She didn’t want to look.
So her hand moved instead. Trembling, sliding across feverish skin, until she encountered the swell.
Still there.
Still achingly full.
Proof that the impossible was real. That she’d begged a god—her god—to save her, but another had answered. A darker one.
A leviathan.
From the deep.
A beast with a single thought, driven by primal instinct to breed female flesh. Willing or not.
Her hand slid lower, toward the slick throb pounding between her legs.
A gasp shattered the oppressive silence, then.
Swollen, slippery skin came alive at the slightest touch. Her mound was raw, gooey with something that slipped but couldn’t be wiped away. Gelatinous ropes hardened where they’d been left to dry.
But her clit?
It screamed.
Her core clenching around a plug of something solid, she couldn’t help but trace that sensitive bundle of bulbous nerves.
A tiny climax shuddered through her. Hardly provoked, a thing she’d never experienced before the beast—not even in the divine chambers of Apollo’s consecrated holy men. Those chosen to spill virgin blood across the altar in the heart of Delphi.
It was the venom.
She knew.
Even through the haze of climax, her fingers a fumbling blur of desperation, she knew—how unnatural this fog really was. That if she’d been meant to climb such a delirious peak for any, it should have been the holy men who served Apollo.
And yet…
Kore could feel it moving through her blood, whispering the secrets of the sea through her veins. Throbbing in time with the pulse pounding in her sex.
Too depleted to cry, she squeezed her eyes shut and saw a flash in the sparkling dark. A canvas on which to paint her torment, where she couldn’t escape. Fragments of something sinister danced just beyond her grasp. The weight of that impossible body atop hers, scales grating against her skin.
And the relentless thrust of an inhuman cock filling her.
“Gods,” she whispered. Had he returned to her? Taking advantage of helpless flesh while she’d been enthralled in the grip of unconsciousness? “No,” she rasped, denying it. It was the venom playing tricks. Nothing more.
Gritting her teeth, she tried to push herself up. Tried to flee, and only managed to stagger and slip. She collapsed, the impact sending a ripple of movement sloshing through her. It was as if the very sea itself had been pumped inside her, churning with the fury of the tides.
“No,” she said again, teeth bared. Determination scrawled across her brow. She would not give in—a priestess of Apollo wastrained to resist the dark, and so she would fight it to her very last breath.
A gull cried. Drawing her slitted gaze to the world outside these desecrated walls.
Night. It had begun to blanket all her eyes could see. Everything they couldn’t.
And she was alone.
Baring her teeth, ears popping as she clenched her jaw, Kore fought to stand. Despite the throbbing, tender flesh begging for relief, the bruises and chaffed skin, and the belly full of poisonous cum. Sweating, breath coming in great, heaving gulps, she claimed her feet and wobbled in the dusk.
“Just one step,” she whispered to no one, because there was only the dark. “Just take one, single step.”
