Chapter 1: The Corruption of the Warrior
The air in the Temple of Aphrodite was wrong.
It used to smell of salt from the sea below and clean, sun-warmed stone. Now, the scent was a physical weight, cloying and electric—a cocktail of wild roses, rampant jasmine, and something beneath it, metallic and hungry, like ozone before a lightning strike. Diana knelt on the cracked marble at the pool’s edge, her knuckles white where they gripped the rim. The sacred waters, once crystal, now swirled with milky opalescence and veins of deep, volcanic purple.
She shuddered, a full-body tremor that had nothing to do with cold.
It was a fire in the marrow. It had started as a whisper after the battle at the museum, after the Black Heart Diamond had shattered and a shard had bitten into her palm. A whisper of more. Now it was a roar. Her Amazonian strength, the disciplined power she had honed for centuries, had turned inward, coiling into a knot of need that burned her from the inside out. Every beat of her heart wasn't a pulse; it was a throb of want.
“Focus,” she hissed to herself, the word scraping her throat. “Themyscira. The gods. Justice.”
The words felt like ash. The memories they were meant to summon—of her mother, her sisters, her purpose—slipped through her mind like smoke, replaced by hotter, simpler images. The brush of a hand. The heat of another body. The press of lips. A compulsive, devouring emptiness.
“Diana?”
The voice, familiar and steady, cut through the humid perfume. Steve Trevor stood in the broken arch of the doorway, backlit by the violent orange of the setting sun. He was in simple fatigues, his face etched with a concern so deep it looked like pain.
“Steve.” Her own voice was too low, too rough. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah, you keep saying.” He took a careful step inside, his boots crunching on fallen petals. He scanned the temple—the way the ivy seemed to pulse, the dark stains on the rose blooms, the unnatural sheen of the pool. His training assessed it as a hostile environment. His heart saw only her, trembling and alone. “You’re not okay. This place… it’s making it worse, isn’t it?”
She let out a choked laugh. “It is not the place. It is me. It is in me.”
He moved closer, ignoring the part of his brain that screamed tactical hazard. This was Diana. He knelt a few feet from her, not touching. “Talk to me. What does it feel like?”
Her bright blue eyes, when she turned them on him, were fractured. A ring of gold now encircled the irises, luminous and alien. “It feels like I am starving,” she whispered, the confession torn from her. “But no food will fill it. Only… contact. Connection. It is a hollow space that demands to be filled by… life. By feeling.”
“Okay,” Steve said, his voice deliberately calm. The military part of him was cataloging symptoms: altered visual phenotype, reported obsessive hunger, possible psychic contagion. The man who loved her just felt sick. “We’ll figure this out. We’ll quarantine. We’ll find a counter-agent.”
“You do not understand!” The snap of her voice echoed off the marble, sharp as a whip-crack. She flinched at her own anger, hugging herself. The muscles in her arms corded, restraining a power that wanted to lash out, to pull in. “It is not a sickness of the body. It is a corruption of the spirit. It takes what you are… and twists it into this wanting thing.”
She looked at him then, really looked. The fading light traced the lines of his jaw, the stubble on his cheek, the open collar of his shirt. She could see the pulse in his throat. She could smell the clean sweat on his skin, the laundry soap on his clothes, the essential, vibrant Steve-ness of him. The hollow inside her yawned wide, screaming.
He saw the change in her gaze. The compassion fading, replaced by a desperate, predatory focus. He held up a hand, palm out. “Diana. Look at me. It’s Steve. You’re fighting it. I know you are.”
“I am tired of fighting,” she breathed. The words were barely audible, lost in the hum of the temple. She uncoiled from her kneeling position with a panther’s grace, but the movement was all wrong—sinuous where it should be direct, a provocation instead of an action.
He stood up, taking a step back.A tactical retreat. “Then I’ll fight for you.Come on. We’re leaving this room. Now.” It was an order, the one he used in extraction scenarios.
It was the wrong thing to say. To the thing inside her, it was a challenge. To the woman, it was a denial.
She closed the distance between them in a blur. Not an attack.An embrace. Her arms went around him, and at first, it was just Diana holding him, her face buried in his shoulder. He froze, then brought his hands up to awkwardly pat her back.
“See?” he murmured, relief flooding him. “You’re still in there. You’ve got this.”
Then he felt it.
A vibration, deep within her core, that resonated into his own chest. A heat that seeped through both their clothes. It wasn’t the warmth of a friend. It was a fever. Her hold tightened, not with warrior’s strength, but with a terrifying, possessive need.
“Diana… you’re hurting me.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes were fully gold now, glowing in the temple’s gloom. The last of her restraint, the final thread holding back the flood, snapped.
“I need you to stop talking,” she said, and her voice was a symphony of wants.
Her mouth found his. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a claim. The electric, perfumed air of the temple seemed to condense around them, pouring into the connection of their lips. Steve’s mind blanked with shock, then with a surge of something that felt like his own, but amplified, distorted—a dizzying, immediate rush of desire that short-circuited all thought.
He tried to push her away. His hands came up to her shoulders, but the strength had left him. His push became a pull. The virus didn’t just work through touch; it worked through feeling, and it found the hidden cache of his own longing, the what-ifs he’d never spoken, and weaponized them.
It was a feedback loop. Her hunger fed on his awakened want, which in turn stoked her fire higher. She kissed him like she was drinking, and he was parched. His body responded, betraying him, even as a tiny, screaming voice in the back of his skull warned him this was death.
They sank to the petal-strewn marble. Her hands were everywhere, and where they touched, the fabric of his clothes seemed irrelevant. Her touch left trails of burning sensation on his skin. He was losing himself, drowning in a golden haze. The world narrowed to the scent of her, the overwhelming taste, the crushing, wonderful pressure.
He gasped against her mouth, a last fragment of “Diana, stop—”
The word turned into a moan as her teeth grazed his lower lip. A sharp, bright pain. Pleasure and pain fused, indistinguishable. It was the point of entry.
The change in him was violent and fast. His back arched off the ground, his eyes flying wide. They were no longer blue, but a solid, glossy black. The veins around his temples stood out, dark purple against his suddenly pallid skin. A wave of pins-and-needles erupted over his body, followed by a deep, satisfying warmth that erased the last of his resistance. The concern, the love, the Steve that was Steve—it was all still there, but now it was wrapped in a new, imperative directive: Take.Spread. Connect.
The hungry vibration in Diana’s core finally, mercifully, stilled. The hollow was filled. A satiated, heavy warmth flooded her limbs. The golden glow faded from her eyes, leaving her clear and present and horrifyingly aware.
She pulled back, looking down at him.
He lay panting, a smile on his face that was both achingly familiar and utterly alien. His black eyes held a gleam of adoration and infinite, shared hunger.
“Steve?” Her voice was a broken thing.
He reached up, tracing her cheek with a finger. His touch was cold. “I understand now,” he whispered, his voice echoing with a faint, harmonic layer that wasn’t his own. “It’s so simple. Why were we ever fighting?”
The relief she’d felt curdled into a horror so absolute it was nausea. She scrambled off him, staring at her own hands as if they were stained. The temple’ intoxicating scent now smelled like rot. The filled hollow inside her was not peace; it was a prison.
She had cured her hunger.
And she had killed her best friend.
On the marble floor, Steve Trevor sat up, rolling his shoulders with a new, predatory grace. He looked at her, his head tilted. “Who do we find next?”