“She’s already done that.”

“What do you mean? She did a background check or something? I’m talking about digging deep—”

“Your birth certificate says you were born in a hospital. Both your parents signed it, and so did the attending physician. He happens to be a college professor now who teaches aspiring doctors how to birth humans. Rachel also found a picture in a newspaper of your father and mother celebrating an award he received. Your mother was pregnant in the picture. From the date of the article, it looked reasonable to assume she carried you in her womb.”

My mouth hangs open but no words come out. Galen doesn’t notice. He says, “Your school records showed attendance since kindergarten to present, and your address never changed. Your medical records can pass as human, though you’ve never had the chicken pox. You broke your arm when you were four years old, you’ve never had surgery, and all your immunizations are up to date—”

“Ohmysweetgoodness!” I yell, standing up. I kick as much sand on him as I can. “That’s none of her business! And none of yours! She had no right to—”

“You just said you wanted her to dig deep,” he says, standing, too. “I thought you’d be pleased that we already did that.”

“You invaded my privacy!” I say as I step into my flip-flops and stomp toward the hotel. Heat wraps around my wrist as he jerks me back.

“Emma, calm down. I had to know—”

I point my finger in his face, almost touching his eyeball. “It’s one thing for me to give you permission to look into it. But I’m pretty sure looking into it without my consent is illegal. In fact, I’m pretty sure everything that woman does is illegal. Do you even know what the Mafia is, Galen?”

His eyebrows lift in surprise. “She told you who she is? I mean, who she used to be?”

I nod. “While you were checking in with Grom. Once in the Mob, always in the Mob, if you ask me. How else would she get all her money? But I guess you wouldn’t care about that, since she buys you houses and cars and fake IDs.” I snatch my wrist away and turn back toward our hotel. At least, I hope it’s our hotel.

Galen laughs. “Emma, it’s not Rachel’s money; it’s mine.”

I whirl on him. “You are a fish. You don’t have a job. And I don’t think Syrena currency has any of our presidents on it.” Now “our” means I’m human again. I wish I could make up my mind.

He crosses his arms. “I earn it another way. Walk to the Gulfarium with me, and I’ll tell you how.”

The temptation divides me like a cleaver. I’m one part hissy fit and one part swoon. I have a right to be mad, to press charges, to cut Rachel’s hair while she’s sleeping. But do I really want to risk the chance that she keeps a gun under her pillow? Do I want to miss the opportunity to scrunch my toes in the sand and listen to Galen’s rich voice tell me how a fish came to be wealthy? Nope, I don’t.

Taking care to ram my shoulder into him, I march past him and hopefully in the right direction. When he catches up to me, his grin threatens the rest of my hissy fit side, so I turn away, fixing my glare on the waves.

“I sell stuff to humans,” he says.

I glance at him. He’s looking at me, his expression every bit as expectant as I feel. I hate this little game of ours. Maybe because I’m no good at it. He won’t tell me more unless I ask. Curiosity is one of my most incurable flaws—and Galen knows it.

Still, I already gave up a perfectly good tantrum for him, so I feel like he owes me. Never mind that he saved my life today. That was so two hours ago. I lift my chin.

“Rachel says I’m a millionaire,” he says, his little knowing smirk scrubbing my nerves like a Brillo pad. “But for me, it’s not about the money. Like you, I have a soft spot for history.”

Crap, crap, crap. How can he already know me this well? I must be as readable as the alphabet. What’s the use? He’s going to win, every time. “What stuff ? What history?”

There he goes again, wielding his smile as a thought-preventative. “I recover things lost at sea and sell them to humans,” he says, folding his hands behind his back. “When it’s too big to handle myself, like old war submarines or planes, I give the human governments the location—for a price. Rachel handles the legal stuff, of course.”

I blink at him. “Really?”

He shrugs, uneasy, as if my full attention suddenly makes him nervous. “I have some private buyers, too. We give them first pick, since they tend to pay more than most nations.”

“What about shipwrecks? Pirate treasure?” The possibilities are endless—or at least, only restricted by the boundaries of the Triton territory, which spans from the Gulf of Mexico to dead-center Indian Ocean.

He nods. “Plenty. My biggest was an entire Spanish fleet carrying gold.”

I gasp. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. It occurs to me that I might be the only other person he’s told, besides Rachel. “How much gold? Did they question how you found it? Where was it?” My questions bubble up like a shaken soda.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, then laughs. “Rachel has everything saved on the computer, including pictures. You can go through it all you want when we get home.”

I clap like a trained seal. I also ignore the flutter in my stomach at hearing him say, “When we get home.” As if home could be on dry land.