Chapter 18
She was clean.
Consecrated.
Unbroken by the cruelty of men.
“The Oracle commands you to give,” the high priest murmured in a voice that echoed and shivered, licking thin lips. Watery eyes watching her from beneath a heavy hood. “Your lord Apollo commands you to break.”
Bowing her head, heart in her throat, Kore nodded. Letting spotted, aged hands push the robes from her shoulders to reveal the nudity hidden beneath scratchy wool. He guided her back, spreading her across the altar where he would spill vestal blood to bless the Spartan army.
Kore submitted as she was trained to do.
Watching dust motes spin through shafts of sunlight, painting Apollo’s inner sanctum in brilliant golds and deepest purples, she lay beneath a doughy weight and trembling forearms. Staring up at the high vault in the heart of the temple.
The stone cool beneath naked flesh, her shoulder blades cutting into the unforgiving granite, her nose stinging with the scent of charred rosemary and sage.
She was warm. Floating.
Unable to feel the priest’s probing fingers, his frantic thrusts, for his paltry efforts were eclipsed. Drowned out by the monstrous ache already pulsing inside her.
Demanding every wayward drop of attention she might spare.
The sunbeam narrowed, growing sharp and cruel. Slicing at her skin with treacherous, savage heat. Burning what it touched—her arms and face, shoulders and spine—forcing her to cower away from Apollo’s unforgiving glare.
She hissed at the pain and turned to the dark. To the cool embrace of the deep.
She was pulled under.
Forced to the crushing depths, beneath the impossible weight of an Athenian trireme. Pinned to the sea floor, her lungs filled with the sea, while her belly was filled to bursting with brine…
She woke with a gasp and found herself pinned, face pressed to stone.
Not crushed beneath the shattered hull of a warship, this was not the weight of wood or wreckage.
It was flesh.
Slick. Scaled. Achingly familiar. Pussy already wrenched wide open, she’d been stuffed with a pressure she’d come to know. One that swelled from inside. One she craved.
He was back.
Fucking her into the stone with the sort of desperate savagery she’d never known possible before she’d drowned. Rutting into her from behind, his weight a burden on her slender body as he worked her tight sheath and forced it to accept all that was inhuman and vicious.
There was a fury in his grip. His thrusts brutal and erratic. Not the calculated rhythm of the divine creature with intelligent designs upon her flesh, but the animalistic beat of a mindless rut. Something wild. Punishing and cruel.
Fingers clawing at his belly, she cried out as he pummelled her from above.
“Pl-please!” she moaned into the stone, stuttering and breathless as his cock shoved inside her. Crushing her lungs with each heavy thrust. “What have I done?”
His answer was a wet, wordless snarl. Cruel fingers tipped her hips up until her back was made to arch, and desperate hands braced against the wet cave floor were the only thing stopping her from being folded in half.
Until she was wide open for his vicious attention and he was sheathed so deep inside her, she could feel her belly tenting with every shove.
A whimper escaped her lips, half moaned, half guttural sob. But her hips lurched to meet him all the same.
Betrayed by her body. By the gooey slick gushing from her sodden channel, squelching from her depths with every invasion of the colossus reshaping her insides.
Something was wrong.
Different.
There was no careful foreplay. No practiced, restrained ritual she could feel in his every movement. No burning ache of venom pulsing through her blood. His movements were utterly absent any hint of breathy hunger drawn out between clashing bodies.
There was only fury.
Claw digging into her hips, his thrusts nudged her forward, then dragged her back. Scraping her skin across the stone. “Pl-please! I-I can’t—”
He snarled above her, misting her shoulders with spittle. And his claws—digging into muscle, too tight—dimpled her flesh with bruising force. Anchoring her in place, nailing her down as she was made to take the vengeful drive of a monster unmaking her in the dark.
Stone grinding against her cheek with every punishing stroke, Kore felt it building and knew she was doomed. Climax. Unholy lust for what he was doing to her. Inside her.
She reached and felt the shift between man and leviathan, fingers slipping against warm skin, then sharp scale. And, digits curling, she took what he rained down upon her. The sound of slapping flesh filled the cave. Obscene and wet.
It was always wet now.
She tried to twist, to peer at his face and understand.
“Why?” she whispered, desperate to know why it felt cruel this time. Like he was just a man enacting vengeance upon a woman’s flesh, and not… not what he’d been before.
He didn’t answer, of course.
Merely tore a sharp, broken sob from her throat.
