Chapter 513 No Time For Betrayal

Chapter 513 No Time For Betrayal
(Apollo) 

Apollo struck the nearest pillar. The impact split the skin across his knuckles and sent a fracture racing through the obsidian from floor to ceiling. Pain burst through his hand. It meant nothing. He struck it again. 
Someone seized his shoulder. 
Apollo turned with a snarl that shook dust from the vaulted ceiling, one hand already closing around a throat before recognition forced its way through the red haze consuming him. 
Malachar. 
The general did not flinch, though Apollo could feel the rapid hammering of his pulse beneath his palm. 
"My King," Malachar said, each word measured with the extraordinary calm of someone standing inside the jaws of an animal and pretending not to notice the teeth. "Release me." 
Apollo's fingers tightened as another wave of Adelaide's pain moved through him. 
Malachar's face darkened as the pressure around his throat increased, yet he did not raise a weapon. He merely held Apollo's gaze. 
"She is alive," Apollo growled. 
"I know." 
The answer stopped him. 
His fingers loosened by a fraction. 
"What?" 
Malachar drew one careful breath through the space Apollo allowed him. "The bond. You would not be reacting this way if she were dead." 
Apollo released him so abruptly the general staggered backwards, one hand rising instinctively to his bruised throat. 
"Where is she?" 
"We don't know." 
Wrong answer. Flame surged across Apollo's shoulders. Malachar saw it and stepped forward before the rage could become another act of destruction. 
"But someone does." 
The fire stilled. 
Malachar's breathing remained uneven, though his voice recovered quickly. "An ancient communication projection has been attempting to reach the Citadel since before the healers removed the last of the poison. The signal is old. Older than anything still operating within our own archives. It is coming through channels that have not answered in centuries." 
Apollo stared at him. The pain returned, winding around Adelaide's wrists with enough force that his own hands curled reflexively. His nails split the healing cuts across his palms. Fresh blood slid between his fingers. 
"Why wasn't I told?" 
"You were unconscious." 
"You should have woken me." 
"The healers said doing so could kill you." 
Apollo laughed. The sound began somewhere low in his chest and climbed until even he no longer recognised it. It carried no humour, only the ragged edge of something that had spent two days being carved hollow and had finally discovered the blade belonged to someone else. 
"Kill me?" 
Malachar said nothing. 
Apollo stepped closer, his bare feet leaving bloody prints across the fractured floor. 
"She is out there screaming through a bond I can barely reach, and you were concerned waking me might kill me?" 
The general held his ground. 
"I was concerned you would die before we had the chance to find her." 
The words struck cleanly enough to cut through the madness. Not extinguish it. Nothing could do that now. But shape it. 
Apollo turned towards the chamber door. His body protested immediately. Every step pulled at torn flesh and reopened wounds the healers had spent days closing, while the blood loss turned the corridor beyond into a wavering tunnel of black stone and crimson fire. He refused the arm Malachar offered. He refused the cloak someone attempted to drape over his shoulders. He wore only loose black trousers and bandages already darkening with fresh blood, his bare chest, his skin pale beneath the soot and dried gore that had survived the healers' washing. He looked less like a king returning to his throne than something dragged half-dead from beneath a battlefield and too furious to understand it should have remained there. 
The Citadel recoiled from him as he passed. Servants flattened themselves against the walls, lowering their eyes as though even meeting his gaze might draw the thing inside him back to the surface, while guards bowed with the rigid caution of males who had already learned how quickly their king could become something beyond reason. Whispers followed him through corridors bearing the wounds of the past two days, though they died whenever he drew near. Doors hung crooked from shattered hinges. Great sections of carved obsidian had been torn from the walls and scattered across the floor. One corridor remained blackened from ceiling to stone where his devilfire had erupted during a fevered attempt to escape the healers, and deep gouges scarred the surrounding pillars where claws he did not remember summoning had carved through rock as though it were softened wax. 
Apollo saw none of it as strangers might have. He saw fragments. A flash of waking beneath restraints with poison burning through his veins. Malachar shouting his name from somewhere beyond the roar filling his skull. Crimson fire surging through a healing chamber while hands tried to force him back onto the blood-soaked table. The memory of breaking free, only to lose himself again before he reached the next corridor. There were entire stretches of ruin he could not remember creating at all, places where the Citadel had apparently endured him while his mind drowned in venom and rage. 
He had done this. Not an enemy army. Not the Emberborn. Him. 
The knowledge should have sickened him. Perhaps, when Adelaide was safe, it would. For now the wreckage was only another measure of how completely the poison had stripped him of control while someone carried her farther and farther beyond his reach. 
Another surge of her pain tightened through the bond, sharp enough to drag his breath from him and send one hand striking instinctively against the nearest wall for balance. The obsidian cracked beneath his palm. 
Cael surfaced in his thoughts then, not as a fully formed accusation, but as something darker beginning to take shape. Cael had known the Citadel. Its passages. Its hidden doors. Its guards. Its king. Apollo had trusted him with every weakness he possessed, including the one person whose absence had now hollowed him into something scarcely recognisable. 
The thought tried to deepen. Apollo buried it beneath the pain. 
There would be time for betrayal later. Time for answers. Time for blood. 
First, he would find her.