Chapter 116 Scream for Me
(Apollo & Adelaide)
Apollo felt it.
The second his magic lost purchase on the restraints, it was like a tooth ripping free of his jaws. Pain lanced through his forearms where the bond to the bindings had anchored, sharp and sudden.
He stilled. His grip in her hair tightened reflexively. She didn’t stop.
Her newly freed hands were on him now, fingers hot and desperate, clutching at scaled skin and hard muscle, at whatever she could reach. It wasn’t graceful. It was messy, instinctive, and wild.
It was everything. But it was also wrong. He hadn’t allowed this. He hadn’t given her his level of control. She had taken it for herself.
His Little Flame.
His seductress. His temptation and his damnation.
A snarl tore through him before he could swallow it down. The braziers’ flames lurched. The shadows in the room recoiled.
“Enough,” he said, the word a whip crack.
He pulled her off him, his rock-hard cocks pulling free of her cursed mouth.
His magic slammed down through the room. Not through the bond. Through the stone. Through the air.
Adelaide flinched, frozen, her hands still on him, eyes wide and suddenly clearer, the fog of lust and shock peeled back just enough for fear to punch its way through.
She looked at her hands. At the absence of glowing rope around her wrists. At the faint red marks left behind.
Her stomach dropped. “I—” Her voice came out thin. “I didn’t—”
“I know,” Apollo said tightly.
He grabbed her wrists. His fingers wrapped all the way around them, hot and unyielding. He lifted them easily, ignoring her instinctive attempt to pull back. There was a faint tremor in his hands now—not from weakness, but from the effort it took not to squeeze until he heard bone crack.
“Do you know what you just did?” he asked.
Adelaide’s pulse thundered in her throat. “I didn’t try to escape,” she said quickly, panic sharpening her tone. “I didn’t even know— I wasn’t—”
His gaze flared with something complicated—anger, yes, but also a fierce, almost feral satisfaction.
“You burned through my bindings,” he said. “Without me. Without permission.”
She swallowed, lips trembling. “I was just—I couldn’t—”
He squeezed, just enough to make her wince. “You’re growing,” he murmured. “Whether you want to or not.”
That terrified her more than the pain.
He released a breath, slow and measured, dragging control back into place.
Then, very deliberately, he pulled her hands down.
The remnants of the cross’s lower half sank further into the floor with a low, grinding sound, until there was nothing left but the truncated X hanging in the air above her. The chains of magic that had anchored her wrists slithered like smoke, following his hands down, reshaping under his will.
New bindings formed.
They coiled around her wrists again, but this time the tether ran down instead of up—long strands of glowing smoke twisting into chains that sank into the floor in front of her.
He forced her arms down until her hands hovered just above the obsidian floor.
“Hands,” he said, voice low but implacable. “Here.”
Every instinct in her screamed to resist. Every lesson in Hell told her not to.
Slowly, Adelaide let her palms settle against the warm stone.
The moment they touched, the smoke-chains snapped tight, anchoring her there. A circle of runes flared beneath her fingers, binding her to the floor.
The cross above her dissolved. The chamber rumbled. Something new rose from the stone in front of her—a smooth, sloping structure emerging as if the ground itself were melting and reshaping. Obsidian flowed, hardened, took form.
A bench.
Not a simple slab, but curved, specifically designed. Its surface was slightly inclined, padded by some dark, velvety material that radiated heat. Restraint rings were carved subtly into the sides and front, as if the whole thing had been grown out of the idea of captivity.
A lover’s bench. A torture device. Both.
Adelaide stared at it, breath shallow. Her knees dug into the floor; her bound hands burned where the magic gripped them. The position pulled her forward, forcing her spine to arch.
Behind her, she heard Apollo move.
Wings rustling. Scales shifting. The slow, heavy steps of something enormous repositioning itself.
Her heart pounded so hard it hurt.
He came to stand behind her, close enough that the heat of his body rolled over her back in tidal waves. Shadows from his wings swallowed the bench, leaving only the faint, hellish glow of runes tracing the floor like constellations.
“Up,” he said.
His hand settled on the small of her back and pushed, not gently.
She staggered, catching herself on the bench with her chest and ribs. The angle forced her to bend, her hands dragged forward by the chains until her arms extended fully, palms flattened on the floor.
The position left her bare feet on the stone, her torso draped over the padded incline, her backside elevated, her spine a taut, vulnerable curve.
She sucked in a breath between her teeth.
It hurt. It also stole some of the strain from her shoulders. Her wrists still throbbed, but the old hanging agony was gone, replaced by a new discomfort that felt disturbingly like being arranged.
“Comfortable?” Apollo asked.
Her laugh came out fractured. “No.”
“Good,” he said. “You’ll remember it better that way.”
He stood over her, looking down at the line of her body—her hair spilling forward like a dark curtain, her shoulder blades shifting with each unsteady breath, her fingers splayed and trembling where the chains held them to the floor.
His possessiveness surged again, dark and tidal. The intruder had given her water and a scrap of cloth. He would give her this: a position she would never forget, a lesson carved into muscle memory and bone.
He leaned over her, one scaled hand sliding up her spine until his claws rested lightly at the nape of her neck. His wings arched, enclosing them both in a cage of shadow and heat.
“Open those legs, Little Flame,” he murmured, voice a low, reverberating growl against her ear.
The chains at her wrists pulsed once in answer.
Her fingers curled instinctively around nothing, pressing harder into the stone.
“And don’t,” he added, a cruel amusement threading through his tone, “forget to scream for me.”