Chapter 133 The Fight of The Beasts
(Apollo & Adelaide)
The steam curled around them like breath.
It rose in slow, ghostlike ribbons, catching the amber bathhouse light and turning it to drifting gold. Each coil carried the mineral bite of heated stone and something faintly sweet, like scorched herbs dissolving into warmth.
Adelaide floated in the cradle of Apollo’s arms, the heat of the bathhouse soaking into her bones until she felt almost boneless. The water glowed faint gold from the Hellfire veins beneath the stone floor, each shimmering ripple brushing softly over her skin. For the first time since she’d been dragged down here—since she’d been strung up, burned, used, tested, broken—her body didn’t feel like an enemy.
She felt… held. Suspended between drowning and rest, her muscles loosening in increments they didn’t quite trust, every slow exhale feeling stolen but somehow allowed. Relief crept in, so unfamiliar that she almost mistook it for fear, her body adjusting to the quiet not as a threat, but as a question.
They had been here a long time. Long enough for her heartbeat to steady. Long enough for her trembling to ease into a slow, manageable thrum. Long enough for her to stop expecting his hands to become punishing again. Time had collapsed into a strange, underwater quiet—no screams, no chains, only the drip of distant water and the hush of their shared breath.
Apollo didn’t speak at first. He simply kept her buoyed against his chest. His palm rested low on her stomach beneath the water, fingers splayed, not holding her so much as… keeping contact. He floated behind her, one arm under her shoulders, her head resting against the warm plane of his chest. His movements were slow but strangely attentive, as though adjusting her weight in the water with every inhale she took. Each time she shifted, the smallest twitch of his fingers compensated—an unconscious promise that he would not let her slip beneath the surface.
She should fear this. She should hate this. She should hate him.
But every time she tried to summon the old sharpness—every time she reached for anger—her body responded with memories of the press of his mouth on hers, the heat of his breath ghosting over her skin, the way he had lifted her from the chamber with impossible gentleness. Her rage tried to find footing and kept sliding off the memory of his hands cradling her neck instead of snapping it.
Each attempt to reignite her rage and her hatred faltered, dulled by recollections that softened her at the edges, and left her caught between distrust and unexpected longing.
And the way he looked at her now. Gods. She was done for.
Quiet. Focused. Almost… reverent. Just feeling. Processing. His gaze didn’t strip or measure. It simply lingered, as if memorising each rise of her chest, each small wince, each easing line in her brow. Like he was trying to study her in a language without orders.
And she was doing the same. Cataloguing all the ways he was wrong in her head and the ways he didn’t fit any of them in her chest.
Her throat tightened.
She let her head fall back into the water for a breath, letting the heat lick at her hair and scalp, then lifted it again, blinking the steam from her lashes. Apollo’s eyes were on her the whole time, tracking every movement as if it meant something. The intensity should have burned; instead, it felt like being seen and not immediately punished for existing.
“Why are you watching me like that?” she murmured, her voice still ragged, raw from gasps and screams she couldn’t stop replaying.
“I’m not watching,” he said softly. “I’m… remembering.”
A tremor skittered down her spine. His voice rarely softened. Rarely dipped into anything that felt like the truth. It scraped against the part of her that still believed every word from him should hurt.
“What,” she whispered, “are you remembering?”
His gaze dragged over her face slowly, like a touch.
“You,” he said simply. “How you looked when you begged. How you looked when you broke. How you looked when you trusted me.”
Her breath caught. She didn’t say that she hadn’t fully trusted him—that she’d only trusted that he wouldn’t let her die. But as the words hung between them, something softer sparked. A flicker she couldn’t name—maybe safety, maybe hope, although she recoiled from both words. There was less terror, a loosening in her chest. Where cold used to grip her ribs, now there was heat—unsettling, but undeniably hers.
She swallowed hard. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“So don’t,” he murmured. “I’m not asking you to.”
The restraint in that answer unsettled her more than any threat ever could. She expected demand. Command. Pressure. Instead, he stared at her like if he touched her too quickly, she might vanish. Like she was something fragile he’d accidentally been handed and was terrified to break.
She tried to look away—but his fingers lifted, brushing a damp strand of hair back from her face, tucking it behind her ear. The movement was careful. Soft. Almost painfully tender. His claws were gone in this form, but she still braced for a scrape that never came. Only warmth. Only the faint callus of his thumb against her temple.
Her pulse fluttered.
He leaned in—not a demand, not a trapping—but a question written in the tilt of his head.
She didn’t think. She didn’t need to. Her lips found his.
The kiss was slow, warm, a gentle pull of mouths meeting without urgency, without the brute hunger he had shown before. His hand slid up her back beneath the water, spreading wide over her spine, anchoring her as he kissed her again—deeper this time, still controlled. No forcing, no bruising grip, only pressure that matched her, answered her, let her withdraw if she wanted. He let her choose every inch.
When he rolled his tongue in a way that it wrapped around and massaged her at the same time, she groaned. Gods, when did he learn to do that?
Her fingers lifted on instinct, tangling in the soaked-black hair at the nape of his neck— And she froze.
Something brushed her hand. Something hard. Smooth. Curved.
She pulled back slightly, blinking in surprise.
“Apollo…?”
He closed his eyes, a low rumble echoing in his chest—something between a sigh and a suppressed growl.
“Don’t,” he said quietly. “Not yet.”
But she lifted her hand anyway, brushing her fingertips through his hair until she found it. A horn. Small. New. Warm.
She traced it gently.
Apollo shuddered—violent, visceral, helpless. The tremor rolled through his chest and into her palms, as if she’d touched a live wire buried beneath skin and bone.
Her breath hitched. “I didn’t hurt you—”
“No,” he rasped. “You didn’t.”
His eyes were molten when they opened again, pupils blown wide. “When I’m with you,” he said, voice roughening, “it is… difficult to stay in one shape.”
She went very still. The words sank into her like stones into deep water, rippling out. Difficult to stay in one shape. Because of her. Because of what she did to him without meaning to.
“My beast,” he continued, “wants you as badly as I do.”