Molten heat gushed between her legs, soaking her thighs. Pooling on the stone beneath her, she wetted tattered robes in a rush of shameful arousal she couldn’t fight. The wound in her thigh all but forgotten.
“Please,” she whispered, “I don’t—I can’t?—”
She was sodden.
Ashamed.
Feet slipping in the wet, she squirmed. Thighs gliding where she was slick and oozing, her flesh swollen. Ripe. Agitating what was meant to be chaste.
What had been promised to her Lord Apollo, before it had been desecrated by a slave trader and now… poisoned by a beast.
Horrified, she squealed and felt that heat curl low. Pooling between her hips. Twisting with a power she couldn’t begin to fathom.
A wet, rasping breath spattered over the beast’s lips…
… and a cord was plucked. Tied to her ichor, that sound strummed at something deep and primal. Something woven through muscle and marrow. A hooked barb that dragged a sob from her chest, even as it brought forth another creamy gush.
At first, the beast was still, but for the unsettling flap of gills flexing below his jaw.
And then… his lips twitched.
A smile stretched over gleaming, pearlescent teeth in exactly the right way to keep her pinned in place. Stuck.
It was a horrible thing, his smile.
Because it was… hungry.
Ravenous.
His gills rippled on a cough.
And with a huff, he lifted the heavy coil of his tail and twisted deeper into the cave. Snaking closer. Every movement serpentine. Alien. So utterly foreign, Kore couldn’t so much as draw breath as he surged forward with a methodical grace that was at once repulsive and hypnotic.
At his approach, her heart thrashed. A pathetic flail that pushed the venom into every secret, forbidden part of her. All the hidden corners that had been promised to the glory of Apollo’s gaze were corrupted by something… desperate.
Something wonton and wicked, for it was no longer a mere flutter in her throat, but a deep, rhythmic throb centered between her trembling thighs.
A whimper escaped her, then. Eyes wide, dread flushed hot in cheeks stained red with mortified heat. “Please,” she rasped again. A quiet, desperate plea—not to the beast, but to the Lord she’d forsaken. “Please, please save me.”
Kore twisted her fingers in a mockery of Apollo’s sacred symbol. A stumbling, broken version of the prayer she'd offered since she'd been given to the temple. It was a trembling, desperate invocation against the monster looming before her. Pitiful. A thing already half forgotten.
A laugh echoed between them, making her ribs tremble. Cruel and low. It was a ripple of sound that skated over her skin like a whip, but landed with the crashing weight of the sea.
Inhuman.
He inched closer, heat radiating from scaled flesh she could feel even in the cold depths of her chosen prison. But it wasn't the cruel gleam, nor the sinister intent glimmering in his alien glare.
It was the angry thing jutting up from below his belly button.
A cock.
She'd heard the word grunted through browning teeth in the slave market. Heard it hissed above her as a man who'd paid toown her had helped himself to what had always been saved to honor Apollo.
But this was no tender spear of human flesh.
Her gaze was fixed to a thing that defied all reason.
It was to be her doom.
