Release (The Submerged Sun, #3) Read online

  Marko had been born in Marin, so I could only imagine how hard it was for him to be away, not to mention knowing that his city was in the dangerous hands of his psychotic siblings, Damir and Sylvia.

  “No, it wasn’t you. I had another nightmare,” I said, shrugging, trying to shake off the bad vibe the dream had given me. I threw the ocean a quick glance, as though it could carry my thoughts to my sister. As frustratingly stupid as Lauren had been to get involved with Damir, I still loved her. She was still my sister.

  Please be okay. Please be okay.

  Marko’s fingers grazed my chin and steered my gaze away from the ocean. He stared down at me, his normally silvery blue eyes now dark pools in the moonlight.

  “She’ll be okay.” He wrapped his fingers around a tendril of my hair, then let it unravel and float like a ribbon in the wind, and sighed. “Though my brother is an animal, I do believe he loves your sister. She may be the only person he has ever loved save for my grandfather and because of this, I think... no, I know that Lauren is safe.”

  Snippets of my nightmare returned, with certain parts more vivid than others.

  “I’m more worried about what Sylvia might do to her. She’d want Lauren out of the way once the baby is born, and she’d want Nana and Pop out of the picture as well.”

  My blood boiled to think of Sylvia laying a hand on my grandparents while I was up here on land, unable to do anything about it.

  Marko didn’t dispute my fears because I knew he thought they were one hundred percent valid. It was just hard for him to agree, to say out loud, “My sister Sylvia is a traitor, and yes, she could actually hurt your sister and grandparents”.

  Earlier on in his life Marko saw Sylvia as his mother. She’d brought him up after their mother died when he was born. But the past few tumultuous months had proven that sometimes blood isn’t thicker than water, at least not in Sylvia’s case. Her banishment of Marko was the cruellest thing she could have done to him, and she knew it.

  I rested my forehead against his chest. Lauren would have had her baby by now and it was driving me crazy not knowing anything about it. Had the baby been born healthy? Was it a boy or a girl? Did Lauren have a difficult or easy labour? Had there been any complications? Had Sylvia managed to steal my niece or nephew from my sister?

  “Shhhh. It’s okay,” Marko whispered in my ear, as though reading my barrage of thoughts. “No harm will come to the baby. Sylvia will worship that child. Its safety will be paramount.”

  For a long time I rested my head against Marko, listening to the rapid beat of his heart and picturing Lauren’s baby. Who did it look like? Did he or she have Lauren’s fairness? Or did the baby look like its father, Lauren’s old boyfriend, Jackson.

  My lips relaxed into a smile. Wow. I was actually someone’s aunty.

  “What are you thinking about?” Marko asked, his fingers running through my hair.

  I told him and he squeezed me tighter.

  “We’ll see this child, Miranda, I promise,” he said, and then with a smidge of hope in his tired voice, he added, “maybe even today.”

  Marko loosened his hold and I stood back and watched as he lifted his black T-shirt up and over his head. The moonlight highlighted the contours of his muscles. A flicker of heat stirred in my lower belly. He was achingly beautiful to look at.

  Marko had already been fit and muscular when I first met him, but now, after three months of intense weight-lifting, using the gym equipment he’d purchased and set up in the spare bedroom of the shack, his lean muscles were even more defined. He was obsessed with preparing himself for his next confrontation with Damir and punished himself with six and sometimes seven workouts daily.

  “I wish you weren’t going in right now,” I said, as a wave curled then crashed at the shore, spraying our feet with foam. “Can’t it wait until morning?”

  Marko fixed his eyes on the churning sea.

  “You never know when Robbie might send a shuttle our way. We can’t miss that opportunity. Ever.”

  “But the sea’s so rough. It’s almost impossible to find the chute when the weather’s like this.”

  He sighed. “I have to keep trying, Miranda. I won’t stop until I find a shuttle in that chute.”

