Chapter 146 Say My Name
(Caelum Ashborne)
Adelaide lay curled on her side, hair a dark spill across the pillow, sheet tangled around her waist. One arm was thrown above her head, fingers half-curled, as if she’d been reaching for something in her dreams.
The sight of her—the simple, defenceless shape of her—hit him harder than the throne room had.
Chains gone. Wrists free. No hook. No cross. No ropes biting into soft flesh. Just… her. In a bed meant for the king, in a room meant for his pleasures, sleeping like she hadn’t yet learned this place would always take more than she was willing to give. And now his senses told him something else had shifted, some rule he’d relied on bending without warning: the Devil had held back, and Cael did not know what to do with a world where Apollo could fuck without breaking. The dissonance made his jaw tighten. If the Devil could soften there, where else might he soften? And what would that do to all the carefully balanced horrors Cael had built his survival around?
He crossed to the far corner, cloak whispering against the floor, and let the shadows thicken around him. They curled up the wall and across the ceiling, a quiet, watchful presence. He didn’t need to see everything. Just enough. He had been ordered to stay. He told himself that was why he remained after he’d confirmed her pulse was steady, her magic unbroken. Obedience. Nothing else. Not the strange, hollow fear that if he left, something in the room would change without him witnessing it. Not the pull of her ember tugging on the frayed edges of his restraint.
He let a thin strand of power slip from his fingertips, brushing the air above her the way he had brushed the embers of dying fires in the days after the Queen fell.
Her magic stirred at the contact, sleepy and instinctive. Golden warmth flickered under her skin, a faint glow around her heart that only someone like him would ever perceive.
Alive.
He had not realised until that moment how much he’d been braced for the opposite.
His shoulders dropped a fraction. His hand lowered. He sank more fully into the wall, letting stone cool the back of his skull.
He shouldn’t think of the way she’d sounded in the chamber. He did anyway. Not in detail. Not in the explicit heat of the act—he’d run that path raw already and knew where it led. What rose now were flashes.
Her voice. Cracked open. The tiny, helpless noises that had slipped out when she’d tried to swallow them. The way her magic had clutched at his ember without knowing what it reached for.
The way his own body had betrayed him, spilling in the dark to the rhythm of someone else’s hands on her.
Shame crawled under his skin. It felt greasy and hot, an oil slick over the bones of who he was supposed to be. Shadows were meant to watch without wanting. He had crossed that line, and there was no way to uncross it, no matter how straight he held his spine.
He had stood in the walls like a voyeur and lost control like a novice. If Apollo ever realised how far that loss had gone, there would be no leash tight enough to save him.
You watched your king take his mortal, and you climaxed with her.
The thought had teeth. He let it bite. Better that than let it fester.
He had built a life on discipline—on control so ruthless it bordered on cruelty to himself. Yet one mortal girl’s magic had undone it in a handful of heartbeats.
He glanced at the bed again, jaw tight.
She shifted in her sleep. A small, restless movement. Her toes flexed under the thin sheet, calves tensing, then relaxing again. A faint crease appeared between her brows, tension flickering through her features.
His shadow leaned forward before he could stop it, drawn to that small sign of unrest the way it had been drawn to her on the cross.
Not safe from this realm. Not safe from him.
He wasn’t sure which worried him more.
Her breath changed. The steady, slow rhythm of deep sleep hitched, smoothed, then hitched again. Her fingers twitched where they rested near her face. The line between her brows deepened.
Caelum could tell the moment the dream found her.
Magic stirred under her skin, not in the wild, explosive flare of earlier, but in a gradual build. Emberflame seeped into her veins, soft at first, spreading along her limbs like warmth under a door. The air in the room responded, heating in slight, uneven surges.
She whispered something. Too quiet to catch.
Then, clearer: “Apollo…” The name slid out of her like a sigh, full of longing that made Caelum’s teeth clench.
Heat snapped through him, irrational and sharp. Jealousy wasn’t new—demons were born in packs of it—but this felt different. It wasn’t the covetous frustration of seeing power he couldn’t match, or status he’d never reach. It was small, sharp, and particular.
He wished she hadn’t said his name like that. He wished he hadn’t heard it. The sound lodged under his breastbone like shrapnel, vibrating every time he drew breath.
Before he could stop himself, his own name slipped out on a breath, so soft it barely qualified as sound. “Caelum…” A pathetic, traitorous whisper, as if the air might carry it to her dream and convince her to reach for him instead. “Say my name, Firelight.”