But he set her aside, for he couldn’t afford the distraction.
Not now, with an audience of Pelagorn who’d been his people, once.
Before they’d exiled him.
He saw the young males first. Their gills flaring wide with the first true taste of her. Dark eyes flicking over the reef, they searched for the source of that perfume they craved but couldn’t name.
Slick.
That unique liquid that gushed from a Siren, tacky and thick. A lubricant meant to gloss his passage, even in the most turbulent sea.
Once the pleasure of Abyssari in every known trench, but now? After the war?
It was a thing as rare in the seas as Kore herself.
Ambrosia that curled through his every breath, a call woven into the very tides. Currents laced with a potent magic that hadn’t been seen inanysea since before the Accord of Nisyros had been written.
It was bait, to use her this way.
The sort most wouldn’t even recognize, even as they reacted to it.
Slick, in the water.
A blatant challenge for the oldest of them—those last remaining Pelagorn who’d survived the war and watched the last Siren die.
A predatory smile curled at the edge of his lips, and he glanced down. Looked to the glowing fist of coral clenched in Vorynthar’s heart where she was hidden away.
His bride.
Concealed. Protected.
Safe, until he was ready to reveal her to their luminous eyes, split her open with his cock, and lock her to him until her belly swelled with his spawn.
The elders were slower to enter his kingdom. Wary, their spines rigid with outrage, their biolume flickering a furious warning.
He let them come without comment or challenge.
Allowed them to circle Vorynthar’s jagged perimeter and bask in the glory of what he’d built without them.
In exile.
“Nyxarion Korrides,” one of the old blood snarled. Voice laced with a Resonance deeper than even his own. “Youdareto break the Accord a second time?”
Nyx let a savage grin spread across his lips. Fins stretched to their limit, his tail flicking through the black water with a deliberate grace that saw the Raskoril pulse beneath him. His command over his kingdom was absolute.
Molten, silver eyes sweeping over them, gleaming with the promise of violence, he said, “This is the Black Sea. It is to be a haven. A new beginning. The seat of Abyssari power is no longer in the crumbling ruins where my father rots. It ishere.In Vorynthar. And here,” he said, eyes gleaming with malice, “in the Deep? The laws of the Shallow King are meaningless.”
Bristling in outrage, the elder male let tattered fins flare. “You risk us all,” he snarled, baring teeth. “Poisoned the currents with the stench of your whore. This… this creature you created to suit yourself. Thalos will scent her just as easily as we have. He will come, and with him, war will sweep through the Deep. A pricewewill be made to pay. Not you.”
Shivering from scalp to the tip of his fluke, Nyx laughed. Crimson filaments flaring as he pulled a breath through his lips to taste his bride, before he exhaled. “Then why did you come?” he drawled, taunting and cruel.
Gills pulsing, the elder’s jaw worked around an outraged retort. “We’ve come to extinguish this creature. To stop you, exile. From killing us all in a war born of arrogance.”
“You came,” Nyx hummed, and flicked his tail through the current to waft her scent across the faces of the young ones, “because you tasteher.Because, already, you ache to know whatI have created. To know if I succeeded. Your blood remembers what the Thalassari tried to take.”
A younger male, fins still translucent with youth, nosed the current. “That scent—what… what is that?”
Nyxarion grinned, sweeping his hand wide to encompass them all when he said, “That, my brother, is your blood right. She is a stunning creature, my bride. The first true Siren in a thousand years. Soon, she will bloom. Her voice will lift the currents and fill the Deep with life once more.”
