Chapter 24 Just A Little Longer
(Adelaide)
The rules pounded in her head. Survive until sunrise. Survive the night, and he cannot claim you. The Pact forbids it. He obeys the Pact. He has to. That’s how this works. Villagers had staked their sanity on that belief for generations; mothers had let their daughters walk into the woods because of it. Surely, surely, the universe would not be so cruel as to twist the rules now.
Her muscles burned as she pushed herself up onto her elbows, wincing when her abused hands brushed the rough ground.
“The moment that sun comes over the trees,” she muttered, “I’m free. You can rot in your hell, you bastard. I won.” She almost laughed. It came out as a broken, breathy sound. The sound of someone stringing bravado across a chasm and pretending it was a bridge.
The forest was quiet. Not the dead silence from when he arrived—this was different. Gentle. A hush before morning sounds resumed. A bird dared a tentative chirp somewhere far away.
Adelaide exhaled shakily.
Just a little longer.
The air shifted. Not like before—not that crushing, suffocating weight of his arrival. This was subtler. A ripple instead of a wave. A breath of heat threading through the chill. Like someone had exhaled against the back of her neck from very far away, and the forest had carried the warmth to her.
The hairs on her arms rose. Her body knew before her mind did. Something was wrong.
Very slowly, she lowered herself again, pressing closer to the earth, eyes peering over the edge of the root-woven opening. The stream gurgled softly, silver under the rising grey light. And then he stepped out of the trees.
Her breath caught. The new shape didn’t fit at first; her mind tried to slot him into a dozen safer explanations and found nowhere to put him.
For a heartbeat, she thought he must be a man from the village. Maybe one of the guards sent to find survivors after the Offering. Maybe someone who’d been lost in the forest.
But no one from Fire’s Peak looked like that.
He was tall. Taller than any man she had ever seen up close, height stretched over a body made of sharp lines and coiled power. Broad shoulders, lean muscle, no softness anywhere. His skin was tanned and smeared with dirt and blood—some already dried, some still fresh in slow, dark streaks. The angles of him were all wrong for this gentle half-light; he belonged to harsher, sharper hours.
He wore only a pair of ripped, low-slung pants, the fabric torn across one thigh, fraying at the seams. His feet were bare. His chest was bare.
And it was… Art.
Muscle sculpted as if someone had taken a blade to marble and carved this from spite. A long line of his throat. The cut of his collarbones. The ridges of his abdomen. A faint trail of darker hair leading down from his navel, vanishing beneath the waistband. He looked like one of the old, forbidden carvings half-scrubbed from the chapel walls—one the Elders pretended had never been there.
Adelaide swallowed hard, throat suddenly dry.
He was beautiful in a way that made her stomach twist. Predatory. Unfair. Wrong. Her body reacted before her mind could catch up, a hot, disorienting mix of attraction and revulsion that made her want to both step closer and throw a rock at his face.
His hair was dark, almost black, wet-looking in tangled waves that brushed his jaw and neck as he walked. Strands stuck to his forehead with sweat and blood. His mouth was sinful in that lazy, careless way—full lower lip, sharper upper, currently pressed into a line that said nothing and everything all at once.
And his eyes. They were not fully human. Too bright. Too intense. A colour that might have been amber in daylight, but here, in the half-dark, seemed to hold embers. No glow, not like the Beast.
But the memory of that molten fire echoed in them. Something in their depths moved when he blinked, like banked coals shifting under ash.
Her heart stuttered.
No.
Her gaze snagged on the ink.
A swirling tattoo painted his right arm from shoulder to wrist—black sigils twisting over his bicep, winding down his forearm. It didn’t stop there. The marks continued over his chest, curling across one side of his ribs, vanishing around his back.
It looked like the forest had written a language on his skin. The lines were sharp and old, looping into shapes that hurt to look at for too long, as if they wanted to move, to rearrange, to spell her name.
Her stomach dropped.
That shoulder—the left one—was bloodied. Punctured. Torn where something sharp had pierced it. Blood tracked over the muscle.
The same place where she had stabbed the Beast.
Her pulse stumbled, then slammed into a sprint.
No. No, no, no—
The man stepped into the stream. He didn’t flinch at the cold. Water pooled around his ankles, swirling red where it met the blood at his feet. The current grabbed at the crimson and dragged it downstream like a ribbon, staining the silver with faint tendrils of shadow.
He tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something she couldn’t hear. Then he turned. And walked straight toward her hiding place.
Adelaide pressed herself back under the roots, muscles locking.
Maybe he doesn’t know you’re here. Maybe he’s just—
His gaze locked on the hollow. Right on her.