The first sound she’d made since emptying her lungs at the bottom of the Aegean.
A tiny scream none but he might have heard, but a sound nevertheless. One she was alive enough to make.
She blinked.
Blinked again.
And then Kore’s gaze flicked to where the prongs of his trident were buried in the stone—and saw the true target of his strike.
Her chains.
Twisted metal was all that remained of the cuff that had bound her wrist to the base of the mast. The only remaining sign of her bondage to Athenian slavers was little more than a puddle of mangled scrap.
Forcing a tiny, ragged breath, Kore pulled air between numb lips. Trying to offer thanks. Trying to apologize for her doubt.
He yanked his spear from the stone as if it were nothing to do so, and turned once more. Shifting back to the ocean with deliberate, undulating twists of his tail.
Flinging one hand out, clumsy and inelegant, Kore tried to scream for him to wait. To beg that he not leave her stranded here, with no food. No voice. No water that wasn’t poisoned to one not born to it.
All she could muster was a wet, wordless rasp.
It did nothing to slow him.
On he went until he’d reached dark, lapping waters once more.
Helpless, she watched as he slipped into the waves and was gone. Too weak to stand, too numb to explore, she curled around herself and set her head against the pile of linked chain.
Gazing up at the sky as her lids grew heavy with the need for sleep, Kore simply worked to breathe. Luxuriating in her ability to do so, each new breath was bigger than the last. Her ribs stretching and moving with proof that she still lived, despite it all. That she’d survived against all odds.
Her chin dipped as the battle was lost, sinking toward her chest. Where rosy pink nipples were pebbled against the cold, half exposed in the tattered remains of a ruined shift that bore the mark of her service to Apollo. The left one poked through, fully exposed, as if pointing an angry accusation up, toward Olympus.
And then she saw it.
A strange blue glow.
Dimmed by her rags, brighter where the skin of her upper belly was exposed to the chilly night air, it was a glow that came not from her skin…
… butwithin.
CHAPTER 5
Agony sent him back to the deep.
His tail flicked at the surf, just once. A single powerful sweep of muscle and sinew that sent him down through the shallows. He drove forward into the great, crushing silence of the poisonous waters, muscles protesting with every heaving thrust.
Exhausted after the hard miles he’d invested in this girl. A broken slip of a human female. Disgusting creatures. Fragile and slow.
And yet, he’d towed her through hostile waters despite the cost or the risk. Wrestled rivers with currents strong enough to test even his resolve. And now, at last, she was marooned in the heart of the Black Sea.
Trapped.
He let the weight of the trident drag him down, his grip unrelenting while the rest of him went lax. Sinuous as he bled into the belly of the trench below.
It was a canyon. A crack in the sea floor yawning wide enough to swallow an entire human city. Deep enough to crush pretty surface things into a pulpy mist.
And totally anoxic.
Hostile to all life.
