Chapter 20
Blinking awake, Kore shifted back to consciousness. Groggy and gasping, spine rattling against stone.
Silence.
Not peace. Not safety.
Just the absence of deep, rattling breath. Of scales slapping skin.
Alone.
He was gone.
It should have brought relief. Instead? Dread hummed in the back of her mind. The memory of that ravaged body, limp and all but lifeless in the surf, sinking into the deep.
Heat kissed her cheeks when she thought of what she’d done to bring him back.
That she’d slipped her hand inside him to draw that colossus…
out. Feasting on the taste of him, she’d gulped him down.
Her hands were slick when she’d rolled massive, heavy balls through the tight slit guarding his genitals. Coaxing them into the air.
To save him.
She’d done it… to save him.
Clenching, her pussy remembered the lie.
And her body… Gods.
Her thighs were sticky. Bruised. Pussy swollen and tender, aching from the inside out. Her throat was dry. Sore. Fucked raw.
Brine lingered on her palate. Salt burning in every crevice, sand stuck in places the sun priests of Delphi had never thought to warn her about.
Stretching, Kore reached toward the sea—and froze.
There was something stuck between her fingers.
Rolling around her belly, Kore sat up. Slow. Stiff. Her every movement a reminder of the monster who’d marked her, but one she ignored as she stared at her hands.
Webbing.
Delicate, gossamer petals stretched between her spread fingers.
Just a pearlescent shimmer, but the skin was tender. Reddened. Sensitive and painful, the skin between each digit was swollen with a blister ready to split.
Horror made her stomach churn, but she prodded the delicate membrane with one trembling finger.
Sensation lit her nerves with an electric reality.
She was growing webbing between her fingers.
Standing, Kore wobbled into the blinding glare of the sun. Hissing against the bright light, she stretched her fingers, wide as they might go—and saw the glitter of scales breaking through the skin.
“Please,” she whispered through a broken sob. “Gods, no.”
Her voice was wrong. Hoarse and ravaged. But that was to be expected, wasn’t it? After what she’d done? After what she’d swallowed?
Licking cracked lips, Kore lifted someone else’s hands to her brow. Hiding sensitive eyes from the sun. Heart beating through her chest, pounding behind her eyes, felt in the puffy, tender skin aching all over her body. Everything that throbbed and screamed for attention, all at once.
Her jaw flexed. Sore at the corners.
Not with bruises, not from gaping wide around a cock that had no business plumbing her throat.
It was something else. An internal twinge that flexed with her every breath.
She’d done damage to herself, then. Broken something essential when she’d let him fuck himself empty down her throat.
There’d been a purpose in her madness. A need beyond filling her belly, or dying alone on this forgotten spit of land.
Kore crouched, hands braced and spread wide in the sand. Trying not to see the alien glitter of scales, nor the webbing stretched taut between her fingers, she hiccuped. Belly tight, too full, distended.
She retched. Stringy bile splashed into the sand, but that was all.
Because she’d already absorbed what he’d pumped into her gut. Already made him a part of her. It was right there, in the sparkle growing beneath her skin, in the ocean of sperm sealed away inside her treacherous cunt.
He was inside her, this beast from the deep.
Changing her from the inside out.
Wiping her hand against her thigh, she braced herself for this new reality.
That he might not come back.
Might already be dead, drifting somewhere in the current.
And if he was?
She would soon follow. Marooned alone on a spit of rock in the middle of a forgotten, nameless sea.
Gritting her teeth, Kore turned and staggered into the cool embrace of the dark—and tripped over a pile of stones.
The tide markers.
Rocks she’d piled at the edge of the tide to time his absence between… sessions.
A breathless laugh escaped her, then, and she pressed her hand flat to the wall of the cave.
The tide was at its lowest point. Water lapping at stones well below the edge of the sandy beach.
The beast was ravaged by his own nefarious purposes, his fate unknown.
And the cave… it was a sanctuary from the sun for as long as it took for her to starve, or… worse.
