“Please,” she whispered through a broken sob. “Gods,no.”
Her voice was wrong. Hoarse and ravaged. But that was to be expected, wasn’t it? After what she’d done? After what she’d swallowed?
Licking cracked lips, Kore lifted someone else’s hands to her brow. Hiding sensitive eyes from the sun. Heart beating through her chest, pounding behind her eyes, felt in the puffy, tenderskin aching all over her body. Everything that throbbed and screamed for attention, all at once.
Her jaw flexed. Sore at the corners.
Not with bruises, not from gaping wide around a cock that had no business plumbing her throat.
It was something else. An internal twinge that flexed with her every breath.
She’d done damage to herself, then. Broken something essential when she’d let him fuck himself empty down her throat.
There’d been a purpose in her madness. A need beyond filling her belly, or dying alone on this forgotten spit of land.
Kore crouched, hands braced and spread wide in the sand. Trying not to see the alien glitter of scales, nor the webbing stretched taut between her fingers, she hiccuped. Belly tight, too full, distended.
She retched. Stringy bile splashed into the sand, but that was all.
Because she’d already absorbed what he’d pumped into her gut. Already made him a part of her. It was right there, in the sparkle growing beneath her skin, in the ocean of sperm sealed away inside her treacherous cunt.
He was inside her, this beast from the deep.
Changing her from the inside out.
Wiping her hand against her thigh, she braced herself for this new reality.
That he might not come back.
Might already be dead, drifting somewhere in the current.
And if he was?
She would soon follow. Marooned alone on a spit of rock in the middle of a forgotten, nameless sea.
Gritting her teeth, Kore turned and staggered into the cool embrace of the dark—and tripped over a pile of stones.
The tide markers.
Rocks she’d piled at the edge of the tide to time his absence between…sessions.
A breathless laugh escaped her, then, and she pressed her hand flat to the wall of the cave.
The tide was at its lowest point. Water lapping at stones well below the edge of the sandy beach.
The beast was ravaged by his own nefarious purposes, his fate unknown.
And the cave… it was a sanctuary from the sun for as long as it took for her to starve, or… worse.
Then? The cave would become her coffin.
“No,” Kore said again, but this time, there was fire in the denial. “Not for me.”
He’d left her with a belly bulging with promise, the command to keep what he’d sewn obvious, even without a shared language between them.
Dragging herself over to the deepest tidal pool, way in the back of the cave, Kore paused at the edge. Eyes fixed to the gentle ripple of the water trapped in a shallow basin, and not… not the reflection of a girl she didn’t know staring back at her.
It would hide her lie.
