Not desire.
Need.
She crawled.
Ass upturned, gushing where she gaped, belly distended where it all but dragged through the sand.
Fingers trembling, Kore scooped a clot of cream into her palm.
Rescuing it from the sand.
And with a whimper, the vessel drank…
CHAPTER 15
Bubbles bled from his gills. Tiny fizzing things that tickled as he drifted through the current. Sinking, while he tried to simply draw breath through ravaged filaments. His every wound burning with the sting of brine.
Eyes that were meant for the dark had a disturbing white cast that lent a fog to everything he could see. His fins were blistered and oozing, sunburned and crisped from exposure, and his scales—once the envy ofPelagornfrom the deepest trench to the warmest shallows—were curling. Peeling up at the edges.
He welcomed it.
The pain.
It was the price. Merely what he must endure in exchange for fucking his sun-kissed bride through her transformation. His divine flame. His obedient little whore, who spread those flimsy legs as wide as they might go and welcomed him inside. She’d commanded him to break her, the wild little thing.
Feckless, beautiful fool.
So eager to be his.
Kore Dionari.
His divine flame.
Perfect. A symbol of what he meant to do, the taboo he’d committed by taking a human from the sun, so he could drown her in the trench.
Her name rolled through his mind, making his cock throb, still swollen with the ghost of her scent. Echoing the moment she’d broken open around him.
Kore. Kore. Kore.
Soon.
It wouldn’t be long before he could have her completely.
Black and endless, the trench yawned beneath him. A distant glow of bioluminescent blue calling to him from the deep. He sank, fins tattered and sailing as he folded in on himself, letting the pressure mend what the surface had ruined.
Blood heavy and thick, he snaked into the dark.
His passage disturbed the reef larvae still drifting through the trench—they clung to the tears in his scorched hide. Brushing against seared flesh and shredded scales.
A greeting from the Raskoril, his parasitical reef, they tasted his wounds. Cleaning away dead, flaking tissue. Feeding.
He thrummed, making the water tremble. Summoning the remaining larvae, he sent a purr rattling through his gills, letting the Resonance drum deep in his chest.
Shrouded in a cloud of ravenous larvae, Nyx sank through the heavy dark until the basin revealed itself. A bloom of soft light pulsing in the abyss.
In his absence, the reef had grown. Whole spires risen from volcanic vents of black heat. The entire basin breathed life into the deep.
An incredible feat, but one that could not sustain his bride. Not until the reef could produce enough oxygen-rich water to keep her alive, at so fragile a point in her transformation.
