He didn’t just want her swollen and full, oh no. This time, he’d see her ruined with it.
He’d either rut her over the broken corpse of his enemies or punish her for daring to flee.
Vibrating in his grip, the trident shimmered, eager for battle. Humming with the thirst for carnage. To pin her to the beach and make her learn exactly who she belonged to.
He burst from the surf with a snarl.
Eyes scanning the brilliant, radiant sunlit beach for traitors.
White-hot agony lanced through his lungs, but he didn’t slow. The sun blindingly hot overhead, salting the flayed strips of scales peeling from his flesh.
None of it mattered.
She had gone into the surf. Dared to flee.
And he would make her pay.
Trident gripped tight, the shaft bit his palm, and drank his fury. Feasting on the rage. Luxuriating in the tempest boiling his blood.
The beach shimmered ahead.
Utterly absent any hint ofPelagorn—ThalassariorAbyssari.
So she’d tried to flee, then.
He grinned, and it was terrible.
Propelling himself from the surf, Nyx slithered. Planting the trident into the beach, carving deep gouges in the stone of unseen bedrock, he moved. Labourious. Determined. Ignoring the blistered skin, the flaking scales. The coppery tang of blood from gills straining to draw enough oxygen into his lungs.
He was a storm.
Something possessed.
Gills clattering with effort, he inhaled the blistering air. A thunderous scowl marred his brow. Eyes gone dark as pitch scanned the beach for his wayward prize and found her absent.
Wrath, pure and unfiltered, threatened to consume him, for she wasn’t in the surf. Not sprawled out on the beach.
She was gone.
For a moment, panic threatened to eclipse his temper. That she would dare. Risk herself to scorn his gift.
But a tangle of darkness caught his blackened gaze.
The cave.
The place where he’d fuck her into the stone until she learned what it was to belong to the sea.
Hefting his tail, snaking up the beach without the tide to ease his passage, Nyx used the ancient weapon as a crutch and not the god-killer it was meant to be. A trail of tattered scales left glittering in his wake, gills hissing with every laboured breath he dragged into soggy lungs.
She was there.
Curled in the back of the cave, as far from the sunlight as she could get. Sleeping. Hands cradling a flat belly. A tiny shadow wrapped around the center of what had once been a human girl.
And her skin…
… it was glowing.
His vision—meant for the endless black of abyssal things—caught the shimmer in an instant. Bioluminescent scribbles pulsed beneath her skin. A dainty webbing scrawled across her throat, spirals painted over her collarbones. Elegant swirls snaking up her arms, where her veins pulsed with the heart of the sea.
