Chapter 13
It was obscene, the way her mouth watered for more.
Lifting trembling fingers, Kore painted her lips and found them sticky with cooling ropes of his essence.
She sobbed.
Just once. Enough to acknowledge the horror of what she was doing. Even as that cry became a groan, as her abused nipples tightened, her core clenching at the flavor that burst on her tongue, for with a greedy rush, she’d scooped up every forgotten, humiliating drop and sucked it from her fingers.
Obscene.
Still, she searched.
Fingers tracing the tender bruise he’d left on her jaw, the swell of puffy lips that had stretched around his girth.
All gone.
But his brine lingered on her tongue, hung heavy in the moist air. Clinging to the back of her sinuses, the scent surging in her mind with every fevered breath.
Shifting—thighs slick, pussy swollen and neglected—Kore groaned when her belly sloshed. And when she burped, she tasted an echo of the sea and knew she was already lost.
Her stomach was full. Gurgling with the impossible volume he’d pumped down her throat.
She’d been filled from both ends, now.
Still, something insidious inside her writhed with a ravenous hunger. Begging for… more.
Baring her teeth, Kore scowled at the waves. Slapping one hand to stone, she forced her battered body forward. On hands and knees, she crawled. Bottom swaying. Chasing the tide, following the trail of glittering, iridescent scales that led back to the shore.
“No,” she snarled, not brave enough to utter more than a defiant whisper. “I reject your claim, son of Poseidon. I was born to serve another.”
But the heat of him burned in her gut. Mocking, for she could feel it spreading, took note of the way it twisted through her blood with every beat of her heart.
Eyes fixed to the distant waves, where she’d watched the flick of his tail slip beneath the surface, she heard the sound of cruel laughter ringing in the fog of her memory.
Remembered the way he’d pumped her pussy with two fingers and stretched her walls, only to leave her desperate.
Empty, despite how recently she’d been… filled.
She remembered.
What she’d done.
That she’d nursed at his cock as if his sperm was the very breath she needed to fill her lungs—but she’d done it willingly.
Not at first. Not when the panic at having her throat invaded had blinded her with panic… But when the first lash hit the back of her throat? Coating her tongue in an explosion of flavor?
She moaned before her breath caught.
Shame washed over her, then.
But there was something else. Some other fog of memory she dredged from the back of her mind.
As a fish pulled from the sea, she recalled a mist of red from flapping, straining gills not meant to endure the surface air. Moisture that beaded across a proud brow and left a waxy sheen on greying skin. A particular tremble in clawed, clutching hands.
Kore knew suffering—she’d been a vessel for the divine all her life.
And so she knew the beast paid a terrible price to come ashore… to do what he did to her. Knew it without considering, for Kore had been paying the price of serving the divine since the Oracle had fallen.
The price of her sins.
She’d been untouched until the Spartan army had called on Delphi for a miracle. Sacred, until she’d been sampled in front of an audience, bent over an auctioneer’s table, and traded for two hundred and sixteen drachmas.
But they hadn’t made her beg.
Apollo’s priest had been kind in his brevity, his identity hidden behind a mask. Tipping her hips back before the thimble of fluid might escape his thin prick.
The slaver had been selfish. Unwashed and cruel, but overcome by her unblemished skin after a few desperate, greedy thrusts.
His time inside her was marked by a handful of lusty groans, the clink of silver, and calloused, pawing hands.
The only moisture he’d been able to force between her legs, a gob of spittle and a watery dribble of semen.
But this?
Nothing in the scripture could have prepared her for this.
One hand circling her throat, Kore shivered.
Remembering the stretch. The way the beast had opened her throat with such terrifying ease.
The sentient way his cock had reached beyond her limits, growing thin and fat in measured pulses.
Surging too far. Withdrawing only enough to set an anchor before reaching again.
And…
And the way she’d swallowed and gulped as he poured the sea down her throat.
A shaft of sunlight danced across the beach, peaking through the clouds. The sun bleeding through, as if to summon her back into the light.
