Chapter 102 Someone Dared
(Apollo)
The bond felt wrong.
Not broken. Not distant. Just… off. Like a bell that should have rung true, yet somehow held a hairline crack in the note.
Apollo lay sprawled on the obsidian bed in one of the lower rooms, forearm draped over his eyes, fighting the exhaustion gnawing at the edges of his bones. Every muscle ached with the aftershocks of holding himself back. The beast inside him still prowled restlessly, claws raking along the inside of his ribs. Even the air around him tasted singed, as if the room had been too close to a storm and hadn’t stopped smelling of it.
The sleep had meant to cool him down. To let him think clearly. To allow his mind to shape a plan that didn’t begin and end with tearing Hell apart.
Instead, his thoughts kept circling the same point.
Her.
The bond hummed low in his chest, a steady ember instead of the shredded, raw wire it had been hours ago. No sharp flares of agony. No frantic spikes of panic. No dizzy, white-hot peaks of ecstasy.
Just a slow, stubborn pulse. Measured. Persistent. The kind of rhythm that belonged to a flame refusing to go out.
Alive. Stable. Stronger.
Too strong.
His brows knit. He dragged his arm away from his face and stared at the ceiling, watching hairline fractures in the stone knit themselves closed. The whole palace was still repairing from the earlier blast—wards resetting, walls sealing, sigils re-anchoring. Threads of molten gold crawled through seams like stitching, patient and obedient, trying to pretend the realm hadn’t flinched.
The bond pulsed again.
Not the weak, sluggish thump of someone who’d been wrung dry and left hanging. Not the faint, frightened flicker of a human body finally giving up.
His jaw clenched. He sat up slowly, shoulders creaking, long horns scraping the carved headboard. He hadn’t dismissed the cross. Hadn’t released the bindings. Hadn’t ordered anyone near the top level.
And yet—she was not how he’d left her. Not completely.
Her Ember beat stronger down the bond. A brighter thread in the dark, as if someone had fed it breath.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood.
The chambers around him dimmed instinctively, shadows drawing back from his rising aura. His form was still an unsettled compromise—horns shortened from their war-length but still too long for a “man,” claws half-retracted, the molten seams in his skin faintly aglow. The faintest heat-halo shimmered off him, bending the edges of the furniture like glass over flame.
Good enough.
He didn’t bother trying for more human. He was done pretending for tonight. If Hell wanted a king, it would get him unsoftened.
The walk back to the top level was a blur of heat and stone. The palace felt his temper before he reached the stairs. Torches guttered nervously as he passed. Wards along the walls hummed harder, ready to harden or shatter at his whim. A few lesser sigils dimmed outright, playing dead like insects before a boot.
He forced himself not to run.
Slow. Controlled. Learn before you destroy. He kept his pace even when his ribs wanted to split and let the beast sprint ahead.
The corridor outside his chamber door smelled as it should—smoke, iron, the lingering echo of his own flame. No foreign scent. No demon trace. Only the familiar metallic bite of fresh wards and the dull warmth of a room that belonged to him by right and rage.
He didn’t trust it.
His hand closed around the iron handle, claws denting the metal. For a heartbeat, he simply stood there, feeling the bond like a taut wire running from his chest to the other side of the door. It wasn’t pulling. It was pointing.
She was asleep. Deep. Her mind had sunk into that dark, merciful nothing humans used as refuge. Even down there, she burned. Faint, curled in on herself, but burning. A coal tucked under ash. A secret that refused to stay buried.
He twisted the handle and stepped into the room.
The chamber looked almost exactly the way he’d remade it:
Bed rebuilt, sheets straightened, pillows arranged. Cracked walls fused. Shattered furniture either replaced or reformed. The floor was scrubbed of ash and gore. The runes were quiet, their glow reduced to a low, satisfied simmer, as if they’d finished eating.
And yet—
His gaze snapped to the cross.
She hung where he’d left her. Arms stretched above her head, ankles bound wide. The ropes of smoke still glowed faintly at her wrists and feet, binding her to the wooden X. The cross cast a long, angled shadow that cut the floor like a blade.
But the colours were wrong.
The first thing that didn’t belong: the cloth.
Dark, soft, draped around her shoulders and chest. Not fur. Not silk. Not any fabric he’d conjured. It lay between her back and the wood, padding the worst of the pressure, the ends wrapped clumsily across the front of her body to shield some of her nakedness. A human gesture, almost awkward in its care, sitting in his ritual chamber like a blasphemy.
He went utterly still. The air around him tightened, as if the room itself sensed the shift and held its breath.
The second thing: her skin.
He stalked closer, each step a crackle of heat across the stones. His shadow climbed the cross ahead of him, swallowing her in slow increments.
Her head sagged, chin touching her chest, hair a tangled curtain falling around her cheeks. She looked ruined still—lips swollen, eyes bruised with sleeplessness, muscles trembling in occasional small spasms of overuse. But the tremors weren’t the hollow, dying kind. They were the stubborn reflex of a body that had decided, against all reason, to continue.
But the bruises along her ribs were already yellowing at the edges. The raw, bloody grooves at her wrists had darkened, closed, tender but no longer open. The brutal bite on her breast had lost its angry, fresh sheen—skin already knitting, blood dried, the broken crescents of flesh beginning to pull together.
Hours. It had barely been hours.
Humans did not heal like that, not without intervention or assistance.
His mark could accelerate her recovery, yes. The bond could thread Hell’s venom and vitality into her veins, keeping her alive where she should have broken.
But he hadn’t given her that.
He’d left her deliberately frayed. Deliberately wrecked.
Now someone had cleaned the edges. Not enough to erase the damage. Just enough to change the story.
He reached her and stopped, chest rising and falling in slow, heavy pulls.
The cloth was the tell.
He lifted one claw and pinched the edge of it between two fingers.
Soft. Worn. Woven from something that wasn’t demon-hair or infernal silk. It carried a faint scent that did not belong to this palace at all—distant smoke that wasn’t his, stone that wasn’t Hell’s, the metallic tang of ember magic layered carefully beneath. Old mountain air clung to the fibres, memory of some other cavern. A cold, clean place that had no right to exist this deep.
His lip curled. Not his. Not hers.
Someone had stood close enough to tuck this around her shoulders. Someone had laid eyes on her naked flesh. Someone had touched what wasn’t theirs to touch. Someone had dared to act like his chamber was a place where mercy could survive.