Then? The cave would become her coffin.
“No,” Kore said again, but this time, there was fire in the denial. “Not for me.”
He’d left her with a belly bulging with promise, the command to keep what he’d sewn obvious, even without a shared language between them.
Dragging herself over to the deepest tidal pool, way in the back of the cave, Kore paused at the edge. Eyes fixed to the gentle ripple of the water trapped in a shallow basin, and not… not the reflection of a girl she didn’t know staring back at her.
It would hide her lie.
Give her the time she needed to escape, so the beast couldn’t smell himself in the current and return with punishment in his heart.
She slipped into the cool water.
Spread her legs.
Sending trembling fingers down, over the foreign swell of her belly, she touched what he’d left slimy and slick with shame. Spread puffy petals with two fingers, then dipped inside.
Cold and sharp, salt water rushed inside, and her body bucked against the shock of intrusion.
A guttural moan tore free of her lips, making the damage in her throat flutter and kick at the corner of her jaw. A low, shocked sound she didn’t recognize as human.
The salt stung. Lighting nerves she didn’t know she had, with a pleasure she wasn’t sure existed.
She found it quickly. The plug. Wedged inside her, a grotesque mockery of the maidenhead she’d given to a god who’d never bothered to answer her prayers.
Grunting, Kore sent her fingers deeper, spreading those digits wide to let the sea creep inside.
“Take it back,” she groaned, curling her fingers. “Please. Take it… back…”
Pumping, she guided the salty water toward the plug, pressing against that spongy head glued inside her.
And felt it melt.
Dissolving in slow, sickening gushes, ropes of sperm spilled into the tidal pool, floating on the surface with an oily sheen. Thick and cloudy, milk-white smoke curling through the water.
She watched it.
Couldn’t look away. Utterly hypnotized by the sheer volume that came pouring from between her thighs.
Fingers working of their own accord, rough with the scrape of new scales, she explored her pussy.
She came.
Unexpected. Violent.
An orgasm shattered what little remained of her modesty—her body was seized in a fist of blinding pleasure.
Hips bucking, the fingers of her free hand curled around the edge of the pool as she spasmed and lurched.
Bearing down as each wave of climax crashed through her nerves, Kore sent another torrent of sperm splashing into the water.
Until the tidal pool churned with it.
Until she was empty.
Purged.
Sweating, she took a breath that ached below her ears and stood on legs that had gone jiggly and loose. Belly flat, pressure gone, she staggered toward the mouth of the cave with steel in her blood.
The sun was merciless above.
Unforgiving, blister-bright heat lashed her shoulders, peeling at her skin in angry ribbons.
Kore walked anyway.
Clambering over rocks exposed by low tide and slick with algae, she moved with a purpose. Away from the last place she’d seen that monstrous tail fluke slip beneath the waves. Stumbling over barnacles until her feet were raw, she marched through seaweed that clung.
And then, trembling and sick, she stepped into the sea.
Splashing into frigid water with a hiss, Kore didn’t look back.
Not once.
Offering no last glance at the cave where she’d been imprisoned, she simply walked until she reached the edge of her tiny world.
Until a shelf of coastal bedrock dropped away, where the beach bled into the abyss, and there was nothing but the sea and sky. Seafoam hissing at her back, the yawning blackness of the bottomless deep below her.
It was hypnotic, the abyss. A lure that beckoned her to slip under and know what it was to be him.
Salt washed over her lips, flooding her throat and burning chapped lips. Kore plunged beneath the waves, the chill striking her with a slap as ice washed over blistered flesh.
She choked on a gasp. Her throat caught on at the edges of the shock.
Body seizing, muscles locked, lurched toward the surface. Bursting through into the air, she sobbed as she choked. Terrified screams cawing over a ravaged voice, left breathless in the chill, she dipped beneath the surface again.
Only once. Just long enough to see the fathomless black and feel the weight of the deep for what it really was.
Endless.
Her limbs thrashed in an ugly, graceless panic. Legs thrashing. Muscles screaming as agony speared through her bones.
