Chapter 123 Drown in Me
(Apollo & Adelaide)
“He looked… Gentle” She chose each word like stepping on glass. “His skin was grey. And black, but not. It wasn’t like yours, it swirled almost.”
Her gaze dropped, lashes lowering as if she could hide the memory there.
“He looked like…” She swallowed. “Like someone carved him out of smoke and stone, then forgot to smooth the edges.”
A faint, humourless huff left Apollo — a sound too sharp to be amusement.
She hesitated, then added, softer, almost resentful of herself, “He was… handsome.”
The word landed like a spark in dry kindling. Apollo didn’t move, but the temperature in the chamber shifted — not hotter, not colder, just tighter. As if the air itself had drawn a careful breath and decided not to release it.
Handsome.
Not brutal. Not monstrous. Not crowned in flame.
His jaw flexed. Slowly. Deliberately. “Handsome,” he repeated, tasting the word like something spoiled.
Adelaide lifted her chin a fraction, defiance flickering weakly through her exhaustion. “Not in the way you are,” she said quickly. “Not… overwhelming. He was quieter. Sharper around the edges. Like—”
“—like something you could look at without fear,” Apollo finished for her.
Her silence answered. That silence cut deeper than any lie.
“So,” Apollo murmured, circling once, measured and predatory, “he stood close enough for you to see him clearly. Long enough for you to notice his face.”
His shadow passed over her. Lingered.
“Long enough,” he continued, voice low and dangerous, “for kindness to take a shape.”
Adelaide’s fingers curled reflexively. “He didn’t touch me like that.”
Apollo stopped.
Oh, little girl.
The restraint it took not to smile was almost painful.
“Of course he didn’t,” he said softly. “He wouldn’t dare.”
His gaze lifted, molten and intent, pinning her in place.
“But he let you look.”
Jealousy did not roar. It did not explode. It settled. A slow, poisonous certainty sinking into his bones: that Cael had been seen, remembered, weighed — and found wanting only because Apollo existed.
“And he never gave a name,” Apollo added, voice deceptively calm. It wasn’t a question.
She shook her head. Her hair stuck to her damp cheeks. “No. He never told me who he was.”
Good. Names were power. And Apollo did not share power. Not with smoke-carved rats. Not with handsome strangers.
Truth burned in the back of her throat like acid. “But he said… he said he was invested in me surviving. In… what would happen next.”
Apollo went still. Not with suspicion. With recognition. Invested.
Only one demon in his palace ever used that word so clinically — so sincerely — about anything.
A grey-and-black skinned demon. Quiet. Forgettable by design.
And every other demon had been expelled from the inner halls by the time she was strung from the cross.
Only one could have been near her.
Cael Asher.
The spy. The shadow. The observer. The loyal blade Apollo kept half-drawn and half-lost in shadow. The one whose real name even Apollo never sought out.
A cold, lethal certainty settled in his bones. That was a mistake on his part. One he will never make again.
“He said that?” Apollo’s voice was too calm.
She nodded, eyes flicking away.
“He said if someone was going to break me down, something in me should get to stand back up. That was all.”
Silence thickened. Apollo’s flames flickered low — not with rage, but something far more dangerous. A slow, deliberate calculation unfurled behind his gaze, ancient and territorial.
Cael Asher. Invested where he should not be. Watching what he should not see. Caring about someone he had no right to touch.
Adelaide swallowed hard.
“That’s all I know,” she whispered. “He never tried to tell me more. He came when I could barely see. Barely think. He made me drink. He adjusted the ropes. He told me not to die before I decided what I wanted. And then he left.”
Apollo’s jaw flexed — a single, violent movement. Some part of him approved. Most of him hated that he did. It made him angrier.
He released her throat, hand falling away in a slow drag that left her skin prickling where his claws had been.
“You did not tell me everything,” he said.
Panic shot through her. Her eyes widened, and panic once again clawed at her chest. “I—”
He cut her off with a lifted hand. “Because you did not know everything,” he clarified. “You cannot lie about what you have not seen.”
Relief hit so fast it made her sway.
He stepped forward a fraction to compensate, fingers catching her shoulder to keep her upright. The touch looked almost like support. It wasn’t. It was control.
“For this,” he said, voice dipping low, “you will not see the cross tonight.”
Her lungs seized. The words were a reprieve and a new kind of sentence all at once.
Her shoulders sagged, an involuntary loosening she couldn’t disguise, but her stomach stayed knotted. Not the cross, then. Something else. With him, mercy always came with teeth.
She forced herself to meet his gaze. “Then what?” she whispered.
He studied her for a long heartbeat. Her hair tangled around her shoulders. Her swollen lips. Her body marked by his hands, his teeth, his magic. Her eyes—still bright, still defiant, even rimmed in red.
His Emberborn girl. His liability. His leverage. His prophecy-thread.
And Cael’s new project.
Jealousy and curiosity twisted together.
“Now,” he said, “you will see another kind of kindness.”
Her brows knit, suspicion cutting through exhaustion. “I don’t trust your kind of kindness,” she muttered.
His mouth twitched. “You shouldn’t,” he said easily. “But you will come.”
Before she could argue, he bent. One arm slid under her knees. The other wrapped around her back. She hissed as her thighs protested the change in angle, but the protest died in her throat when he lifted her without apparent effort.
Heat engulfed her. His chest was a wall of solid, scaled warmth against her ribs. The world tilted as he straightened, cradling her like something both precious and dangerous.
Adelaide grabbed for his shoulders on instinct, fingers digging into the rigid plates there. The movement pressed her closer into him. Her pulse hammered against his collarbone, trapped between the urge to shove away and the dizzy need to cling to the only stable surface in a spinning room. His scent wrapped around her—smoke, spice, and something metallic—until there was nothing else to breathe.
“Wait—what are you—”
“Careful,” he murmured. “You’re in no state to be dropped.”
Her heart rattled faster. “Dropped where?” She hated how small her voice sounded.
He turned toward the door, shadows slithering out of his way.
“Into the only place in this palace where the water is nearly as hot as you are,” he said. “You begged not to hang. You offered anything. You spoke truth when it mattered.” His golden gaze cut down to her. “You get a reward.”
“Another reward?” she echoed, wary.
He smiled, all sharp teeth and something almost soft buried so deep most would miss it.
“Don’t sound so offended, Little Flame,” Apollo said, stepping through the threshold with her in his arms. “You wanted to teach me kindness.”
Whatever kindness meant to him, it was not the same thing it meant to her. Adelaide understood that now with aching clarity. His mercy came edged with ownership, his protection tangled with possession.
And yet—beneath it all—something had been set in motion. Not by force alone, but by choice. By interference. By a single act of quiet defiance that neither fire nor fear had managed to erase
The corridor beyond them warmed in anticipation, the distant sound of rushing, heated water curling up from the depths below. The walls seemed to glow brighter as they passed, veins of molten gold pulsing lazily in the stone, as if the palace itself approved of where he was taking her—or was curious to see what he would do next.
“Tonight,” he finished, voice a low promise, “you can drown in it.”
And somewhere far below, where the palace bones met the veins of Hell, the bathhouse waited—its steaming pools stirring as if they already knew who was coming.