Cheeks wet with the congealing salt of her guilt.
Holding one hand out, trying to twist fumbling fingers into some forgotten pattern, she hiccuped through a sob and set her free hand to work. Plunging two fingers down her throat, she gagged. Bringing up what had been so eagerly choked down, she vomited into the surf. Expelling everything she’d swallowed, returning it to the sea from whence it had come, purging until she was left shaking and empty.
Weak.
Exhausted.
The setting sun bled violet and black, streaking the horizon with angry accusation before surrendering to the night once more.
She’d failed.
Again.
Blinking, freed of the pain of searing light, Kore stared at the waves.
She’d failed.
Utterly.
Her prayers had fallen on the wrong ears.
Her skin throbbed with pain from Apollo’s rejection, already bubbling where she’d been burned so badly it hurt to simply breathe.
But still, through the fog of heartbreak and delirium, she ached. Throbbing where she’d been defiled. Needy where she’d been made to sample something divine.
Dejected, she stood.
A glow caught her eye.
Faint.
Blue.
Luminous.
It was pulsing through her veins, just beneath the surface of her skin. An eerie light show, both beautiful and… horrifying, for it was a map of something ancient. Wrong.
“Gods,” she rasped. “No.”
Venom.
She could see it. Knew at a glance that she’d been filled with something so much more insidious than semen.
And with trembling hands, she searched. Touching herself, tracing aching skin, until she found it at the top of her left thigh.
A wound.
Small.
Raised.
Dimpled in the center. A crater where she’d been barbed with another dose of the toxin that had enthralled her so. Deafened her to Apollo’s love as she was enslaved to something beyond her comprehension. Something carnal and lewd.
Something that demanded all of her—everything she’d never known to give.
Bluish veins spidered out from the center of that wound. Glowing in the encroaching night.
Clenching around nothing, Kore willed herself to be disgusted by that otherworldly glow. Convulsing around an offensive emptiness, she forced her lips to form around the sacred words of her youth. Trying to summon what had been beaten into her as she knelt at Apollo’s altar.
