Even if it was hopeless.
Desperate.
Jaw bunching, Kore slipped her fingers beneath his forearm, set her feet in the wet sand, and lifted.
She couldn’t so much as budge his arm.
Dragging him into the sea would be utterly impossible.
Sweating freely, Kore swallowed the lump of panic and looked for something—anything—she might use.
The trident.
Already half-sunk into the sand, thrumming with an ominous energy, but almost three times her height.
With a huff, she collapsed in the sand beside him, her belly swollen and heavy. Her chest heaving with the effort, breaths growing ragged with panic.
It was almost funny, the games gods played. The things they demanded mortals to do in the name of service.
Entranced, almost helpless to resist, Kore allowed herself to succumb to the curiosity. To touch what had been her doom, inspect the monster who’d claimed her. She was drawn to the hypnotic glimmer of a blue-green glow humming beneath the surface where his scales had sloughed away.
So different.
So alien.
She touched a fin, gasping when it flared. Almost stabbing her with a spine before it lay flat once more.
“Beautiful,” she murmured, voice a low hum of interest. And, letting her fingers down his forearm, she marveled at the delicate patterns etched in his skin. The delicate webbing between clawed digits, lax in his crisis. Deadly and sharp.
He didn’t move.
Didn’t snap or snarl or seethe.
Growing bold, Kore’s touch drifted to the taut ridge of abdominal muscles. Searching for a flinch, a twitch, anything that might indicate his divinity. That he could survive.
For both of them.
This was wrong.
Immoral.
Taboo and obscene.
She should flee.
But her hand was already moving, already sliding toward the seam below his navel, where man and leviathan became one.
Curiosity was a devious mistress.
Her fingers hovered before sliding… lower.
To the line of scales that guarded his cock. The seam was subtle. Ridged and muscular.
She ran her fingers along its edge, tracing the line with a quiet reverence.
It pulsed.
Her mouth watered.
