Chapter 22
She was gone.
The beach empty. The cave barren of any hint of life, except for the shallow pool swirling with the evidence of her rejection and the echoing hum of her absence.
Gills flaring in the stale air, Nyx paused. Seething, trying to catch even a whisper of her scent.
Gone.
She’d rinsed him out. Waited for low tide to give herself as much time as possible to put distance between them.
Clever little bitch.
He was almost impressed.
Sneering, he scowled at the tidal pool where his seed had been left to curdle.
Rejected.
He’d waited too long.
Tried to recover. To let the pressure in the trench stitch him back together until his gills could move freely, and his scales lay flat against blistered, tender flesh.
And in his absence, she’d been called to the sea—or taken. Her transformation nearly complete, while he’d fought the urge to resurface and drag Kore into the surf where she belonged. To stuff his knot inside that perfect, grasping slit at long last and pour the sea inside her womb.
Too long.
She was gone.
Her trail cold, already swallowed by the Black Sea.
The rage trembled in his chest, making the trident hum with a savage, dark power. The sort he hadn’t touched for too long.
Lust for blood ignited in his veins, and with a preternatural grace, he slapped his tail into the tidal pool and turned black eyes toward the sea.
She’d refused his claim.
But the Black Sea was his domain—and she would give up her secrets when commanded to obey.
The resonance howled through his ribs, turning the sand liquid as he snaked from the cave, shot over the beach, and dove into the shallows with a grace that should have been forbidden outside of the waters from whence he’d come.
Swallowed in a single gulp of slicing fins and ragged scales, he plunged into the sea that had allowed his bride passage.
Silence greeted him.
Oppressive. Whole.
Resistant, at first.
Pouring his wrath into the ancient weapon howling for carnage, he scoured the currents. Drew them through his gills and tasted the delicate ambrosia she’d left in her wake.
Faint. Diluted.
But unmistakably hers.
Slick.
Arousal thrummed through him, then, for Kore had given him a gift. The joy of a hunt.
Heart pounding with savage glee, he let his scales flare. Venting the heat kept close to his skin in preparation for the hunt.
“Flee if you must, little Siren.” Dizzy with the rush, he laughed. A wicked booming sound that sent ripples washing ashore. “The tide will return what belongs to me.”
The words echoed, a decree scrawled into the waves—carried forward as he turned his face into the current.
It was to be a hunt.
One she was wholly unequal to, his fledgling Siren.
Trident clenched in an unyielding fist, he flicked his tail and dove, but didn’t descend into the deep. He coasted through the shallows, rich with oxygen, heavy with her scent. Tireless. A force cutting through the water with inhuman precision.
The little fool had tried to wash him away.
Tried to mask her scent in the brine that called her to come, unaware how easily he could taste her.
That she was in his every breath. The current rich with the flavor of a female in desperate need of service, for without him, his venom and seed—his knot—she would ache as she’d been conditioned to suffer.
Forever changed to need what only he might give.
And nothing could fill that void.
With every breath dragged over his gills, her scent grew stronger. Bolder.
Closer.
She was there. Floundering at the surface, the poor thing. Unaware of the gift he’d given, of what she would become when she accepted his knot and sank into the role he’d crafted for her.
Surging through her wake, he grinned. She was close.
The sea moved around him, giving up its secrets. Mirroring the fever in his blood. Giddy at the memory of her mouth, the grip of her divine cleft.
He surfaced.
Fins catching the current, holding him still, he blinked against the slap of cool, night air. Massive pupils reflecting the distant glimmer of stars and silvery blanket of moonlight as he searched for the girl he’d remade to suit his monstrous needs.
Wrapping him in ribbons of cold, the current sang through his gills.
But she was nowhere.
Her trail ended, as if she’d been dragged from the sea.
The realization sent a wave of frigid cold washing over him.
She was no longer in the water.
That glimmering trail of slick and blood ended, as if she’d been plucked from the waves.
As if she’d been claimed.
By another.
The moon hung heavy in the night sky, casting a silver glow upon the black waters. He scanned the horizon with eyes meant for the purest dark. A predator’s gaze.
Still, there was no sign of her.
No hint of another Pelagorn—Abyssari or Thalassari—in the water who might have stolen her away, for she’d been plucked from the waves.
By a human.
A scream rang out.
Not the delicious sounds he’d pulled from her throat in the cave.
This was something else altogether.
Wet and broken, a desperate cry carried on the wind, but unmistakable in its haunting beauty.
A Siren’s call.
Nyx shifted his grip on the trident, and he turned toward that glorious, devastating sound. And with a single, powerful stroke, he dove, propelling himself toward the distant shore.
It was the tide that betrayed him first.
Unnatural. A ripple where there should have been stillness. A shudder passed through the current, moving in the wrong direction.
She was there.
Bound in netting.
Bent over a log, her belly pressed to driftwood. Hair tangled and matted with sand that clung in clumps of soggy grit. Legs twisted together in a cruel mockery of a glorious Pelagorn tail, he watched the shimmer of new scales as her flesh jolted and rippled with obscene impact.
And behind her?
Driving a pathetic tendril between her legs, a short little cock rutting between swollen, glittering folds.
