Thalos remained untouched. “You mistake me, exile. What you’re sensing is disgust. A violent need to extinguish the existence of the unfortunate creature you insist upon violating with your low-born cock.”
Eyes growing slitted and narrow, Nyxarion stilled. “What’s done cannot be undone. I won’t allow it. This is the Black Sea, and you have no dominion here, Thalos.”
Cymareth vibrated in his grip, thirsty for retribution, and Thalos hummed, tempting the Waveblade to come fully awake.
Laughing, incredulous, Nyxarion flung his arms wide. “You think to take her from me? Here? In the Deep, where not even you can survive as long as my bride?”
“Perhaps not,” Thalos returned, and it was his turn to grin. And then, “I invoke the Spiral.”
Six little syllables, but they struck hard enough to make the Abyssari recoil as his declaration carried through the black waters. “I challenge you, Nyxarion Korrides, for that contemptible creature. For breeding rights that govern all Pelagorn, from the Shallows to the Deep.”
Cries of outrage clawed through the Abyssari. Disbelief and shock, for the Spiral had never been called over a mutant.
He knew that.
Lips twisting somewhere between a snarl and shock, Nyx recoiled with the rest of them. “You mean to claim her as your own? Fight for breeding rights?You?Thalos Asterion, the law keeper, come to rut with monsters?”
“I shall claim her,” Thalos said, and did not blink, “so I may set her free.”
Cymareth shimmered in his fist, the ancient blade humming at the prospect of bloodshed.
“I will win the Spiral,” he said, “and then I will slaughter your precious Siren.”
And then, with a flick of his ancient blade, Thalos commanded the current to tear them apart.
CHAPTER 5
It happened in an instant.
That precarious moment right before she tumbled off the edge of carnal pleasure.
In one breath, she’d been poised to fall.
On the next, torn away from that abyss with a brutal splash of frigid reality.
Kore’s body was seized in a fist of liquid denial as she was torn off Nyxarion’s cock. Left empty and denied, her muscles fluttered around a void. Clenched at nothing but the ache of denial, yet again.
Gasping, throat raw and mute, she clawed at the water as it swirled around her in a violent twist. A wretched sob clawed its way free of her throat, for the hollow acheburned.
Promised and withheld.
Her nerves screaming for something stolen mid-breath.
And even as the water spun in a violent cyclone around her, Kore’s thighs clenched as if trying to pull him back in.
His name broke apart on her lips when she tried to cry for him to return. To ease the pain and give her what she needed so desperately.
But the ocean rejected her plea.
Trashing, Nyxarion roared. His preposterous length twisting as he was forced into the depths of his trench, a column of angry water wrenching them apart. Muscles straining, his scales caught what little light there was as he raged against a magic she hadn’t known to fear.
Bewildered—hair whipping around her, gills flaring wide in rudderless panic—Kore looked up.
To the creature who’d appeared from nothing to command the waves.
Her breath caught in a soggy gasp.
Pale skin etched in scales so white they shone with a silver-blue, iridescent gleam. He was smaller than Nyxarion. Lean and sleek to Nyx’s bulky length. His fins more elegant, sweeping fans of fluttering silk flared wide and pressing flat as he postured.