But she didn’t stop.
She kicked again, hard.
Spreading her fingers, an instinct seized her as she clawed toward the surface. The water grew thick in her hands, caught in a grip no longer quite human, she was propelled to the surface with a speed that made her gasp.
The water gave.
Parting around her as she sliced through, gliding as she burst through to the surface. Sucking in a breath that ached and burned at the back of her jaw, Kore blinked the salt from her eyes and kept swimming.
And swimming.
Eyes glassy and fixed to the distant horizon. Where waves crashed against the swollen underbelly of blackened storm clouds.
Swimming, swimming, swimming.
Absent purpose or direction.
One stroke after the next.
She lost track of time. Her body and mind. Everything drifted with the current, caught in the lull of waves and the burn in her shoulders.
There was nothing but the next kick. The next stroke.
She swam through pain and fear.
Not strong or fast. Absent grace or wild, determined purpose.
She simply moved with whatever remained in a dying body until her arms dragged through the water in weakened arcs. Until her jaws sagged on ragged gasps, as the sea flooded her throat and burned her lungs.
One kick.
Another.
Her body moving for nothing but a shred of fragile instinct that commanded survival. Growing weaker with every lurch toward a destination that offered no hope.
No distant sighting of land.
The horizon mocked her. Taunting her with an endless wash of grey turning black. As the sun turned away from her plight, and the night swallowed anything that might’ve once felt like hope.
Fingers aching as she cut through the water, Kore felt the webbing stretch with every stroke.
And gods… she was so tired.
Her head dipped under.
For a heartbeat. Two.
The water held her in an embrace, cradled.
Spluttering, she surfaced with a gasp. Shoulders burning, muscles screaming for her to stop. To give in and just… find peace.
She coughed again and felt it ripple beneath the corner of her jaw, but the sound was hollow. Empty. The particular tang of iron flooded her mouth, metallic and sharp.
A wave slapped her.
Something brushed her thigh. Soft. Silken.
A fragile, weak scream tore through her reedy throat. The sound was barely a whisper.
Legs jerking, she tried to kick and thrash, but her limbs had grown leaden. Too heavy. Weighted down by the promise pulling her into the gloom.
Her head dipped again.
She let it.
Blinking, she found the salt didn’t burn her eyes so badly anymore. And she watched the last light of the sun as it shimmered above. Distorted by the waves.
Below her, in the deep blue abyss, something cold twisted around her knee. Slipping lower, to caress her ankles before it was swept away—a lure, the promise of what lay below her.
Dragged down, floating just beneath the surface, she tried to kick but couldn’t rise. Buoyant. Cocooned by the sea.
Wrapped in seafoam and shadow.
Just as her sisters had been. Drowned at the bottom of the Aegean, dragged to the bottom by an Athenian trireme.
It came slow, the realization. The sense of the familiar was a sluggish memory that teased at the edge of her mind, for she’d been here before.
And it hadn’t been an escape.
It was a new beginning.
She let her body sink.
A wave crested, sending her tumbling, forcing her up for just a moment. Enough for her to take a shocked breath of air before she was pushed under once more.
The sea seeped between her lips, slicked her throat, spilling into her lungs in tiny sips that made her insides burn.
Below… blackness that was somehow… welcoming, despite the profound absence. No bedrock or limit. Just an infinite, yawning scream. An ancient hunger that throbbed with a living heartbeat she could feel thrumming through her marrow.
Beckoning.
Closing her eyes against the void, Kore let her head fall back as the warmth was washed away from her fingers and toes.
This was how her sisters had died.
Left to the tide, swallowed whole. Sacrificed for a deity who’d turned away from their desperate prayers.
Thunk.
The sound echoed, forcing her eyes to snap open.
Thunk.
It was the dull slap of wood on wood.
Thunk.
Foreign and jarring. A sound that had no business in the middle of this forgotten sea where she was meant to drown. Forgotten. Cold.
Thunk.