Chapter 22 To Spite You
(Adelaide)
For a long moment after he disappeared, Adelaide didn’t move. Sound peeled away from the world in layers—the distant rustle of leaves, the soft rush of the stream, even the ringing in her ears—until all that was left was the echo of his roar vibrating through her bones.
The forest swallowed his massive shape, darkness rushing in to fill the space he’d occupied, but his presence clung to the air like smoke. Her knees stayed pressed into the cold earth, her fingers still curled around the useless stone, her lungs dragging in broken, shaky breaths that hurt all the way down. Every inhale scraped along her ribs, each exhale shuddering out of her as if her body was learning how to breathe again without his weight pinning her.
He was gone. She didn’t understand it. The Beast had had her pinned. His weight on her chest. His teeth at her throat. One more breath and he could have ended it. He should have. That’s what everyone said the Devil did: he chose, he hunted, he claimed.
But he didn’t. He had stepped back. Turned. Left her alive. The absence felt as sharp as any blow, like a swing that should have connected but didn’t, leaving her off-balance and reeling.
Her heart hammered so hard it felt like something trapped in a cage inside her chest, slamming itself against the bars. Her pulse roared in her ears, drowning out the forest, a frantic rhythm that insisted: alive, alive, alive.
“Why…” Her voice came out shredded, barely a sound at all. “Why didn’t you finish it?”
No answer. Just the whisper of the trees and the faint drip of his blood cooling in the dirt. The droplets hissed softly as they hit fallen leaves, dark and almost luminous in the thin wash of moonlight, as if even the forest didn’t quite know what to do with the Devil’s blood.
Adelaide dropped the stone. It hit the ground with a dull thud, coated in his dark blood and hers. Her hands were a mess of torn skin and mud, the half-moon cuts from her own nails now filled with grit. Her shoulder throbbed. Her ribs ached every time she breathed.
But she was breathing. Her chest rose and fell in stuttering waves, each one a small, stubborn defiance against the night that had tried to put her in the ground.
She pushed herself upright on shaking legs. Her muscles protested with hot, needling pain, the world tilting for a heartbeat before settling again into uneven focus—trees, shadow, the torn gouges his claws had left in the earth.
He left because you fought back. The thought flashed sharp and fierce. You made him bleed. Twice. You’re not the kind he wants. Good.
Maybe he preferred the ones who begged. The ones who broke quickly. The soft ones. The obedient ones.
She spat blood and dirt into the leaves.
“Then choke on someone else,” she muttered, chest burning. Her words puffed out in a cloud of white in the cold air, vanishing almost instantly, but they left a lingering heat in her bones.
Trees loomed around her, tall and indifferent. No torches. No village. No screams now, either—the earlier cries had faded into a horrible silence. Either the girls had outrun him. Or they hadn’t.
Adelaide’s stomach twisted. Faces flickered behind her eyes—Calia’s wide, wet gaze, the trembling shoulders of the girls lined beside her, the red threads at their wrists—and she swallowed hard, as if she could force their ghosts back down.
She can’t do anything for them now. She could barely stand. There was only one thing she had left to do. Survive until dawn.
The old rules replayed in her mind like a litany: If you live ‘til sunrise, he cannot claim you. The Pact forbids it. Survive the night, and you are free. The words sounded thin now, worn at the edges, but they were all she had—old promises wrapped around a new kind of terror.
Her lips pulled into something that might have been a smile if it weren’t so bitter.
“Fine,” she whispered to the trees. “I’ll live. Just to spite you.” Let the gods hear it. Let the Devil hear it. Let the forest carry it down into its roots. She would keep breathing out of sheer stubbornness if she had to.
She had no idea where she was anymore. The ravine wall rose behind her, casting the ground into deeper shadow. The forest floor was uneven, broken by roots and stones and thick ferns that brushed against her bare, freezing legs. Mist pooled low between the trunks, a thin, ghostly veil clinging to the hollows and dips, turning every shadow into a suggestion of teeth.
Her foot throbbed when she put weight on it. The cut from earlier, when she’d stepped on a rock, had widened during the run. Each step sent a hot sting up her calf.
She limped anyway. Pain became a metronome—step, burn, step, burn—a rhythm she matched her stubbornness to.
It felt like hours and seconds all at once, wandering deeper into the tangle of trees, every sound magnified. Each crack of a twig sounded like his claws. Every gust of wind became his growl. Branches creaked overhead like old bones shifting, and leaves sighed against one another as though the forest were whispering warnings she couldn’t quite catch.
But he didn’t come.
She kept bracing for the impact—his weight slamming into her back, his teeth at her neck—but it never happened.
He’d truly let her go.
The realisation made something strange twist in her chest. Disbelief. Confusion. The faintest, most unwanted flicker of… insult? As if some grim, prideful part of her resented being discarded, even by a monster. You chased me like prey, and now you can’t be bothered to finish the game?
“You lose interest that fast?” she muttered under her breath, pushing a branch aside. “You hunt girls for sport and don’t even finish the job?”
Her voice trembled. The bravado crumbled at the edges.
She was alone in a forest where a monster roamed, and she was mocking him. Maybe she was insane. Maybe the Beast had rattled something loose in her skull. Maybe this was what happened when you looked the Devil in the eyes and lived—you never got all the pieces of yourself back in the same places.