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.
