Page 5 of Brine and Bone
The current shifted.
His tail coiled around her legs.
The Trident hit the reef floor.
One arm banding around her waist, he dragged her flush against his chest. Squeezing the breath from her lungs in a rush of silver bubbles, and then his mouth was at her throat, pressing into the delicate filaments with a sound that vibrated through her bones.
"Forgive me."
The words ground out of him, rough and haggard, each syllable a concession torn from somewhere deep. His free hand found her thigh, massive fingers curling beneath the joint and spreading her open, guiding her legs around the narrowing taper of his hips where scale met skin.
Where man and Leviathan blended.
Kore's breath hitched. Webbed fingers digging into the ridged plates of his shoulders, clinging as the current swirled around them both.
"I left you wanting." A low croon rolled through his chest. Rumbling against her ribs, the plate of her sternum, teasing the fragile architecture of her gills. Sinking deeper before it settledinto the base of her spine. "My bride. My sweet Siren bride, carrying my spawn, and I?—"
His palm slid between her thighs.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Cupping the swollen heat with a possessiveness that made her vision blur. Thick fingers parted slick folds, stroking, he spread it in unhurried circles that sent golden light rippling through her scales.
"Nghh—" A groan escaped before she could catch it.
But Nyxarion's croon only deepened.
A subsonic purr that pulsed through the water and sang to the child shifting beneath her navel.
Thumb dragging across her clit with a wicked, agonizing precision, he grinned when Kore's spine bowed. Caught her around the nape when her head fell back. When she bared her throat in helpless, desperate submission.
"My sweet bride," he hummed. "You were right," he admitted, pressing the admission against her ear. Lips tracing the line of her jaw, teeth grazing the edge of a gill slit, he kissed her. "I've left you desperate. Needy."
Another stroke. Firmer. One that saw his fingers slip lower, teasing her slit without breaching it. He gathered slick and dragged it up in maddening repetition that made her groan low in her throat.
Desperate.
"I can taste it. In the water." Nyxarion's voice dropped to something deadly quiet. The croon shifted, darkened, and became the low territorial hum that made her breath hitch. "That I've neglected my bride and abandoned the one territory that matters."
His fingers pressed inside her. Stretching.
"This one."
Beneath her navel, felt deep in her ripening womb, the child squirmed.
Leaning in, Nyx claimed a handful of hair. Tilting her head back so he might set his lips to the hollow at the base of her throat. Peppering her with greedy little kisses.
And there, where none might see, Kore's lips creased around a something wicked—a trick of the light. A little splinter of darkness.
For her child would be born into chaos, but it would inherit something neither sovereign might expect.
Kore's refusal to break.
She smiled.
Just a tiny quirk of her lips that would have made any predator hesitate.
