Chapter 96 The Devil's Broken Doll
(Adelaide)
Her hands twitched against the restraints. Her lips parted around a shaking exhale.
And the shadow of her own voice echoed back at her: “…I hate you,” she whispered into the empty air. The words sounded small in the vast chamber. But they were true, and truth was a kind of anchor.
Nothing answered her. No voice. No footsteps. No mocking chuckle from the Devil on the other side of the door.
Just silence. Crushing, suffocating silence. Even the walls seemed to hold their breath, as if the palace was listening for what she would become in the aftermath.
Her breath hitched again, a thin, ragged sound scraping up her throat. She hung there for what felt like hours—though she suspected it had barely been a minute—too drained to cry, too exhausted to scream, too wrung-out to even tremble properly. Her body tried to go numb, but the bond wouldn’t let her fully disappear; it kept flickering faintly, a stubborn ember refusing to die.
When she finally forced her eyes open, the world had settled into painful, unforgiving clarity.
And the first thing she saw was the room.
It was… perfect. Immaculate. So perfect it felt obscene. A staged scene after a massacre. Every shattered stone, every gouged mark, every piece of furniture he had obliterated in his rage—it was all restored. Every surface gleamed faintly in the firelight. The bed looked untouched, sheets smooth and dark, pillows fluffed as if nothing monstrous had happened there minutes ago. Even the air had been reset, scrubbed of chaos, leaving only the faintest ghost of smoke that clung to her like a confession.
As if he hadn’t just violated her the way he did. As if he hadn’t just made her feel more pleasure than she knew was possible. As if he hadn’t almost broken her completely.
She swallowed hard, throat burning. The room stood pristine. She was the only ruined thing left inside it. It was a message written without ink: he could undo anything he wanted. He simply chose not to undo her.
Adelaide dragged her gaze downward slowly, terrified of what she would see yet unable to stop herself. A slow inventory. A forced witnessing.
Her arms ached with each shallow breath, muscles quivering, wrists rubbed raw from the smoke-bonds. Her shoulders felt half-dislocated. Her breasts—gods—her breasts were a map of him. Swollen, marked in shades of red and purple, a bruise blooming over her left breast from where he had bitten her, teeth sinking deep enough to draw blood.
The mark stood out starkly against her pale skin. She stared at it. It didn’t look real. It looked like something painted on a statue, proof of a story that belonged to someone else.
Heat crawled up her throat, hot and nauseating. Her fingers curled helplessly above her head. She braced herself and looked lower. Bracing did nothing. The truth still hit with full force.
Her ribs were ringed with darkening fingerprints. Her hips mottled with bruises in the shape of his grip. Her thighs trembled uncontrollably. Her skin smeared with the fading remnants of his touch. The essence of his pleasure, and an embarrassing amount of hers, mixed with her blood, coated her inner thighs. Her legs felt tender, overused, pulsing with the ache of being held open for hours. Each bruise felt like a signature, each sore muscle a sentence in a language she never agreed to learn.
It was the blood that frightened her. She wasn’t a virgin; Liam had taken that right. But Liam was human. What Apollo had fucked her with was anything but human. The comparison made her stomach twist. Liam belonged to sunlight and moss and awkward tenderness. Apollo belonged to stone and fire and old rules that didn’t care if she begged.
She shut her eyes. A broken sound escaped her, neither sob nor gasp but something quietly destroyed. A sound you make when you realise you can’t climb back into the person you were an hour ago.
She was wrecked. Not just in body. In certainty. In innocence. In the simple belief that wanting and consenting were the same thing.
Her chest tightened painfully. She sucked in a breath—not enough—and another, but it didn’t reach all the way. Panic prickled at the edges of her vision, quick and sharp. The room seemed to watch her panic with the same indifferent patience as the cross: it would hold her until she stopped fighting or stopped breathing.
He rebuilt everything. Everything except her. Because her ruin was the point.
Adelaide forced her head back against the wood, the movement small and weak. The cross creaked behind her, answering the shaky drop of her weight like it could feel her shame. The sound was almost tender, and that made it worse.