Pussy fluttering, she clenched around him. Her belly stretched taut as she was sent hurtling toward the edge of that cliff, rounding with each brutal pump. The curve of it was obscene. Lewd. Alive.
Because his cock was too thick. Too long. Too gods damned much.
But she took it anyway.
Every last inch was gobbled up and milked for the pleasure only he could give.
Beast or not.
Cruel or kind.
Venom or lust.
It didn’t matter.
The walls of her sodden cunt spasmed and sucked him deeper. A breathless chant rattling through slack jaws, she murmured, “Yes, yes, yes. Gods, give me more. Please, please, I’m almost—”
Snarling above her, breath ragged and bloody, he worked her over with single-minded intent.
Still, he drove her into the stone. Pulsing and shaking, as if desperate to fuck her full of sperm. To replace what she’d given to the sea.
Kore gasped as the bubble of ecstasy building between her hips bulged tighter, then burst. Her thighs flexed hard enough to shake as the world grew blurry at the edges. Climax washing over her, a grateful, ragged moan spilled from her lips.
She was full.
A wet grunt broke the silence.
Kore blinked, twisting, slow and stiff. Her spine arched in protest as she tried again to look.
And then she saw him.
Poseidon’s son loomed above her. A god at the altar, a specter of war. Blood dripping in slow, syrupy pulses from the slashed vents of his gills. His every breath was heavy, a ragged rasp that sprayed her cheeks red as he gazed with glassy, sightless eyes.
He wasn’t looking at her.
Not really.
No, his pupils were blown wide—his gaze slicing through her as he stared somewhere she couldn’t see and wasn’t invited to go.
It was a look she recognized.
His arms trembled where they bracketed her body, shoulders locked and straining as he fought the clenching waves of her climax, and began to thrust anew. Instinct driving him to empty his balls into her womb.
A gust of wind blew touseled, sweat-slicked hair around his face—and something massive and glittering slapped across her brow.
A scale.
Green and blue, speckled with purple iridescent flakes. This one as large as her palm.
She looked beyond clenched muscle, quivering belly, and saw… carnage.
The scales lining his tail were flaking off in glittering ribbons.
Blinking, dazed with the shock of an incredible climax, her brain was slow to grasp this new reality.
That his body, sculpted by gods, terrible yet divine… it was coming apart.
No matter that he’d fucked her like he was trying to outpace death.
The truth struck her with enough force to make her gasp.
He was dying.
It was there in the way his jaws gaped open, in the hair clinging to his forehead in dark strands.
In the blood glistening where his gills fluttered and clapped, each gasping breath sending a red mist peppering the air between them.
And his eyes—pupils yawning wide and inky black—they gleamed with an inhuman, feral intent.
Merciless and unyielding, obviously in excruciating pain.
Because he was dying.
And yet, he continued to breed her.
“What—what’s happening to you?” she asked, voice a hoarse rasp edged with panic.
The beast only snarled.
Grinding against the most tender parts of a body that should have broken days ago. Her womb clenched, suckling at his tip. Begging for his offering.
“Please,” she whispered, reaching to cup his cheek, her voice breaking. “Please stop.”
Her body betrayed even that, hips rolling to meet his next thrust. Fluttering with the ache to be stretched. Owned. Ruined and remade.
It was his turn to groan, and it was a sound that made her eyes sting.
He was collapsing. Weight pressing her thighs wider still, his rhythm shuddering. Breath growing wetter as he choked on blood, and still—still—he drove himself in to the root. Forcing one final surge deep into her core.
It was the last.
With a snarl that lacked any whisper of finesse, he came.
An unholy sound that ripped through his chest and splattered against her shoulder. Wetting her cheek.
Sending a molten flood of cum rushing through the mouth of her womb.
Squealing, Kore tried to buck the pleasure stabbing through her with a broken, “Gods, I can’t… Please… stop…”
A lie.
A floundering attempt at selflessness. The sort of chastity she was sworn to uphold.
It didn’t stop her from climaxing as her womb ballooned with the volume. Body jerking with the waves of pleasure, her belly distended with the obscene fullness. Spine bowing, her cunt spasmed around him. Gaping. Clenching and milking. Training to take all he might give, and keep it sealed inside.
She saw the pain ripple across his face, marring his brow. Watching as his muscles clenched, his jaw bunching at the corner as he shivered above her.
Kore saw the effort it took, for she’d been raised to sacrifice. Trained to endure so others might prosper.
And she knew.
There was a price.