If she hadn’t seen the effort it cost to wear that mask.
"She's right." Two words. Gentle. Delivered with the careful grace of one unaccustomed to delivering hard news. "It would be the height of cruelty," Thalos drawled, his voice a careful, regretful hum, "to starve the child of Asterion venom at this stage. And only for the sake of your ego."
A pause.
Silver hair drifted around his perfect face when his chin dipped. But Thalos' eyes didn't drop. Fixed to Nyxarion's. Gleaming. "The neglect could be… catastrophic."
She caught it. Something bright, scarcely contained as it flickered through glacial blue eyes.
Triumph dressed as sympathy.
"I understand your fear," Thalos crooned, drifting closer as his gaze settled on her. "Any mother would feel the same."
But the words sank into Kore's chest and took root.
"You spinelesscunt," Nyxarion snarled, massive round pupils constricting to tiny dots of furious, murderous wrath. Fixed on Thalos with the kind of focus that preceded killing. "Using an unborn child as leverage against its mother—threading your poison into her marrow. Scaring her so she'llbegyou to sink your fangs into her again."
One massive hand landed on the throne, that strange, twisting cradle where she had once been imprisoned. Incubated. Claws gouging furrows into the coral, the shriek of chitin against the calcified reef screeched through the water.
Lips peeled back in a vicious snarl, Nyxarion wasn't done. "You think I don't see what you are? What you've always been? A parasite wearing a crown, feeding on whatever you can trick into holding still long enough?—"
Pushing at the weight of his heavy coils, Kore tried to stop him from slaughtering the Shallow King. From starting a war. "Nyxarion?—"
"Threnakar's scholars are coming," Nyx spat, flexing his coil, freeing it from the dais in a single violent motion. "My father's court. She will be examinedproperly. Abyssari scholars will determine what she needs. Not you, not your bought-and-paid sycophants with their convenient diagnoses."
Thalos only smiled. Composed. Regal. Opalescent scales catching Vorynthar's stuttering glow and scattering it in pale rainbows across the chamber walls. His features schooled into something that was patient, almost… pitying.
And then, "How many tides?" Thalos crooned. Soft. Measured. The cadence of a question already answered. "How many tides until they arrive, Korrides?"
Nyx's jaw locked. Teeth clicking shut.
"Already the first trimester draws to an end." Thalos lifted one webbed hand, fingers spreading in a gesture of helpless inevitability. "Neural pathways, gill architecture, pressure-organ development," he struck them off on long, pale digits. "These fundamental structures formnow. Once that window closes, what has been malformed cannot be repaired. Not by Abyssari scholars. Nor Thalassari. Not by the ocean itself."
Hands pressing harder against her belly, Kore gasped.
Horrified all over again.
No matter that she knew what Thalos was doing.
Knew the shape of manipulation, for she'd been born to serve it. Sold to a sun god, given to the priests.
Traded to slavers.
Then stolen by the sea.
And still.
Still.
Terror sank its teeth into her chest and refused to release that deadly bite. Because beneath the manipulation, beneath the calculated softness laced in Thalos' words… there was a truth she couldn't deny.
A world where pride and loyalty could cost her child something irreplaceable. Something structural. Permanent.
Eyes filled with dread, sun clams dangling from her finger as the child squirmed beneath her navel, Kore looked to Nyx.
Waiting for his answer.
For the number. How many tides, how long until his father's scholars could reach the Black Sea and offer a second opinion.
