Chapter 95 Corridor of Time
(Adelaide)
"That’s enough to keep you here.” Apollo warned.
Enough. Like her endurance was a currency, and he’d decided she still owed him. Her whole body sagged. Something inside her tried to fold in on itself, to become smaller than pain, to slip between the cracks and vanish.
She didn’t have the strength for this. Not after… all of that. Not after the way she had shattered and kept shattering until she couldn’t tell where she ended and the bond began. She’d been stretched past her own edges. Now he wanted to stretch time itself around her like another rope.
Her throat tightened. “You’re cruel.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m the Devil.” He said it the way someone might say I breathe. A fact. A justification. A shrug made of fangs.
He stepped back a fraction, finally pulling his hand from her chin. The sudden space between them felt like cold water. Like abandonment. The absence of his touch was its own kind of violence, leaving her skin too awake, too exposed to the air.
He watched her chest rise and fall too fast. Watched her legs quake uncontrollably. Watched her blink through exhaustion that bordered on unconsciousness. He watched like a man taking inventory. Like each tremor was an entry on a ledger he intended to balance. And he had the audacity to look pleased. As if her suffering had satisfied some private standard.
“You did beautifully,” he said softly. “Better than I expected.” The praise landed wrong, sour and intimate, making heat crawl up her throat with nausea.
She wanted to punch him. She couldn’t even lift her hand. Her fingers twitched anyway, useless as fallen leaves.
He moved toward the bed — the newly restored one, the one he’d rebuilt with a flick of his fingers. And he did so casually. Leisurely. As if he hadn’t just nearly torn her soul out of her body. His footsteps were unhurried, each one a deliberate insult to her shaking urgency.
He stretched like someone after a pleasant exercise. Then sighed.
“Gods,” he said, rolling his shoulders, “I haven’t had a workout like that in a long time.”
The word workout made her vision flash white with fury. Like she was a thing, an object, a tool for his boredom.
She stared at him, disbelief and fury warring in her veins. Somewhere deep under the rage, shame curled like smoke, thick and choking.
“You’re a monster,” she whispered hoarsely.
He grinned. “Naturally.” He wore the word like a crown.
He walked to the bed, sat down, and then — with an exaggerated groan — laid himself back across the pillows, arms behind his head, wings folding at his sides. The pillows swallowed him like they’d been waiting, as if the room itself existed to comfort him after he broke someone else.
Her jaw dropped.
He closed his eyes. Actually closed them. The audacity of it made her hands twitch again, as if her body still believed rage could become movement.
“Don’t,” she croaked. “Don’t you dare—”
“Mmm,” he hummed. “I think I should take a nap.” His voice drifted like velvet over a blade.
Her entire body shook with outrage. The cross answered with a low, tired groan, the wood sounding almost sympathetic.
“APOLLO!”
He peeked one eye open, golden and infuriating. “Even I’m not that mean, Adelaide.” The use of her name was a hook under her ribs, tugging hard.
She froze. Her breath stalled. Then, he laughed. A low, sinful, terrible laugh that vibrated through her bones and made humiliation bloom hot under her skin. The sound bounced off the stone and came back to her, louder, as if Hell itself enjoyed the joke.
“Relax,” he said easily. “I’m not going to sleep.”
As if she could relax, hanging there, shaking, stripped down to nerves and bruises.
He stood again — stretching, slow, deliberate — and walked back toward her with a prowl in his steps. A predator’s pacing. Unhurried. Certain his prey had nowhere to run.
She glared at him with every ounce of strength she had left. It wasn’t much. But it was hers. A last spark cupped in trembling hands.
He reached her. Leaned in. Brushed his lips against hers. Not soft. Not gentle. A bruising kiss that stole what little air she had left.
She bit him. Hard. The taste of him hit her tongue like smoke and copper, and the bite felt like the only weapon she still owned.
His breath hitched — barely — before he chuckled into the kiss. Amusement, warm and wicked, sliding over her defiance like oil over flame.
“Fiery even now,” he murmured, pulling back. “I love it.”
The words made her skin crawl, as if affection from him was just another chain.
“Go to Hell,” she rasped.
“Already home,” he replied.
He cupped her jaw briefly — a shockingly tender touch, too gentle for what he’d just done — then stepped back. That brief softness felt like a trapdoor under her feet: disorienting, dangerous, meant to make her doubt her own hate.
And turned away. Just like that, as if she were already finished.
“No,” she whispered. “Apollo— Apollo WAIT—”
The plea scraped out of her before pride could stop it, and she hated herself for giving him even that much.
He paused at the threshold, looked over his shoulder, and smiled like the sunrise over a battlefield. A beautiful ruin. A promise of more devastation.
“You hang there,” he said. “Until you’re ready to talk.”
Her chest caved. “Apollo— please— I can’t—”
“You can,” he said simply. “And you will.” Two sentences, each one a nail.
Then, he walked out. Just walked out. The casualness of his exit was the cruellest part. Like breaking her was as ordinary as opening a door.
The door reassembled behind him with a shiver of smoke and iron. Metal sighed into place. Wards stitched themselves shut with invisible thread. The seams of the world corrected around his absence.
The room went quiet. Completely quiet. Not peace. Not rest. Just a silence so dense it felt poured, as if it had weight and intention.
The cross creaked around her trembling body. It sounded old now, older than wood should be, like it remembered other bodies, other prayers that had gone unanswered.
Her breathing stuttered. Broke. Hitched again. A single tear slipped down her cheek.
Her body shook, either from exhaustion or rage. Or the delayed tremor of magic that still clung to her bones, buzzing under her skin like trapped lightning.
And she hung there — helpless, exhausted, humiliated, aching in every place he’d touched her, every place he’d marked her, every place she had betrayed herself. The air cooled slowly, leaving sweat to turn clammy, leaving bruises to throb in clearer, sharper pain.
Alone. Still bound. Still spread. Still unable to move. Still forced to wait. Waiting felt like a second punishment: the long, empty corridor of time with no end in sight.