Delicate.
Feminine.
Lip curling, Kore flicked it into the surf.
She didn’t see where it landed before the sea took it. Gulping it down. Greedy and immediate. There and gone before she might look again.
It was bad enough that he’d fucked her hard enough to leave her swollen and raw, but to leave pieces of himself lodged in her skin?
“Animal,” she hissed, and ignored the way her cunt flexed, her belly growing hard as her muscles pined for more. Choosing instead to watch the spot where the scale had vanished beneath the waves.
Blood trickled down her wrist, then. A thin, jagged trail veined red against the sand and surf. She stared at the spot, watching it ooze until it… stopped. Until the flesh knit before her eyes.
Her heart skipped.
Because it wasn’t possible.
Turning her bleary gaze away—a denial—she spotted a clam nestled in the sand and seized the distraction.
Lumbering forward, she stepped deeper into the surf. Chilled and sobering, the water licked at her thighs. Cooling what the sun had baked and burned.
She stooped, groaning as she moved around her own obscene girth.
Shaking, she went to her knees with a hiss, reaching for the clam…
… and froze.
Her skin caught Apollo’s divine light.
The migraine throbbed between her temples. A rainbow blur through the pain.
But she saw it.
A web of iridescence tracing her forearm. Smooth beneath the skin. Too precise, too perfect… because it was a pattern.
Scales.
Tiny and translucent, layered. An armored filigree written beneath the surface.
Not shining with the greens and purples of the beast.
These were…
A sunrise.
Pale gold, blooming into pink. Bleeding into baby coral.
“No,” she whispered, breath catching high at the back of her throat. She sat back on her heels, horrified. “No, no, no…”
She reached for the trailing edge. Tracing the razor-sharp fan of the last scale until it slipped through to the surface, sailing on a bead of crimson.
A thread of pain lanced through her nerves, but she pressed harder. Letting her nail slip beneath it, freeing it enough to tug.
The skin tented where it was attached.
Attached.
With a hitching breath, Kore tore it free and watched the blood well from the wound. Watched the bead burst free and trickle down her forearm.
