubbles streamed past my ears. The water got colder, darker, the light above blurring as I went deeper in one smooth, practiced motion.
I never saw the shark.
One second, it was just water and sound and the distant sound of my heartbeat.
Then, a massive shadow surged out of the deep blue depths, and before I could twist away, my head slammed into rough, slick flesh and rows of serrated knives.
My scream turned into a choking gulp as the shark’s jaws snapped shut around me.
Pain exploded through me.
Rune’s voice echoed faintly through the water in what I thought was a distorted scream of my name.
The pressure was crushing, stealing away anything else. I hated that she felt my agony through the matebond. Muscle and darkness swallowed me. The raw terror of being dragged deeper beneath the surface overwhelmed me.
This was by far the worst death I’d experienced.
The shark’s throat convulsed, hauling me down. My shoulder scraped against jagged teeth; pain flared and vanished into the larger horror of no air as I was shoved into a space that felt so, so wrong.
I’d been swallowed into the belly of a shark.
I gasped, burning my lungs as stomach acid seared my skin, stinging over every exposed inch of me. Going shirtless became the dumbest idea I’d had in weeks.
The smell invading my nose was rancid and sharp, like rot and metal and something I was never supposed to smell.
My chest cavity screamed for pure oxygen, and my phoenix fire flickered under my skin, panicked as my magic flared weakly in response to the agony.
I clawed at the slick, pulsing walls on instinct, but there was nothing to grasp and nowhere to go. Heat, acid, and crushing pressure pressed in from every side. My lungs seized as my vision started to dull.
My first real date with my fated mate, and I was drowning and half-digested inside a shark.
Not exactly theromanticdate I’d planned.
The last of my good air left me in a shattered exhale.
Everything went black as death claimed me, and then, my phoenix magic seared my soul back to the body it was about to create for me.
Phoenix death never got easier, no matter how many times I did it. It was always too bright, too hot, and too expansive. Fire burned outwards from the center of my soul, consuming whatever was left of my body.
I collapsed into ash before the flames erupted from inside the shark.
The shark’s body convulsed around me. Its flesh charred and bones seared as fire filled every inch of the beast from the inside. The acid that had been burning my skin vaporized in an instant.Heat ripped through muscle and organs and up the throat, bursting out in a pillar of incandescent gold and blue fire.
The shark’s shape split, obliterating it.
From the dead body of a shark in the deep water, I exploded upward as a phoenix—a burst of molten-gold feathers and searing heat, wings flaring wide as I shot out of the ocean in a roaring column of steam and flame.