She tried to shift her legs. Agony shot up her thighs, and she froze, breath catching. No—no moving. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The pain was bright and immediate, a reminder that her body had limits even if Hell pretended it didn’t.
A tremor rolled through her—slow, spreading outward from her belly to her chest, her arms, her jaw. Tears welled and slipped down the sides of her face again. They traced the dried salt lines from earlier, carving familiar paths like the only map she had left.
Not from pain. Not from what he’d done. From the truth crawling sickeningly up her spine:
Part of her had wanted it. A big part. Not him. Not exactly. Not this. Not the cross. But the way her body had answered anyway, the way sensation had drowned out fear for brief, terrible seconds.
Not the fear. Not the cruelty. Not the powerlessness. But the intensity… the unbearable need… the relief of each release he tore from her…
Shame slammed into her so hard the breath punched from her lungs. It felt like falling through a trapdoor inside herself and landing in something ugly she hadn’t known was there.
“No,” she whispered, voice cracking. “No, no, no—”
She wanted to tear the bond out of her own skin. She wanted to rip the mark from her throat. She wanted to be anywhere but here, dangling like a broken marionette, humiliated and ruined and still somehow burning inside. Burning in a way that didn’t feel like life, didn’t feel like power. Burning like a curse that refused to go quiet.
The Devil’s broken doll. A thing posed and left, meant to be looked at, meant to be remembered.
Her breathing turned sharp, faster, bordering on hyperventilation. The air wouldn’t fill her lungs; it just scraped down and left her emptier. The bond flickered faintly, sensing her panic. She flinched. It didn’t soothe. It noticed. Like a predator noticing prey is still alive.
“No,” she hissed. “Leave me alone—just—leave me—”
Her voice dissolved into an exhausted sob. She sagged forward, all the strength bleeding from her limbs. If the bonds had vanished in that moment, she would have collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.
The ropes held her upright long after her muscles gave in. She hung limp, her cheek brushing her shoulder, sweat cooling on her skin. Every breath hurt. Her body felt like it had been hollowed out. Her mind frayed at the edges like torn cloth. The chamber’s heat turned mean now that he was gone, clinging to her bruises, settling into sore places like it intended to stay.
In the stillness, her thoughts drifted. Drifted wasn’t the right word. They staggered, dazed, searching for something solid.
To the bite. To the way he’d said reward. To the cruel glint in his eyes when he walked out. To the stupid, traitorous spark in her chest that wanted him to stay. Because presence was safer than silence, even when presence was him. That realisation made her feel sick.
She hated herself for it. She hated him more. She hated all of it. Hate was a blanket, thin but familiar. Without it, she didn’t know how to survive the quiet.
Her eyes fluttered shut.
The firelight blurred in her periphery, glowing in soft, shifting patterns that danced across the ceiling. A warmth gathered at her temples, behind her eyes, not comforting—just… heavy. The light began to look wrong. Not just flicker and flame, but shapes. Spirals. Symbols that felt like they were trying to become language.
Her body sagged further. Her breathing slowed.
The ropes dug in, but she barely felt them now. Her legs hung limp, her head dropping forward in an exhausted slump. Darkness crawled in at the corners of her vision, soft and insistent. Like velvet drawn over a blade. Like mercy with teeth.
She tried—just for a moment—to fight it.
To stay awake. To stay alert. To stay angry. But she had nothing left. Anger required fuel. He’d taken everything that burned.
Her body surrendered before she could tell it not to. Somewhere deep inside, her fire curled in on itself, a frightened ember hiding from the wind.
The last thing she felt was the faint pulse of the bond, brushing against her like a hand cupping her cheek. Not gentle. Not kind. Simply there. A reminder that even unconsciousness wasn’t an escape from being tethered.
She didn’t have the strength to push it away.
Darkness claimed her.
Her body hung silent and still on the cross. A grim centrepiece in a room rebuilt to pretend nothing had happened.
And the room—perfect, untouched, cruel in its symmetry—watched over her with quiet indifference as she finally slipped into unconsciousness. Somewhere beyond the sealed door, the palace shifted, settling around its secrets. And deep in the stones, the remnants of that golden detonation pulsed once, faint and prophetic, like a heartbeat the realm hadn’t heard in a very long time.