Wordless, guttural sobs broke through the film of composure, then, and she scrambled toward the dancing sunlight. Desperate for the kiss of her Lord’s attention. To be saved from this wretched, sodden cave.
She stumbled.
Tripping on wet stone, landing hard on her knees in the shallow, retreating tide, Kore cried out as unfiltered sunlight burned her eyes. Searing pain lanced through her skull, making her whimper as she cowered.
It was accusation.
Punishment for her betrayal.
That, even now, the flesh promised to Apollo was swollen and slick with aching, desperate want of another.
“My Lord,” she rasped, voice mangled by the monster who’d fucked her throat raw. “Please… I… I’m sorry.”
The sunlight only burned hotter.
Apollo’s wrath beat down upon her as she emerged from the dark with a belly full of her carnal betrayal.
Cheeks wet with the congealing salt of her guilt.
Holding one hand out, trying to twist fumbling fingers into some forgotten pattern, she hiccuped through a sob and set her free hand to work.
Plunging two fingers down her throat, she gagged.
Bringing up what had been so eagerly choked down, she vomited into the surf.
Expelling everything she’d swallowed, returning it to the sea from whence it had come, purging until she was left shaking and empty.
Weak.
Exhausted.
The setting sun bled violet and black, streaking the horizon with angry accusation before surrendering to the night once more.
She’d failed.
Again.
Blinking, freed of the pain of searing light, Kore stared at the waves.
She’d failed.
Utterly.
Her prayers had fallen on the wrong ears.
Her skin throbbed with pain from Apollo’s rejection, already bubbling where she’d been burned so badly it hurt to simply breathe.
But still, through the fog of heartbreak and delirium, she ached. Throbbing where she’d been defiled. Needy where she’d been made to sample something divine.
Dejected, she stood.
A glow caught her eye.
Faint.
Blue.
Luminous.
It was pulsing through her veins, just beneath the surface of her skin. An eerie light show, both beautiful and… horrifying, for it was a map of something ancient. Wrong.
“Gods,” she rasped. “No.”
Venom.
She could see it. Knew at a glance that she’d been filled with something so much more insidious than semen.
And with trembling hands, she searched. Touching herself, tracing aching skin, until she found it at the top of her left thigh.
A wound.
Small.
Raised.
Dimpled in the center. A crater where she’d been barbed with another dose of the toxin that had enthralled her so. Deafened her to Apollo’s love as she was enslaved to something beyond her comprehension. Something carnal and lewd.
Something that demanded all of her—everything she’d never known to give.
Bluish veins spidered out from the center of that wound. Glowing in the encroaching night.
Clenching around nothing, Kore willed herself to be disgusted by that otherworldly glow. Convulsing around an offensive emptiness, she forced her lips to form around the sacred words of her youth. Trying to summon what had been beaten into her as she knelt at Apollo’s altar.
Searching for His warmth in the burn on her skin.
There was only a glowing in the darkness.
Only the quiet roar of the sea as it lapped at the beach.
And the pulse of something primal, deep inside her.
Backing away, her prayers forgotten, Kore fled. Back into the welcoming dark of the cave. Where she’d been defiled and remade. Sullied by a demon with a claim to her body.
“I refuse.” It was a denial. A plea. To whom, she couldn’t begin to say.
It didn’t matter.
She was being tested.
And she was failing.
Miserably.
Wholly.
Breath hitching as a shudder rippled through her muscles, Kore took a breath. Nipples growing taut where they chafed at her tattered robes. Her clit pulsed, full and heavy.
Neglected, where it screamed with a heartbeat of its own. Demanding she submit.
Hands pressed between her thighs, she slid down the cave wall with a trembling whine. Back scraped raw where she’d been burned by a god’s wrath, she tried to stem the tide of arousal howling through her nerves. Singing in time with the thrashing of a broken heart.
