Chapter 84 Already In Hell
(Apollo & Adelaide)
Something touched her.
Soft at first. A drag of heat across the back of her calf. A whisper of warmth against skin gone cold and numb. It slithered up from the stone like a thin tongue of fire, testing, tasting, coaxing life back into deadened nerves.
Her body tried to flinch and found nothing to move.
Pins and needles exploded in her arms as awareness trickled back in jagged pieces. Her wrists throbbed in time with her heartbeat, shoulders burning from hours of hanging. Her head felt too heavy, chin sunk to her chest, hair a tangled curtain sticking to the sweat on her neck. Her spine ached in a dozen places at once, each vertebra a separate complaint, each muscle knot a bright, insistent pulse of hurt.
For a wild, dizzy second, she thought she was back in the forest—tied to a tree, wind ripping at her skirts, something monstrous stalking closer through the dark. She almost heard the rush of leaves and the crack of branches under claw, the way the night itself had seemed to lean in to watch.
Then the smell hit her.
Smoke. Iron. Heat. Him.
Adelaide’s eyes flew open.
The world slowly swam into focus: the faint red glow of the wall-cracks, the dark beams of the X-cross stretching above and below her, the blackened circle of runes on the stone floor beneath. Her own hands, bound in coils of ember-lit smoke, fingers white-knuckled and raw. The runes pulsed sluggishly, like a heartbeat buried in rock, every throb sending a faint answering tightness through the bindings at her wrists and ankles.
And him.
He stood in front of her. Too close. Half in shadow, half in firelight.
Horns curved back from his skull, longer than before, catching the glow and painting arcs of gold along the ceiling. His shoulders were broader, heavier, skin split in jagged seams where molten light pulsed beneath like buried lava. Wings—dark, ragged, enormous—hung behind him, the curved tips almost brushing the floor. His eyes were twin furnaces, molten gold ringed in black. Heat shimmered off him in visible waves, warping the air around his body so that the edges of him seemed to blur and sharpen with each breath.
The Devil. Her Devil.
She hated that her mind supplied the word with such terrible intimacy. It tasted like blasphemy and truth at once, a claim she’d never agreed to and couldn’t scrape out of her own thoughts.
His clawed hand rested against her shin, tracing idle patterns up the back of her leg as if she were a piece of carved wood he was examining, not a girl shackled helplessly in front of him. Each slow stroke pulled feeling back into her calf, then her knee, little sparks of sensation racing after his touch like embers chasing a breeze.
“You sleep like the dead,” Apollo murmured.
His voice vibrated through the wood, through her bones. Lazily amused. Rough from disuse and too many roars. The sound of it crawled up her spine and settled under her skull, heavy as a hand.
She tried to speak, and only a rasp of air came out. Her throat was raw—she dimly remembered screaming, begging, cursing, then nothing. Just darkness. The kind that wasn’t merciful, only… empty. Memory flickered in fragments: her own voice shredding on his name, the burn under her skin, the sudden drop into black when her body had finally given out.
He stroked higher, claws barely grazing her skin.
The touch left a trail of heat, burning away the numbness. Her muscles shuddered in protest, aching as sensation crawled back into them. Her hamstrings clenched, a dull ache blooming where strain had settled like stone; even that hurt felt better than the terrifying absence that had come before.
“How—” She swallowed, winced, tried again. “How long?”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “A few hours.”
It felt like lifetimes. Down here, without sun or moon, time stretched and snapped back on itself until ‘hours’ felt like a lie mortals told themselves to believe in endings.
Her head throbbed dully; her lips were cracked and sore. Every part of her body ached—the deep, bone-deep ache of strained muscles and denied release. Her thighs felt heavy and tight. There was a low, throbbing emptiness between her legs that made her feel hollow and feverish at the same time.
She remembered why and wished she hadn’t.
He’d done this to her. Over and over. Dragging her to the edge of something blinding and hot and terrible—and then snatching it away, leaving her dangling over a drop she could feel but never reach. The memory of that edge sat in her bones like phantom heat, a ghost-climax that kept twitching awake whenever she dared try to relax.
A tremor chased up her spine. She hated that her body remembered him—remembered his voice, his hands, the sick pulse of pleasure he’d coaxed out of her like he owned it. Every nerve felt primed, exposed, like she’d been peeled open and left under his gaze. The shame was molten. The want was worse.
Her cheeks burned.
“Thirsty?” he asked, almost idly.
She glared at him through the veil of her hair. “What do you think?”
He laughed quietly, the sound low and sinfully pleased. “Alive enough to snap. Good.”
His hand left her leg. She heard the faint clink of glass. But he didn’t give it to her. Of course he didn’t.
Apollo lifted the cup to his mouth first, watching her watch him—eyes half-lidded, savouring her desperation more than the water itself. He swished it once, the muscles in his throat shifting as he held it there instead of swallowing.
His tongue pressed to the inside of his cheek, savouring the taste with theatrical slowness, as though the water were wine and her desperation the real flavour he meant to enjoy. His eyes dragged over her like warm claws.
Then, softly: “Show me you deserve it.” The words slid into her like a blade wrapped in silk. A command. A taunt. A test. Her stomach tightened with fury she mistook—desperately—for anything else.
She stiffened. “Go to Hell.” Her voice trembled—not with weakness, but with the last fragments of control she still clutched between her teeth.
His smile widened. “We’re already here.”
Before she could spit out another retort, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers—firm, unhurried, a claiming disguised as mercy. Cool water spilled from his mouth into hers. The shock of it hit her like a plunge into winter riverwater—so blessed it hurt. His breath mingled with hers, hot against the cold liquid, turning the moment into something unbearably intimate. Startled, she sucked in a breath too fast, and the water caught in her throat.
She coughed, sputtering, chest hitching against the ropes, but some of the water stayed—sliding down her throat in blessed trickles. She hated that even choking in his grasp felt like relief. Like being fed after starving. Gods, what was he doing to her?
He pulled back just enough to speak against her lips. “Again,” he murmured, lips ghosting over hers. “Take what I give you.”