Diana looked hostile, grinding her teeth in resentment.
Yongye leaned close to her ear, lowering his voice to a whisper so soft that only the two of them could hear.
"This is only the beginning."
Diana clenched her jaw until a hard ridge bulged in her cheek, and her silver bracers gave a faint metallic tremor against her forearms.
She wanted to shove him away, slap him, grab the Lasso of Truth and bind him into a twisted knot.
But she did none of those things.
Because his earlier words, "I'll never speak of your mother's situation," still echoed in her ears. Because Zeus's oracle, "As long as victory is assured, no wager is too great," still lingered in her mind. Because her conscience and her sense of shame had tangled into an impossible knot.
More importantly, because she realized that she actually... didn't particularly want to push him away.
When that bastard's lips pressed against hers, she hadn't resisted right away.
She could have resisted. She was the strongest warrior among the Amazons. Even if she couldn't defeat Yongye, she could still have broken free, stepped back, or pushed him away.
But she hadn't.
She stood rooted to the spot like a frozen statue, feeling that warm, domineering breath seep between her lips, trace her tongue, her jaw, and her throat, and burn all the way into the depths of her chest.
Then she realized her knees had gone weak.
Not from being beaten, not from intimidation, but from something surging out of the depths of her marrow-something she had never experienced, something that shamed her yet proved impossible to resist-softening her from within.
That sensation was fiercer than the blessings of the Olympus Divine Power Pool, more overbearing than Zeus's thunderbolts.
*No wonder Natasha, Lois, and the others