Chapter 11
The tentacles shifted. The ones holding my wrists released first, and my arms drifted down through the water, boneless, fingers trailing.
The ones around my legs unwound slowly, carefully, not dropping me, lowering me, easing my body out of the position it had been locked in with a patience that contrasted violently with how thoroughly I’d just been wrecked.
Ishka withdrew from me slowly. I hissed as the ridges dragged back through me one last time taking with it one more final jerking shiver from my spent body, each one a ghost of what they’d done on the way in.
The emptiness that followed was cavernous.
The phantom fullness of him lingered, a deep throbbing ache that sat in the pit of my stomach and radiated outward.
A reminder pressed into muscle and bone that wouldn’t fade for days.
He carried me to the shell bed.
I didn’t resist. I didn’t have the capacity to resist. I was a collection of nerve endings wrapped in skin, belly swollen and glowing faintly from within, leaking luminescent cum in slow trails that drifted behind me in the water.
When Ishka lowered me into the curved interior of the shell and the soft fleshy bedding compressed around my body, I sank into it the way you sink into sleep after the longest day of your life.
His tentacles arranged themselves around me.
Not restraining, but cradling. They draped over the edges of the shell and curled into the interior, surrounding me in a loose cage of dark slow-moving limbs.
One thick tentacle rested possessively over the rounded swell of my belly, pressing lightly, keeping everything inside me exactly where he’d put it.
Another lay across my chest, rising and falling with my ragged gill-filtered breathing.
A third traced slow aimless circles on my shoulder, the sort of touch that had no purpose beyond touch itself.
I lay in the bed of an alien leviathan, surrounded by his tentacles, swollen with his cum, with the ache of him still throbbing inside me and the glow of the coral walls shifting through soft quiet colors overhead.
My body was wrecked. My mind was scraped clean.
The water was warm and the bedding was soft and the tentacle on my chest moved with my breathing, and I felt—
Safe.
The word surfaced in my head before I could stop it, and I knew he heard it, and I didn’t care. Because it was true. Lying here, in the dark abyss of an alien ocean while being held by something with tentacles I felt safer than I ever had in my whole life.
Safer than Krackus, where every day was a negotiation with a body that was falling apart.
Safer than the ship, where the people I loved had been planning to kill me while they danced and celebrated with me.
Every place I’d ever been had people in them.
Humans. People who spoke my language and looked like me, and every single one of them had either used me, sold me, or thrown me away.
This creature, this Veylith King… Leviathan, with his cold voice and his tentacles wrapped around me in the dark, had done none of those things.
He’d bought me, yes. Altered me, yes. Taken me without asking, yes.
But I was alive and he made me realize that I wasn’t ready to die yet.
Dammit, I’m still here! And as for Zayne and Milo?
I hope that corporate prince hired a death squad and their heads are sitting on a pike right about now.
The tentacle on my chest shifted, pressing a little firmer over my heart to calm me.
I turned my face into the soft bedding. My eyes burned. I was not going to cry. I was absolutely not going to cry in the bed of an alien who’d just fucked me into a swollen glowing mess because the aftercare was making me feel things I hadn’t felt since my mother was alive.
I cried. Quiet, leaking tears that dissolved into the salt water before they’d fully formed.
If Ishka noticed, and of course he noticed, he could hear every thought in my head, could feel the ache I mentally suffered the same way he’d felt every orgasm, he didn’t say anything.
The tentacle on my shoulder kept moving.
The one on my chest kept rising and falling.
The one on my belly pressed down, warm and possessive, and stayed as it gently pushes his cum out of me.
My mother had held me like this, with thin tired arms on a company cot, humming something tuneless while the mining drills shook the walls.
She’d press her hand against my chest the way Ishka’s tentacle pressed now, and I’d fall asleep knowing that as long as her hand was there, nothing could get me.
Nobody’s hand had been there since she died. Not really. Not like this.
Sleep now, little one. You’re full. You’re mine.
I closed my eyes as his tentacles held me with belly full of him glowed faintly in the dark.
And for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to be anywhere else.