  Seagulls shrieked while we silently contemplated the many reasons as to why a shuttle had not been sent for us the past three months, the worst reasons being that Robbie was either badly injured, being held captive, or dead. Neither of us said it out loud, but we both knew it was a horrible possibility.

  “I just wish you wouldn’t do it at night.”

  Marko wrapped his arms around me. “It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours, which is hardly night.”

  I sighed, feeling like an old nag.

  “Make sure you come straight back if you find one. Don’t you dare return to Marin without me,” I said, before breaking out in a full body shiver.

  Not knowing what awaited us in Marin terrified me. Would Damir and Sylvia have guards waiting in the shuttle rooms with daggers raised? Or were they so overjoyed with the birth of the baby that things had now changed in Marin. But surely Robbie or Lily or even Jordon would have sent a shuttle already if that were the case, or at least sent someone to get us. They knew where we were.

  “Hey, how about I come this time, just in case? I hate sitting around and waiting. I need to do something or I’ll go crazy.”

  Marko smiled softly and ran his palms over the gentle slopes of my newly toned biceps. I’d been working out on a couple of his machines while he slept off his nightly swims.

  He cupped my face in his hands. “You know the rules. Only one of us at a time. It’s the safest way.”

  I sighed in defeat. He was right. I wasn’t thinking straight because I was so desperate to get to my sister and my little niece or nephew.

  The ocean roared.

  As my hair danced in the cool wind I tried not to think about the choppy sea swallowing Marko in its dark mouth.

  Slipping my arms around his bare waist, I squeezed him to me. No matter how many times we’d been through this routine of one of us disappearing into the sea to find the chute, it never got easier to say goodbye.

  I kissed him once over the heart and quickly turned away.

  “I love you, Miranda,” he shouted, his voice carrying over the wind.

  When I turned back around, he was gone.

  “I love you, too,” I whispered.

  The ocean, dark and choppy, roared back at me as if to say, “too late.”

  Returning to bed was a no-go. I was too anxious to sleep so instead I put some coffee on the gas stove and flicked through an old family photo album Mum had kept in her bedroom drawer.

  But when the album fell open on my lap to reveal a photo of Lauren as a little girl—holding a favourite doll she used to call Ariel, while Nana and Pop watched on from a nearby couch—I snapped it shut.

  I missed them all so much. My only hope was that Nana and Pop were with Lauren and the baby, safe under Robbie’s protection and as far away from Sylvia as possible. Damir had shown concern for my grandparents when he’d first brought them to Marin, so perhaps they wouldn’t be in any danger after all. I could only hope.

  My stomach swirled sickly. Pinning my hopes on Damir wasn’t exactly reassuring.

  The coffee boiled over and I took it off the stove. After pouring it into a large mug and adding two sugars and some long-life milk, I decided to crawl back into bed and read.

  Mum had kept a good stash of books beneath the double bed and I decided to read the more well-thumbed copy of the lot, her favourite book, The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons. Mum tried to write a screenplay for the novel but had left it unfinished when she died.

  A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth as I recalled the time I’d walked into the kitchen to find Mum all flushed in the cheeks and fanning herself. She’d completed writing a sex scene and had refused to let me read it because she’d been so embarrassed by it. Then she’d spent the next very a
wkward ten minutes assuring me the book wasn’t her favourite just because of the sex scenes.

  To Mum it had been all about the romance. ‘It’s something bigger than physical attraction. It’s two people destined to be together, fighting against everyone, no, everything that is trying to keep them apart.’

  I hadn’t understood what she meant back then. But now, after meeting Marko, I did.

  After reading the first few chapters and reaching the part where the characters first met, I put the book aside, face down and open, and started recalling my and Marko’s first meeting. How he’d stared at me like I were a disgusting insect. It had hurt so much, even though he’d been a stranger at the time, and I’d despised him for having had me brought to Marin to save his beloved underwater city. He later explained that the disgust was aimed at himself, for going along with Sylvia’s plans to kidnap me instead of putting a stop to it.