He saw it all in painful, cutting precision.
Her debasement at the hands of another.
Not a Pelagorn.
A man.
Eyes narrowed to slits, Nyx snarled and let his rage boil the tide. Kore, his creation, defiled by hands that reeked of rot.
She cried out again, calling to him through gills that had only just split her skin. Not yet healed. Gills that hadn’t even tasted the sea before that grief-song spilled through the rift.
It was a haunting, dreadful melody born of pain and aching despair. It shook the water. Ached deep in his marrow. A keening so pure, it scraped at the edges of his soul and dragged a slurry of muddy anguish through his veins.
His every muscle tightened as he surfaced without a sound. Watching as her back arched when she braced against every thrust, helpless but to take it.
Every impact of flesh against scales twisted his wrath into a seething foam as her cunt swallowed something less than what it had been remade to take. Each shudder of jerking hips, each hiccuping, painful breath, one that would be repaid.
Nyxarion Korrides, first Sovgerine of the Black Sea, raised his trident.
The sea responded.
Current twisting, the waves lifted at his command. Trident singing with the scream of old magic, he issued a call older than bone. Older than the kings of the deep or the open ocean.
It was a call to war.
The shaft vibrated in his grip, humming with an obsidian echo of the violence churning in his blood. Seething in time with the slapping squish of flesh on scale as his bride was rutted like day-old carrion.
It was a summons, an answer to every trespass man had made against the high seas.
He slammed the trident into the current… and hefted the three prongs into the air once more.
Drawing the poisonous waters up before sending them down.
Again.
And again.
Over and over and over, until he’d summoned a black wall of vengeance tipped in foaming white caps.
It rose from the deep.
Carried forward without wind or moon or tide, frothing and foaming. The messenger of a debt to be repaid.
It was wrath.
Retribution.
The man fucking his bride couldn’t tear his greedy eyes from the stolen treasure milking his gummy little prick. Didn’t have time to turn, or blink, or beg.
But she did.
Watching with wide, black eyes, her gaze traced the wall of water with something that tempered the rage squalling in Nyx’s black heart, and fed it something… wicked.
And then she smiled.
It was the man’s turn to scream, and he did it as the wave crested, washing away whatever sticky little squirt he’d managed to pump inside her before he was simply… gone.
Flesh peeled from bone.
A corpse tumbled through the unnatural current. Dragged down and broken, shredded across trees and rocks, mouth agape in an endless, eternal scream.
Tangled in netting, swept through the wave with a cry that made the black waters shiver and dance, Kore was liberated.
Gasping.
Bound.
The net pulled tight around her limbs—arms locked behind her, eyes wide, and hair a chaotic lashing halo. And her lips, they gaped wide open around a breath that couldn’t come.
Helpless without him to guide her.
Held immobile where she was suspended. Afloat.
Weightless.
A drowned bride held aloft by the tide, tangled in her own foolish folly, naked and shimmering for his pleasure. Her throat arched, and she thrashed, legs flailing against inevitability.
Her death.
For her life as a human was over.
And her rebirth as a Siren?
Glistening skin speckled with scales that caught the light as the earth was washed away. Her eyes were wide, limbs slack, drifting as the wave swallowed her whole and let her fall.
Cutting through the surf, Nyxarion lashed at the current. Snaking through the carnage he’d summoned, fins stretched to sail through the turbulent waters, he rose.
Stretching one massive hand forward, the other on his trident, he claimed her. Tearing through the net with deadly claws, Nyxarion pulled her from its grasp and freed her from the trappings of humanity once and for all.
Head lolling, the girl was pliable in his grip.
Unconscious.
Her gills a seam beneath her jaw that did not flutter or gape.
Panic bubbled in his chest, then.
The flash of memory a cruel reminder of the bride he’d lost.
But the creature in his grip twitched. Still warm, heat radiating from gleaming skin in lazy pulses. Growing weaker, she was fading with every moment lost beneath the surface.
Drowning.
“No,” Nyx snarled, straining not to boil the water around her. “I will not lose another.”
Pressing his lips to those that were cold and slack, he forced a breath into her lungs. Thumb adding a gentle pressure to the seam where her gills were meant to filter oxygen from water.
And so he felt it when that flesh flickered. Weak, at first. A tremor unused to the never-ending work ahead.
Suspended in his grasp, Kore twitched.
Muscles lurching as she fought his claim to the very end.
He kissed her.
Tongue dipping inside, tasting her in his element at long last. Breathing for her, until those delicate slits behind her jaw shivered open. Wider.
And then she inhaled.
Water flooded her lungs.
Her pulse kicked beneath his claws, that stubborn flicker of resilience that had drawn him in, given new life in the heart of a Siren.
“Yield,” he murmured, holding them in place as he cleansed her world and relieved her enemy of his pale life. “Open your eyes and sing for me, little Siren.”
Her lips parted on a watery gasp. Blinking, she stared at her king with wide, shocked eyes.
“H-how?” she asked with the last breath of pure, wretched oxygen. It was a voice born for the trench. A voice laced with pain. Shame. Hunger and need.
“This ocean belongs to me,” he said, clutching her delicate form to his chest. “And now, so do you.”