Sneering, he scowled at the tidal pool where his seed had been left to curdle.
Rejected.
He’d waited too long.
Tried to recover. To let the pressure in the trench stitch him back together until his gills could move freely, and his scales lay flat against blistered, tender flesh.
And in his absence, she’d been called to the sea—or taken. Her transformation nearly complete, while he’d fought the urge to resurface and drag Kore into the surf where she belonged. Tostuff his knot inside that perfect, grasping slit at long last and pour the sea inside her womb.
Too long.
She was gone.
Her trail cold, already swallowed by the Black Sea.
The rage trembled in his chest, making the trident hum with a savage, dark power. The sort he hadn’t touched for too long.
Lust for blood ignited in his veins, and with a preternatural grace, he slapped his tail into the tidal pool and turned black eyes toward the sea.
She’d refused his claim.
But the Black Sea washisdomain—and she would give up her secrets when commanded to obey.
The resonance howled through his ribs, turning the sand liquid as he snaked from the cave, shot over the beach, and dove into the shallows with a grace that should have been forbidden outside of the waters from whence he’d come. Swallowed in a single gulp of slicing fins and ragged scales, he plunged into the sea that had allowed his bride passage.
Silence greeted him.
Oppressive. Whole.
Resistant, at first.
Pouring his wrath into the ancient weapon howling for carnage, he scoured the currents. Drew them through his gills and tasted the delicate ambrosia she’d left in her wake.
Faint. Diluted.
But unmistakably hers.
Slick.
Arousal thrummed through him, then, for Kore had given him a gift. The joy of a hunt.
Heart pounding with savage glee, he let his scales flare. Venting the heat kept close to his skin in preparation for the hunt.
“Flee if you must, little Siren.” Dizzy with the rush, he laughed. A wicked booming sound that sent ripples washing ashore. “The tide will return what belongs to me.”
The words echoed, a decree scrawled into the waves—carried forward as he turned his face into the current.
It was to be a hunt.
One she was wholly unequal to, his fledgling Siren.
Trident clenched in an unyielding fist, he flicked his tail and dove, but didn’t descend into the deep. He coasted through the shallows, rich with oxygen, heavy with her scent. Tireless. A force cutting through the water with inhuman precision.
The little fool had tried to wash him away. Tried to mask her scent in the brine that called her to come, unaware how easily he could taste her. That she was in his every breath. The current rich with the flavor of a female in desperate need of service, for without him, his venom and seed—his knot—she would ache as she’d been conditioned to suffer.
Forever changed to need what only he might give.
And nothing could fill that void.
