Chapter 7
Molten heat surged through Kore’s veins.
Alien arousal that spread as her heart flailed and thrashed, each fluttering lurch a treachery that pumped the venom deeper.
Faster. Swamping her with the sort of liquid inferno that drew a choked gasp from her lips.
Forced her fingers to curl into hooked claws as she tried to drag herself away.
To claim some fragile, doomed whisper of safety.
But her body betrayed her.
Limbs that had been broken and miraculously healed no longer obeyed her whims. Knees that had been bent in supplication to a sun god were now scraped and stained with algae, damp with the lingering breath of the ocean—stained by the shifting, treacherous shadows lurking beneath the waves.
Quaking, her muscles heavy with feverish heat, Kore tried to fight the slick stone. Tried to scramble and scrape as she fled the beast who was inside her, now.
In her blood.
Throttled by a gasp, she choked on a sob as her muscles quaked. Heavy and languid, she grew clumsy as the toxin spread. Her movements sloppy even as her fingertips tore against the rocks. Skin rubbed ragged and raw went unnoticed.
But her thigh?
It throbbed.
Tugging at her sanity.
Leaking thick, sluggish blood, dark veins spidered out from the tear in her flesh. Drawing every spare ounce of her attention as the wound flushed hot and ominous.
A sound crackled through her lips. Thin with terror, it was a fragile thing.
Pathetic. Flailing, her heart lurched in her chest, crashing against her ribs as Kore clawed for distance.
Trying to claim the foolish hope that she might escape this fate.
This horrible prison with its impossible, mythic guard.
It wasn’t the pain.
It wasn’t the fear of what might become of her—she was far too traumatized for all that.
No, it was the inferno unfurling within her.
Dark.
Vile.
Insidious. It was the sort of heat that pooled low in her belly. Drawing a gush of slick moisture from deep inside, her breath hitched when she felt her heartbeat drop low. Pulsing in a place that only her Lord Apollo and his consecrated priests were meant to know.
Arousal flushed in her cheeks. An alien glow that grew more visceral with every passing moment. Cresting toward something heinous with each panting, shallow breath that splattered past her lips.
“Nooo,” she moaned and squeezed her eyes shut. Teeth sinking into the inside of her cheek. Hard enough to taste the coppery tang of her own blood.
Such was her futile attempt to resist.
It did nothing to banish the fever—if anything, her refusal only drove the obscene sensitivity humming in her skin higher.
Nipples peaked beneath the tattered remnants of her robe, Kore’s breath grew haggard as the rough-spun fabric tormented those delicate peaks. Chafing with each tiny movement, a bolt rippled through her sinew and landed in the hollow between her legs.
It struck with the force of a gong.
Horror tightened her throat.
A sick, twisted humiliation that blended with the toxin’s wrath. Demanding. Unrelenting as it pounded through her.
And then she heard it.
Something other than the desperate, rattling breaths she dragged through her lips.
A whisper that was more than the roar of blood rushing in her ears, or the quiet pulsing slap of water on stone.
At first, it was scarcely more than a low rumble. Subaudible. A thing felt in her bones and jelly.
But the answer was a gush of molten interest.
Haggard breath escaped her throat on the heels of a guttural moan. And she turned. Tried to hide what was obvious inside a lie dressed in horrified truth.
Her terror.
Her revulsion.
It was a pale wisp in the shadow of what pulsed between her legs.
Dragging herself backward, palms scrambling for purchase on slippery stone, Kore pressed back. Deeper. Her nails splintering and cracking as she forced her body to obey. To flee. Scuttling into the darkest recesses of that lonely cave, where the shadows were deep enough to swallow her whole.
It was a hole with no exit.
A pit where terrified, primitive things went to hide from death.
Where she fought to be.
As if summoned, movement from the shallows echoed all around her. The glimmer of iridescent scales skittered across the ceiling, reflecting the last rays of the sun in a mocking flash that should have been feminine and dainty but… wasn’t.
Scales rasped over stone. Wet. Sinister, crunching movement. It was menace in motion. Sinuous and serpentine, even where she couldn’t see it.
She caught a glimpse of flared spines.
The surging bulge of alien muscle as a dense coil rose, then fell. Undulating closer.
She blinked away the salty burn of unnoticed tears. Frozen as she watched. Waited.
And a shadow filled the window of sunlight.
Male. Utterly so, despite their profound differences. It was obvious in the harsh lines of heavily muscled shoulders. The rippling shadows cascading down over his chest. Racing toward the line between man and Leviathan. Where skin met scales.
