Chapter 92 To Flay Oneself
(Apollo & Adelaide)
The beast kept breaking through.
Sometimes his horns scraped the beam above her head; sometimes they shortened, only to grow again when a particularly violent thrust ripped a sound from her he liked. His eyes flickered between molten gold and something darker, slit pupils dilating and narrowing with each clench around him.
His breath came out as snarls. Growls. Not human sounds. Not entirely.
The cross shook as his wings braced and flexed, feathers scattering ash and sparks around them. His tail lashed wildly, occasionally slamming into stone and leaving cracks spidering up the walls.
She was terrified.
She was drowning.
She was burning from the inside out. Her mind tried to crawl away from her body and found nowhere to go; everywhere she turned inside herself, he was already there, stamped into the raw spaces with heat and shadow.
“I can’t,” she rasped again, throat raw. “Apollo, please, I—”
A pulse of heat slammed through the bond, silencing her mid-plea. Her body jerked around him as another crest rose, uninvited, unstoppable.
Apollo’s head dropped to her shoulder, breath burning against her skin as he forced control back into his limbs, refusing to break when she did, refusing to let the fire consuming him take over—Barely.
Just barely.
A tremor ripped through his arms. Another through his wings, half-formed and flickering behind him. A new shift clawed at his skin, demanding shape, demanding dominance.
His voice came out twisted—half male, half monster: “Little… Flame…”
Another pulse tore through him.
He snarled, low and violent, his fingers, no longer fingers, but long black talons, carving deeper trenches into the cross as he held himself back from the precipice she had already fallen from.
She sobbed his name, hating herself for it, hating the way his answering groan sounded like relief.
She didn’t know how many times he’d made her fall.
At some point, counting stopped mattering.
Each time was different. A sharp crack of lightning. A slow, rolling detonation. A wildfire. A series of small, sharp detonations that left her shaking, trembling, utterly undone.
The only constant was that he never followed. Not all the way. Not yet.
She could feel it—coiled in him like a compressed star, straining at the edges of his control. His own need, his own cresting wave. Every time he got close, his body changed—horns spiralling longer, claws digging deeper, heat spiking to something nearly unbearable.
Then he would snarl and slow just enough to drag it out. To drag her out.
He wouldn’t let himself finish.
He wouldn’t let this finish.
She realised with a horrified, detached kind of clarity that this was his torture too. He was flaying himself on the same altar, refusing the mercy of an ending, as if some part of him believed the moment he broke, everything else would break with him.
He was past thinking. Instinct and obsession had taken the reins, riding him hard. He was aware of very few things: Her heat, clinging to him, refusing to let go. The way her muscles quivered around him, over-sensitised and still answering his every thrust.
The bond, screaming. His own body, mutinying.
Every time he neared that edge—every time pressure coiled low in his gut, every time the urge to claim roared up with fangs and fire—his flesh changed of its own accord.
Horns lengthening in a rush of bone. Wings tearing larger, beating the air in ragged, hungry pulses. Scales turned to fur. Thick and black. Spines splintered along his spine, splitting through flesh. His hands ballooning around her hips, claws morphing to thick paws as his body swelled.
And most dangerous of all—the way his length inside her thickened, stretched, filled.
Gone was the bulbous shape. In its place, a girthy, impossibly long, impossibly heavy monster cock reformed inside her dripping cunt.
Her strangled gasp when it happened nearly undid him. He felt the bite of fear skew through her—real fear, sharp and bright, that this would break her physically as well as everything else he’d cracked open.
He forced himself to still, panting against her shoulder, every muscle trembling with the effort.
“Breathe,” he snarled, more to himself than to her. More an animal snarl than a human command.
Her nails scraped uselessly against invisible restraints. “You’re going to tear me apart,” she whispered.
He shut his eyes briefly. The worst part was that he could. If he fully surrendered to this form, this hunger, he could break her body as easily as he had broken so many others.
He wasn’t sure that would stop him. The thought nearly made him sick.
He dragged in a breath that seared his throat. “I won’t,” he ground out, more promise to himself than her. “I won’t. I—”
The bond surged again.
She clenched around him, a reflexive flinch born of fear and lingering pleasure, and whatever thin dam he’d built fractured.
His hips snapped forward on their own, driven by something older and uglier than intention.
There was no room to move. Every possible inch of her was filled. Stretched. All consumed by him. He was already at the end of her feminine tunnel. All that was left was to slide back.
So he did.
Adelaide screamed so loudly that the sound disappeared into steam. Once he made space, just a few inches of it, he moved again, forcing himself back in. Slowly. Purposefully.
It took more strength than he knew himself to possess not to pound into her again.
But if he did, he knew that would break her. And that thought made his chest tight.