  My stomach grumbled. Gulping down the rest of my sweet coffee, I got up and parted the curtains to see that dawn was on its way.

  The paler, purplish sky gave me a clearer view of the sea, its surface silky smooth now that the wind had dropped. But it made my blood run cold to see that it was empty. That Marko was not yet visible. All I could do was tell myself that the compulsion was keeping him there. That he was safe and just spending time in the sea because it was the closest thing to home.

  He told me that he sometimes swam down to the light crystal chute, pressed his palm against it for as long as his lungs would allow him to stay underwater, then swam back up for air before doing it all over again. He said that touching the light crystal renewed him somehow, kept him from going crazy with homesickness.

  I pulled the curtains shut. Waiting around for Marko to show up was torture. Maybe time would speed up a little if I busied myself organising breakfast.

  After getting dressed, I pocketed a fifty dollar note from the fruit bowl for some bacon, eggs, and juice from the local deli, and grabbed the keys to the car Marko had purchased when we’d first been banished from Marin. We chose a 4-wheel drive because the track between the main road and the shack was highly corrugated and too bumpy for your average sedan.

  Before I left the shack, I scribbled down a note, hoping it would be read by Marko’s eyes only, while I was gone. We had been lucky to escape the police since we’d returned. So far.

  Outside, morning birds had already started to chirp in the bushes behind the shack, and with the sky as clear as it was, it looked as though it was going to be a beautiful spring day. The cardigan I’d thrown on wouldn’t be needed in a couple of hours.

  I gazed at the now calm ocean, a mirror of the clear blue sky, and sighed. These were the kind of days I loved and knew I’d miss once I returned to Marin, where the only light was the soft, muted kind from the light crystals. But despite my love for my homeland, right now Marin was where I wanted to be, desperately so.

  The shop was busy and warm and filled with the usual mouth-watering morning aromas of frying bacon, freshly baked bread and coffee. A man stood at the counter waiting for a ham and cheese toasted sandwich, his shaggy, wet dog panting patiently as his side.

  I quickly grabbed what I needed and joined the queue for the cashier. While standing there, a nice retired couple, clutching bacon and eggs, told me they’d been caravanning around the country for over four years. I half-listened to their story, my mind on Marko—praying that he’d returned safely from the water, when from out the corner of my eye I spotted a red faced guy, a couple of years younger than me maybe, clutching a packet of condoms in his hands, desperately trying to hide the fact with his fingers. It made me wonder if I should get some myself.

  Marko and I hadn’t done it yet. Not because we didn’t want to, but because I was afraid of getting pregnant.

  I cast my gaze over to the aisle the boy had been hovering around. Maybe if I brought home some protection things would move along a little quicker. Marko hadn’t bought them himself because he feared pushing me into something that I didn’t want to do. He still felt guilty about the kidnapping last year, especially the reason behind the kidnapping. It made him extra paranoid about having sex with me.

  He was always asking me if he was moving too fast whenever we kissed, saying, “We can stop anytime you want to.” But I didn’t want to stop anymore. I just wanted us to be together, in the closest way possible. I was eighteen and more than ready.

  I slipped out of line, hoping that nobody was watching, and snatched a box of the most inconspicuous looking condoms, black with silver writing and no embarrassing naked silhouettes, and returned to stand behind the caravanning couple. Luckily they were too busy reading the front page news to have noticed the addition to my grocery pile.

  “Will you look at this, Shirl? Another one.” The old man shook his head, his jowls trembling as he stared down at the newspaper he was about to purchase. “Yesterday it was Barcelona, today, Sydney. It doesn’t make sense. They’re washing up all over the place.”

  “The poor loves,” said the woman. “Who would do such a thing to these young girls? And in so many different countries? You’re right it doesn’t make sense.”

  “The Sydney one might be a copy-cat. That’s the problem with the bloody media these days, they give away all the details and some idiot thinks it’s a good idea to do the same.”

  My blood turned to ice. Another body had washed up on a beach.

  I had to get back to Marko. This was the fourth one in two weeks. It was too coincidental.

