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The words hit like a physical blow. He's not just taking me—he's making me complicit in my own destruction. Making me choose between my body and their lives, between my freedom and their safety. The mathematics of it are elegant and cruel.

"You expect me to betray everyone who trusted me?" My voice cracks, and I hate how small it sounds in this vast space. How human and fragile compared to his alien certainty.

"I expect you to save them," he replies, moving back into view. "Each day you serve as my mate, twenty-four hours they stay free. Your submission becomes their protection. Your pleasure becomes their salvation."

The heat in my core spikes at the word 'mate,' and I bite my tongue until I taste blood. This isn't just temporary claiming—he wants to keep me. Transform me into something that will want to stay, that will crave his touch and beg for his attention. The thought should terrify me. Does terrify me.

So why is my body producing slick for the first time in ten years?

When I try to negotiate, try to find some middle ground between total surrender and the deaths of six innocents, his response is immediate. Tentacles emerge from the water with liquid speed, wrapping around my wrists and ankles before I can think to struggle. The grip is firm but not painful, precise pressure that demonstrates absolute control without causing damage.

But it's the appendage that curls around my throat that makes me freeze. Not cutting off air, just resting there like a promise. Like a reminder of how easily he could end this if he chose.

"You misunderstand," he says, golden eyes fixed on mine with terrible intensity. "This isn't negotiation. This is me giving you the illusion of choice before biology makes the decision for you."

And that's when it happens. The accumulated suppressants in my system finally, completely fail.

The heat that crashes over me isn't gradual—it's a tsunami that obliterates thought, reduces me to nothing but burning need and empty ache. My body arches in his grip, a sound escaping my throat that's part scream, part moan, alldesperation. Ten years of suppressed omega biology exploding through my nervous system all at once.

Slick floods between my thighs, soaking through my clothes with humiliating abundance. My channel clenches around nothing, demanding to be filled, demanding the knot my body suddenly recognizes it needs. The omega biology I've fought so long overwhelms every human thought, every rational consideration, every fragment of dignity I've clung to.

"There she is," Neros murmurs, and his voice is pure satisfaction. "The omega you've been hiding under all that chemical armor."

The tentacles holding me shift, no longer restraining but supporting as my body convulses with need. The lights throughout the chamber flare brighter, responding to the pheromones pouring off me in waves. Creating a light show that maps my surrender in real-time for his viewing pleasure.

"Please," I whisper, though I don't know what I'm begging for anymore. Release from this torment or the claiming my body suddenly craves with desperate, all-consuming need.

"Oh, we're just beginning," he says, tentacles extending to secure me to that waiting platform. The surface responds to my touch, warming and molding to support my trembling form. "Your body has made its choice. Now let's see how long your mind takes to follow."

As the restraints position me exactly where he wants me, as my heat reaches its first screaming peak, I realize with dawning horror that part of me—the part that's been slowly dying from venom poisoning, the part that's tired of fighting and losing and watching people I care about disappear—part of me wants this.

Wants him.

Wants to find out what lies beyond the reach of human will and stubborn pride.

The ghost smuggler is about to discover what it means to be completely, utterly claimed.

CHAPTER 5

VENOM AND VIOLATION

ISLA'S POV

My body tearsitself apart from the inside with the enthusiasm of a demolition crew that's taken things personally.

That's the only way to describe what happens when ten years of accumulated kraken venom collides with emerging omega biology like two trains carrying opposing philosophies about my continued existence. The heat that should bring pleasure instead brings war—chemical compounds battling hormones in a conflict that turns my nervous system into the world's most uncomfortable battlefield. I convulse against the platform's restraints, my spine arching until I think it might snap, muscles seizing as poison fights biology for control of what remains of my rapidly deteriorating sanity.

The black patterns across my skin pulse with their own malevolent life, spreading faster now that the suppressants have failed like some kind of toxic graffiti artist having a really productive day. Veins of darkness race up my arms, across my chest, toward my throat like living things seeking my heart with the determination of very motivated parasites. Each pulse sendsfresh agony through my system, the accumulated toxins reacting violently to the omega pheromones flooding my bloodstream.

I'm dying. Not the slow dissolution I've been expecting, but rapid cellular breakdown as my body's competing systems destroy each other with the efficiency of a perfectly planned murder-suicide. The irony would be laughable if I could form coherent thoughts—saved from capture only to die from my own desperate survival methods. Because apparently my life has become one of those stories where the protagonist's greatest enemy is herself, and I've been doing an absolutely stellar job at it.

"Fascinating," Neros murmurs, and even through the haze of pain I want to kill him for the clinical interest in his voice, like I'm a particularly engaging science experiment instead of someone having a very public nervous breakdown. "Your adaptation is remarkable, but the toxicity levels are approaching lethal thresholds. Without intervention, you have perhaps an hour before complete system failure."

An hour. I try to speak, to tell him I'd rather die than submit to whatever he's planning, but all that emerges is a broken sound that might be a scream or a sob or possibly just my dignity leaving the building. My body isn't mine anymore—it belongs to the war raging in my bloodstream, to the heat that makes me want things I've never wanted, to the venom that's spent years preparing for this moment of rebellion like the world's most patient assassin.

"The detoxification process will be... intimate," he continues, moving closer until his shadow falls across me like a very large, very intimidating promise. "Kraken venom requires direct contact for extraction. Skin to skin. Complete physical integration."

The implication hits me like ice water mixed with dawning horror. He means to cover me with his body, to press againstevery inch of my skin while he performs whatever alien alchemy will draw the toxins from my system. Not just touching—enveloping. Consuming. Making me disappear beneath his form while he remakes me at a cellular level like some kind of biological renovation project I never signed up for.