Chapter 38 Unsettled
(Apollo & Adelaide)
“Don’t say my name like that.” Adelaide gasped, unable to keep the tremmer from her voice.
“Like what?” Apollo purred in response.
“Like you… like you own it.”
A low growl rolled from his chest—resentful, aroused, conflicted. “I don’t own your name, Adelaide.” Apollo said, voice tight. “But you carry mine now.”
Her breath stilled. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“You do,” he said, stepping closer despite every warning in his posture. “You carry it in your blood. You carry it in the mark. And whether you hate me or not—” He exhaled, breath shaking. “—I feel you.”
She shook her head violently. “Stop saying that.”
“I can’t.” He took another step.
“Don’t come closer!” she snapped.
He froze. Every muscle in his body turned to stone. It was like watching a beast chained by an invisible leash. Power rippled off him and then snapped taut, held in place by nothing more than the sound of her voice.
Her fear held him back. Her voice held him back. Her trembling pulse held him back.
The knowledge unsettled her.
Worse—it unsettled him.
He should leave the room. He should turn away. He should walk until he reached the farthest chamber of Hell and lock himself inside until the hunger passed—or until he broke through stone and fire trying.
But her scent filled the air. Her pulse buzzed under his skin. Her fear tasted like lightning. Her defiance tasted like blood.
He felt her everywhere. He had never been this aware of a human in his entire immortal existence. Even the warding sigils etched into the stone seemed to hum with her name now, faint and insistent, as though the realm itself had begun to memorise her.
His fingers twitched, claws threatening to emerge. Control slipped. His heart pounded. Magic clawed inside him like a living thing.
“Do you know what you’ve done to me?” he asked, the words coming out rawer than he intended.
Adelaide pressed herself into the bedpost, eyes bright with fear and anger. “I didn’t do anything to you,” she said.
“You did,” he growled. “When you stabbed me. When you leapt from that tree like you meant to kill me. When you screamed at me. When you fought me under the ravine.” He took one shaky step, then stopped again.
“And when I bit you,” he finished, voice dropping to a low, shaken rasp. “When I tasted your blood. That was the moment everything changed.”
Her breath hitched. Memories jolted through her in fragments—his roar, the feel of stone at her back, the world narrowing to teeth and flame, and his name burned into her skin.
He closed his eyes for a second—just long enough to wrestle with the storm inside him. But even blind, he saw her. He always saw her.
“What do you want with me?” she whispered.
Apollo’s eyes snapped open. Not rage. Not violence. Not hunger. Just truth. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “And that terrifies me.”
She blinked—shocked. The word terrified lodged itself in her chest like a splinter.
He swallowed. “I don’t fear anything,” he said. “Not death. Not power. Not the gods. Not time.”
His eyes dropped to her bite mark. “But I fear what you do to me.”
The admission nearly ripped his chest open. For a heartbeat, the mask slipped—she saw the echo of something old and hurt flicker across his features, like a scar the world had forgotten, but he still felt every time he breathed.
She stared at him. Really stared.
This was The Devil—the monster from stories, the thing mothers whispered about to keep children in line, the creature who took the life of one girl every decade and dragged her soul to Hell.
And here he stood… Looking at her like she was the threat.
It didn’t make sense. She didn’t want it to make sense.
Her fingers clutched the fur so tightly her knuckles whitened. “You fear me?” she repeated in disbelief.
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “No. You’re lying. You’re trying to confuse me.”
His jaw flexed. “You confuse me,” he said, frustration carved into every syllable. “And I hate it.”
Adelaide’s breath trembled. She tried to swallow, but her throat stayed tight. “So what happens now?” she whispered. “Are you going to hurt me? Use me? Kill me? What?”
He went very still then. “No.”
Her eyebrows drew tight. “No?” she echoed.
“No,” he repeated. “Even if I wanted to before… I no longer wish to.” Then, with a tilt of his head that made the next words even creepier, he hissed, “But I could still change my mind.”
Her heart dropped into a painful freefall. She didn’t want mercy. She didn’t want promises. She didn’t want his restraint.
She wanted answers. She wanted escape. She wanted control. She wanted the choice he’d stolen from her on the forest floor, the right to decide whether her story ended or burned.
“You’re the Devil,” she said softly. “You don’t get to decide that now.”
Fire flickered behind his eyes. “I decide everything,” he growled.
“You didn’t decide this,” she whispered, fingers brushing the tender bite at her neck. The contact made her shiver. Then his whole body shivered. His entire body tensed.
“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t.”
The sight of her fingers on his mark nearly undid him.
He took a breath. Pain blistered across his ribs. He took another. Magic curled beneath his skin, coiling in his veins, snarling against the walls of his restraint.
If he didn’t leave soon, he was going to do something unforgivable. Something irreversible. Something he had already come dangerously close to.
“I need to go,” he said abruptly.
Adelaide’s eyes widened—fear, confusion, relief, all of it tangled. “Then… then go,” she whispered.