The pressure around them grew soggy with tension, brimming with the promise of violence.
Crushing.
Squeezing her gills until spots danced behind her vision.
Still, Thalos remained unmoved. “The Spiral is already invoked. Attack me now, and every Pelagorn from trench to shallows will know you for the lawless miscreant you are. There will be war,” Thalos murmured, quiet and sure, “and the Abyssari will know who started it. Before they are obliterated.”
His gaze shifted, then. Electric blue eyes met Kore’s.
And then, “I will master the trials,” he said. Voice a gentle kiss of sound. “I will conquer the Spiral, and when this creature belongs to me by right of conquest”—his fins flared wide and regal—“I will grant what you would deny.”
Something foolish bubbled up in Kore’s chest, then. A flutter of desperate, clinging hope.
“I will claim this vile thing as my bride,” he declared in a voice that rang with conviction. Gaze dragging over Kore without pause or kindness. “And when it is mine, I will release it from a life of suffering. Grant the only freedom it might possibly know.”
Pulse stuttering, Kore’s breath caught at the back of her throat.
His eyes caught hers, and for a moment, Kore saw something flicker in their depths.
“Death,” he said. “In death, your Siren will be free.”
CHAPTER 6
In death… your Siren will be free.
The words pinged around in Kore’s skull, rattling and sharp. It wasn’t a threat, but a verdict already passed.
A promise.
Judgement.
Chest seizing, gills fluttering, a sense of horror flooded her veins, and she twisted, seeking Nyxarion through the gloom.
Her anchor.
He was there, poised beneath them. The length of his tail coiled in fury, and in his fist, the trident hissing as the water boiled around its teeth. Molten silver eyes met hers—desperate and furious—but he didn’t approach.
Because he couldn’t.
In Thalos’ fist, that curious weapon with no blade. An equal to the trident’s mystic power, for Kore had seen Nyxarion control the waves once before.
And she was watching it happen again.
With every errant flick of Thalos’ hand, the current obeyed his whim.
And she knew, then. What had halted Nyxarion on the edge of violence.
It was the threat of war.
Pulse hammering in her gills, body crying for the male who’d ruined and remade her, Kore spread webbed fingers and tried to claw her way down. Fighting against the current. Body screaming for Nyx—his cock, his seed, the thick, brutal promise of his knot sealing it all inside.
She needed him. The weight of him. The certainty that she was anchored to somethingrealin the abyss. Something that could stop her from floating away, swallowed by the endless dark.
Because Thalos was right.
She didn’t belong.
She was… grotesque.
