Chapter 178 Picture of Desire
(Caelum Ashborne)
He saw her bound again, rope burning into her skin. Saw her back arching, sweat glistening along her spine. Saw her thighs trembling, but wrapped around him instead of the Devil. Saw her flame answering his, not Apollo’s—two ancient fires recognising each other in a blaze that had nothing to do with kings or prisons.
He heard her whisper his name in his own head. Not in the room—never in the room. Just in the aching, deluded echo of his wanting.
He swallowed a sound—half-groan, half-prayer—and squeezed his eyes shut so hard stars burst behind them.
Caelum moved his hand along his cock, matching the sounds of slapping flesh echoing through the door.
Inside the chamber, Apollo’s pace changed. The sharp slap of his thrusts grew rougher, deeper. Adelaide’s voice pitched higher, breaking in the middle, turning into something that sounded too much like a sob and a plea at once.
Caelum’s stomach twisted.
“Stop,” he whispered to himself. He wasn’t sure who he was begging. His hand. The Devil. The prophecy.
No one stopped.
Adelaide’s pleasure hit a peak. He felt it the way he’d felt the first flare of Queen’s Flame, when it tore him from sleep—from a distance, through the bones of the world, like the mountain itself had taken a breath.
It tore through him like lightning.
His knees buckled. He slid down the wall, landing hard. Rock scraped his spine. He barely felt it. His body bowed around the sensation, lungs burning, heart misfiring.
His Emberborn blood caught fire under his skin, old sigils waking along his ribs where his people had once drawn protective runes in ash. His long-dormant mark twitched in response—phantom heat ghosting over a sigil his father had sealed centuries ago to hide him from Devils like the one inside that room.
He bit down on a curse, teeth cutting into his tongue with the effort not to say her name aloud.
“Fuck—Adelaide—”
The word broke free anyway. Raw. Wrecked. Worshipful. Her flame surged at the sound, as if she’d heard him.
It wasn’t for him. He knew that. This was Apollo’s doing. Apollo’s claiming. Apollo’s storm.
But her power responded to him all the same. It ruined him.
His grip tightened. Her fire poured through him. Three hard jerks and he was coming. He gripped the head of his cock, feeling his hot seed fill the palm of his hand.
Inside, Apollo roared his release.
The sound shook dust from the ceiling, bits of ash drifting down like dark snow. The mountain carried the cry along its bones, through its tunnels, through every old scar carved here by war.
Caelum doubled over, forearms braced on his knees, head hanging. His chest heaved. Shame raked him from the inside out, sharp as claws. Her wetness still burned on his cheek, cooling now, but no less present—no less like a brand.
He had never felt so alive. And he had never felt so damned.
He looked down at the mess on his hand. Then looked at the iron door. A thought bloomed. It was stupid. He knew that. But it was also needed.
Caelum turned and wiped the remnants of his climax on the seam of the door. His own version of branding, which he wished to claim for himself.
Silence came in broken pieces. A few more ragged breaths. A choked sound that might have been Adelaide trying not to sob.
After a few minutes, the dull thud of Apollo’s footsteps.
The door opened.
Caelum forced himself to stand straight, using the wall to steady himself. His legs trembled. His head spun. He scrubbed his hand over his face, smearing the evidence of what he’d done away—though he knew it still clung to him, in his scent, in his magic, in the way his eyes wouldn’t quite meet the Devil’s.
Apollo stepped out. He was still monstrous. Still more beast than man. Horns curling sleek and black from his temples. One broken stub served as proof of what he used that piece of himself for. His skin was flushed, chest rising and falling in heavy, satisfied breaths. Power crackled over him in faint, golden threads, humming like banked lightning.
But there was something else in his expression now. A softness buried under the cruelty. A fraction of relief. The look of a creature who had nearly broken something precious and was just now realising it had survived.
Caelum’s stomach turned.
“Look at me,” Apollo said.
The leash tightened. Caelum’s head snapped up.
“You will guard her door,” Apollo said, voice flat with exhausted savagery. “You will not enter. You will not speak to her. You will not give her comfort. You will not even fucking breathe too loudly near her.”
Each condition sank into the leash spell, another band locking around Caelum’s wrist, his elbow, his shoulder. The magic constricted like a serpent, scales of heat pressing into nerves, warning and promise all at once.
“I am tightening your leash,” Apollo murmured, watching Caelum’s faint flinch with ugly satisfaction. “Pull against it…”
The coil cinched hard, bones grinding. “…and I’ll pull back harder.”
Caelum kept his face still. He didn’t trust it not to crack if he tried to speak.
Apollo leaned in, voice dropping to a low, intimate knife-edge. “I am always watching,” he whispered. “You do not slip. Ever.”
He meant it. Not as a tactic. As a vow.
Caelum heard the truth in it and hated that a part of him almost believed it might extend to protecting Adelaide too.
Then Apollo turned. His heavy steps receded down the corridor, horns brushing the hanging chains, shadows bending out of his way like they feared to touch him.
The instant he vanished around the corner, Caelum’s knees gave up.
He slid down the door, spine pressed to the iron, hands dropping uselessly to his sides. Every muscle shook. His heart still pounded in his throat. The smell of smoke and sweat lingered. So did the echo of her magic.
He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. For a moment, there was nothing. Just the low rumble of the mountain and the distant drip of water somewhere deep in its throat.
Then, a whisper. Muffled by iron and stone. The gentle words were threaded with shame. Soft enough to be a breath.
“I’m sorry…”
Adelaide.
Caelum’s fingers spasmed against the floor. Her voice slid through the cracks around the door like mist, carrying more than sound. Regret brushed his skin like cold rain. Empathy pressed warm against his ribs, an apology she had no reason to owe him. Humiliation trembled underneath it all.
Her Queen’s Flame rode the whisper. He felt it—a gentle flare, bruised but still reaching, curling around his heart like it was trying to soothe the damage it had helped cause.
He swallowed hard. Everything in him screamed to answer. To tell her it wasn’t her fault. That he wasn’t angry with her. That his rage belonged to the Devil and the prophecy and the world that had caged them both.
His throat locked. If he spoke, Apollo would know. If he soothed her, the leash would burn him alive.
So he stayed silent. He let her apology hang between them, unanswered. Another wound neither of them deserved. His shadows coiled tight around him, like a cloak pulled too close.
He didn’t sleep.
Time stretched, thick and sick and endless. Guards changed somewhere in the labyrinth of halls. The molten rivers far below shifted course with a deep, grinding groan. Caelum stayed planted at her door, a statue carved from shame and want.
Eventually, exhaustion dragged his head against the frame. His eyes closed.
He fell into something that wasn’t quite sleep and wasn’t quite nightmare—the Dreamscape edge where Emberborn sometimes walked. Flames pulsed in the dark, three points of light circling one another. Gold. White. Devil-Red.
They never touched. But they were getting closer.
A few hours later, Apollo appeared in the hall again. Caelum stood in greeting, but the Devil paid him no mind. The door swung inward a fraction, enough for the Devil to step past him without so much as a glance.
Caelum stayed outside.
He heard a small, broken sound he knew was Adelaide’s sleepy groan. He stared at the opposite wall, forcing himself to see only stone.
After a moment, Apollo reappeared in the doorway. His horns were gone, the monstrous edges smoothed back into his more human shell, but the wildness hadn’t fully left his eyes.
A faint smear of blood painted his wrist and forearm—Adelaide’s, Caelum realised with a jolt.