It hadn’t been enough to simply take her body. To corrupt her so fully that her hands strayed, even as she whispered, “This isn’t me.” And her fingers sank through the slippery mess oozing from her battered pussy as her claims of denial were chased off by a trembling, guttural moan.
She remembered.
The way he’d strummed her aching pearl as he’d plumbed her throat, then abandoned her to the dark without a backward glance.
She could recall the exact timber of his booming laugh as he’d slithered from the cave, leaving a trail of scales and slime that mocked her pain. The ache of denial.
And she knew everything else… had memorized his taste, his smell, the sounds he made as he came so violently that she knew what it was to drown in a god’s lust.
A wave of dizziness struck her as her fingers worked.
An animal without thought. A female in heat trying to relieve the bubble of pressure building between the cradle of her hips.
Fire washed through her pelvis, leaving her skin too tight.
The nerves too sensitive and screaming with the want of a beast.
He’d come back.
No matter the pain or the price, she knew he’d come again.
This was no mindless leviathan who rutted at every vulnerable female slit to drown in the Aegean Sea.
He’d come because he had a plan. Designs upon her body that didn’t stop at working the seam between her legs for his own morbid pleasure.
He wouldn’t stop until he had every last piece of her. Not until he’d stolen her away from her Lord, bit by bit, until she was little more than this awful, throbbing need.
The glow under her skin was proof enough of that.
This map of betrayal he’d injected into her blood.
Climax washed through her as her hands squelched through the mess. Slipping off her clit as her digits became a desperate blur.
Too much.
Not enough.
Sweat soaked her hairline as she gasped in the gloom and came apart at the memory of his cock inside her. Heart pounding between her legs, in the hush of the cave’s dark embrace.
Clarity ebbed as the fever of that heat began to clear.
Because this wasn’t her. This all-consuming drive to reach that mysterious peak, to be stretched and stuffed.
It was the venom.
Slit still throbbing, she focused on her ragged breath.
Matching it with the sound of the tide rushing in and out.
Lulling her into the state of torpor she’d been trained to endure for another.
That trance-like state expected of Apollo’s chosen few trained to catch glimpses of the future and deep, forgotten past.
There, she found calm in the heart of a tempest. The knowing of an Oracle in training.
The beast had a plan.
A mission.
Designs upon her body.
A claim to her mind and a stake in her body.
He meant to corrupt her—to what end, she couldn’t say. Only that it was devastatingly successful in driving her away from the heat of her Lord’s divine grace.
But Kore was a priestess.
Forged in suffering. Disciplined in the art of submission to a force greater than even the sea.
And so, her patience would become her weapon.
She was a vessel for the divine. A chalice designed to be filled, so the gods might drink. Her body had never been hers, not wholly.
The moon cast a silver light across the mouth of the cave, hinting at lush curves and puffy peaks concealed within.
She was an offering. Empty. Nothing but a lure meant to draw the creatures of the deep ashore. A sacrifice to the divine.
As she’d always been.
Understanding brought clarity, and with it, a sense of calm washed away the dread.
It was nothing to submit, not really. Not when the force she tried to fight was unbeatable, as undeniable as the coming tide.
He would come again, and this time, Kore would let him invade. Welcome his assault with parted thighs and a graceful smile that hid what lurked beneath the surface.
Rebellion.
Tracking the passage of time between breeding sessions, she’d surrender herself to the moon. Use the tide to mark the days, just as he used it to mark her.
And then?
Her body was already lost, but her mind? It would stay sharp. Cutting and disciplined, as she’d been molded to be. A ceremonial blade meant for dark ritual beyond the comprehension of mortal vision.
Venom pulsed beneath her skin. Twitching in her muscles. Calling her to the shore.
She stood, piling stones beneath the surface of the water to mark the tide, then let the venom use her feet, bleary gaze fixed to the distant waves.
A plan. She had a plan.
The venom pulsed.
Her feet moved.
Blue light gushed through her veins.
He was coming.
And this time, she’d be ready…