  When it was my turn to pay, I placed my groceries on the counter and picked up a copy of the paper from the stack beside me. Without looking at it, I paid, not wanting to see or read the story until I was with Marko.

  My heart raced and my stomach churned while I rushed back to the car. I kept telling myself that this girl might be different. That perhaps she’d just drowned.

  By the time I’d buckled myself into the driver’s seat, curiosity got the better of me.

  I tugged the paper out from under the egg carton and unfolded it to reveal the front page.

  My heart stopped.

  But it wasn’t the heading—Third woman with mutilated legs found on Sydney shores—that got to me, it was the picture, a particular detail in the picture.

  It showed two policemen at the beach, crouched over a body that was loosely draped with a white cloth. The body had long, blonde hair that had half dried in the sun and her thin, pale ankle was showing. The way the picture had been taken, from behind the feet, gave a clear view of the ankle.

  By blood ran cold as I stared at that ankle.

  Wrapped around it was a bracelet, loaded with what appeared to be small, sun-shaped charms.

  Only one person owned that one-of-a-kind bracelet made by my dad.

  And that person was my sister.

  3

  Robbie

  “What did you do with her body?”

  Sylvia sighed, but refused to answer my question.

  “I need to know how and why she died. The city deserves to know. If you’ve stored her, perhaps preserved her...” I swallowed down the rising anger and bitterness in my throat. It still seemed surreal to me that Lauren was gone, and more so because she was yet to be buried and given a proper memorial ceremony.

  In the past, the bodies of Tollin family members had been preserved in coffins made entirely out of light crystal. Seeing as Lauren had died in Damir’s arms, giving birth no less, I’d hoped that she’d at least been given the dignity of preservation. Which would also allow me to view her body for any suspicious causes of death. I was still reluctant to accept that Lauren had died in childbirth.

  Sylvia stepped closer, so that we were almost nose to nose, and glared at me with hard, green eyes. Eyes that showed no depth and instead appeared shallow, like flattened marbles.

  “You’ve been asking to see her body since day one. And my answer hasn’t changed.” She sighed and swallowed thickly. “The girl is dead. There is nothing more you can do for her.” Her voic
e rose with finality. “I don’t know why you keep on about it.”

  I drew my head back and blinked several times, the world around me blurring as though a fog had enveloped me. Yet I could still see the red of Sylvia’s dress. It appeared as though she was dressed in blood.

  “You’re asking me why? You of all people?” I shook my head in frustration. “If we ever solve the fertility crisis in Marin, and the women start to fall pregnant, then surely we must do everything we can to help prevent those mothers from dying in the future like Lauren did? Don’t you see how important this is?”

  Wailing started from down the hall, from Sylvia’s quarters, soft at first, and then loud and high-pitched. Sylvia’s blurry face transformed, her blood red lips spreading wide and curving upward. “Ooh, the baby. I must go and tend to her. Nurse! Warm me some milk.”

  I squinted and saw a woman, who may or may not have been hovering a couple of metres behind Sylvia during our entire conversation, rush off to do Sylvia’s bidding. As the woman brushed past me, I thought I saw the vague outline of a smile and I could not help but feel a little warm inside because I understood that smile. The baby’s cry was like music to my ears and reminded me of my long forgotten sister, Sarah.

  But the inner warmth was quickly replaced with a cold sense of dread. I couldn’t ignore the churning in my guts telling me something was wrong. Lauren had been healthy. I’d checked on her before she went into labour and again during the early stages. She’d begun to dilate as per normal. Her blood pressure had been near perfect. She’d been in a relatively calm state. When the contractions started she was laughing between the milder ones, then later, swearing vulgar words when the longer, more painful contractions hit. She seemed to be experiencing a textbook labour before Sylvia kicked me out of the room. I couldn’t imagine what could have caused her to die.

  And it was all too convenient that Sylvia now had what she wanted—a baby and motherhood—without the hassle of Lauren getting in the way.