Keep it.
Claws flexing, spreading wide across the curve of a belly that would soon be ripe with life, he let a rumble jiggle her marrow with pure, unfiltered menace.
Uttering a tiny kiss of the Resonance, he purred for her. Just a little. For half a breath before it stuttered and stopped.
But she heard him anyway.
Understood just how deeply he wanted to drag her into the surf. Breed her until water filled her lungs. Until she was his, forever.
The effort to indulge his temper—to go to battle with theThalassariking? It had depleted the last of his reserves. Nyx released her, allowing her to pull away.
For a long moment, there was only the rasp of harsh breaths and the rush of the sea calling him back.
And then, “Go,” she whispered, not daring to move. The single syllable hitching in her ravaged throat. Cunt glistening, swollen and wet, left needy and ripe. But still, she dared to command him. “Go back,” she said again. “Before you die and leave me here to rot.”
He was burning.
Flayed by the sun. Poisoned by the surface. Every inch of him blistered. Gills savaged and dripping, scales flaking from his body in glinting, iridescent ribbons—armor peeling from meat.
He should have waited.
Recovered.
He’d ascended in a rage to punish his bride—and instead… she’d stitched him back together.
Rumbling, he seized the trident and turned to obey. Tail dragging behind him, bunching and shifting as he struggled back to the surf and carved a trench in the sand. The trident was too heavy to lift, too sacred to abandon. His chest heaved with effort, gills flapping open in desperate need as he worked deeper.
Every inch gained was easier. Weightless. Welcoming. The tide embraced him. Lapping at his wounds with the promise of salvation.
Nyx turned, just once, at the edge of the sea.
She was watching.
Hair tangled and wild. Lips red, swollen, glistening with him. Her belly—heavy and round—was marked where he’d touched her so much deeper than she could possibly know.
His command echoed in the wind between them.
Don’t spill a drop.
Nyxarion let the trident fall, the weight of it dragging him down when he collapsed forward into the surf and vanished beneath the waves in a flick of seafoam and shadow.
The sea enveloped him. A desperate embrace that sank into every blister. Sloughing flaking scales away as he descended, and left a trail of glittering gore twirling through the current.
Ribs aching with the twist of his spine, gills fluttering with the blissful burn of salt.
Yawning wide beneath him, the trench emerged from the dark.
He let it swallow him. Let it hurt.
The trident dragged him down, allowing him to conserve his energy as he sank through the anoxic layers, through the burning acid where nothing could thrive.
And when he was close enough to see the hint of his reef glowing below, he let the trident slip from his fingers. Watched it crash into the seabed, thinking not of rutting or claiming his bride, nor the slow extinction of theAbyssariwho had exiled him.
Fins flaring to slow his descent, Nyx’s body was a ruin. Too weak to answer when the coral polyps reached out in silent greeting that went unanswered.
No, for the first time in eons, he wasn’t thinking of war. Or vengeance. He thought only of a soft slip of a girl. A human who’d taken him into her throat and begged him to go, if only so he might return.
Kore.
