It was a challenge that nearly toppled her. Her center of balance sent her heaving too far forward. Hands flying out, she clung to the cave wall, fingers hooked into claws. Protecting her belly, where it protruded before her.
Sweat ran in tacky rivulets down her temples, soaking her hair. But she persisted as she’d been taught. Clawing her way out, she left the cave where she’d been fucked by a beast, and collapsed in the sand with a cry of triumph.
The tide splashed against the shore. Mocking her. Each lapping wave pushed a little higher as the sea encroached. Foamy peaks capped with the dying sun, stained purple and crimson.
She stayed until the sweat cooled and dried on her skin, replaced by the kiss of seafoam and dew. Stayed until the sun slipped beneath the waves and drowned in the distant sea.
Motionless. Her limbs aching with the burden of the beast’s venom, his sperm and cruel grip… but most of all, it was the weight of her own complicity.
Her shame.
“I’m sorr?—”
Choking, she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Couldn’t muster the apology because she had no idea where she could even begin to atone for what she’d done.
So she sat in the surf. Staring as the tide rose to lave at her toes, kissing her shins… suckling at her knees. She stayed until her thighs prickled with foam splashing across the shore.
Only then did she scramble back. Shocked back into herself by the knowledge that he was still out there. Lurking where she could not see.
That he was not finished with her.
Not yet.
“I am a priestess of Delphi,” she whispered. Forcing steel into her blood, Kore stood and scowled at the surf. “And I will not be taken.”
She needed a weapon. Some method to defend herself against a god.
Food. Water.
Resources that would enable her defiance—anything and everything she might use as a means to resist.
Trembling, Kore shook off the daze. Hands cupping the swell of her inflated belly, swaying in the dark, she paused. Took a breath. And turned her back on the sea. Tugging the scraps of her robes around her nudity, she concealed puffy nipples from the bite of chilly wind and trudged through the sea foam, determined to master the haunting dark.
It was a slog.
A brutal trek through wet sand, limping to avoid overusing her wounded leg still throbbing with venom, she set her eyes to the eastern end of the island and began to march. Pacing the water’s edge, she hauled her swollen belly. Her eyes flicking through the dark as she explored her prison. This lonely spit of land in the heart of some unknown sea.
But there was nothing. Nothing but a limestone hill, a beach, and a cave sliced into stone from aeons of crashing tidal waves.
It took her less than two hundred paces to find the edge of the beach—she counted. Encountering crumbling boulders vanishing beneath the waves. Treacherous in full daylight, but at night? Without so much as a sliver of moon to guide her way?
She whimpered.
Hugging her rags around herself, she took a trembling breath and turned back.
But the Western limit was much the same, only here, the wind slapped her face and mocked her tears, sending her stumbling back to the beach.
There was only the cave itself. Cut into stone, a sheer face of rock. A hysterical laugh bubbled from her lips, for she stumbled toward the only whisper of freedom with a single thought in her foggy head.
The beast was enormous.
A master of his element,yes, utterly uncontested. But here? On land? Such a creature could not climb.
Kore rushed toward the rock wall. Where gulls had gathered sticks to hold their eggs, where they might watch the trials below from lofty perches. Bleary-eyed in the night.
She scrambled atop a boulder, standing on the balls of her feet. Fingers outstretched, she grasped the biting edge of a handhold and tried to heft herself up.
But she was ungainly.