Her breath caught, high at the back of her throat, her every instinct screaming to flee—but she was pinned to the back of that cave.
Eyes.
Dark and fathomless. Gleaming in the low light.
Summoning the last of her will, she pushed herself back and managed to claim a handspan more before the venom wrenched a low, breathless moan from her lips.
Cheeks scalded with mortified heat, she watched as a ripple passed through his body.
Morbidly fascinated by the gills that flared with a slow, deliberate inhale.
Nostrils growing pinched and white at the edges, he sucked a breath between his lips.
Breathing her in.
Exhaling an unspoken, hissing command that rolled through her bones, his lips pulled taut in a grimace. Vibrating in her chest, her organs… and her weeping, treacherous core.
Molten heat gushed between her legs, soaking her thighs. Pooling on the stone beneath her, she wetted tattered robes in a rush of shameful arousal she couldn’t fight. The wound in her thigh all but forgotten.
“Please,” she whispered, “I don’t—I can’t—”
She was sodden.
Ashamed.
Feet slipping in the wet, she squirmed. Thighs gliding where she was slick and oozing, her flesh swollen. Ripe. Agitating what was meant to be chaste.
What had been promised to her Lord Apollo, before it had been desecrated by a slave trader and now… poisoned by a beast.
Horrified, she squealed and felt that heat curl low. Pooling between her hips. Twisting with a power she couldn’t begin to fathom.
A wet, rasping breath spattered over the beast’s lips…
… and a cord was plucked. Tied to her ichor, that sound strummed at something deep and primal. Something woven through muscle and marrow. A hooked barb that dragged a sob from her chest, even as it brought forth another creamy gush.
At first, the beast was still, but for the unsettling flap of gills flexing below his jaw.
And then… his lips twitched.
A smile stretched over gleaming, pearlescent teeth in exactly the right way to keep her pinned in place. Stuck.
It was a horrible thing, his smile.
Because it was… hungry.
Ravenous.
His gills rippled on a cough.
And with a huff, he lifted the heavy coil of his tail and twisted deeper into the cave. Snaking closer. Every movement serpentine. Alien. So utterly foreign, Kore couldn’t so much as draw breath as he surged forward with a methodical grace that was at once repulsive and hypnotic.
At his approach, her heart thrashed. A pathetic flail that pushed the venom into every secret, forbidden part of her. All the hidden corners that had been promised to the glory of Apollo’s gaze were corrupted by something… desperate.
Something wonton and wicked, for it was no longer a mere flutter in her throat, but a deep, rhythmic throb centered between her trembling thighs.
A whimper escaped her, then. Eyes wide, dread flushed hot in cheeks stained red with mortified heat. “Please,” she rasped again. A quiet, desperate plea—not to the beast, but to the Lord she’d forsaken. “Please, please save me.”
Kore twisted her fingers in a mockery of Apollo’s sacred symbol. A stumbling, broken version of the prayer she'd offered since she'd been given to the temple. It was a trembling, desperate invocation against the monster looming before her. Pitiful. A thing already half forgotten.
A laugh echoed between them, making her ribs tremble. Cruel and low. It was a ripple of sound that skated over her skin like a whip, but landed with the crashing weight of the sea.
Inhuman.
He inched closer, heat radiating from scaled flesh she could feel even in the cold depths of her chosen prison. But it wasn't the cruel gleam, nor the sinister intent glimmering in his alien glare.
It was the angry thing jutting up from below his belly button.
A cock.
She'd heard the word grunted through browning teeth in the slave market. Heard it hissed above her as a man who'd paid to own her had helped himself to what had always been saved to honor Apollo.
But this was no tender spear of human flesh.
Her gaze was fixed to a thing that defied all reason.
It was to be her doom.
All she saw was a glimpse. A hint between one instant and the next.
It was enough.
Enough that she squealed, pressing back hard enough to bruise her spine even as her core gushed and fluid oozed from deep inside.
And so it was that the same word surfaced in her mind as she looked at the hideous thing moving toward her. Monstrous. A cock of truly demonic proportions, it would have shamed the Athenian slavers and made the priests of Delphi fall to their knees in shocked worship of the divine.
A glistening bead burped from the tip before it was swallowed by shadows.
And with a lash of his tail, he was upon her.
His clawed hand caught her throat. Lifting her as if she weighed nothing at all, he brought her up, level with his eyes. Air strangled in her chest, her legs kicking uselessly as he studied her.
Amused.
He was amused by her horror.
Aroused by it.