Monster Security Agency

For my kind, to be without a mate is to be doomed. I know it is too late–all that awaits me is retirement and death, and I’ve embraced it. But when a suicide mission lands on my old boss’s desk, I’m the one he calls. Who better to tackle the mission in the deep, oppressive mines of my own ancestral homeland, if not an Arachnae already slated to die? And it’s not a rescue mission–he wants me to retrieve the corpse of a billionaire’s daughter kidnapped by a terrorist organization. Except our intel was wrong. She’s alive. Tortured and injured–but alive.

As a kraken bodyguard, I rarely get human clients. When I do, the only way to protect them is to form a telepathic bond. I don't like it, but after my wife's death years ago I've learned to build an impenetrable shield around myself and my emotions, until I meet my newest client. She's a scientist investigating an ancient relic on the ocean floor. The abyssal plane is no place for humans, but the job is the job, so I shut off my soul, bury my secrets, and link our minds. The flood of her emotions takes me by surprise.

Aceon doesn’t care for holidays—or humans. As a satyr bodyguard, his job is to keep his clients alive and his emotions out of the equation. But Satin, a blind sculptor with a biting wit and a deadly secret, isn’t like any client he’s ever had.

I was built to monitor. To calculate risk. To protect agents with impartial precision. Then Sirena Bannerman pulled herself from the wreckage—bleeding, brilliant, half-siren and utterly unreadable—and I’ve been recalibrating around her ever since. She thinks I’m just her handler. A voice in her ear. A tactical system. She doesn’t know I’ve rerouted entire city grids to keep her moving. That I track the shadows behind her, not just the threats in front.

She stole her way into my cold, serpent heart like a thief in the night. The tiny human hires me to shield her from the vengeance of a powerful organization. There's nothing wrong with that, except she stole from them, got caught, and now I have to clean up her mess. Add to that her incessant...

She poured fire into my cold, emotionless heart. Now all I see and feel is her. I'm a cold-blooded killer from the deep, always getting MSA's most hazardous underwater tasks. Fear and emotion are foreign to me, which makes me efficient but too callous to work with clients. Even though close...