All Chapters of The Devil's Broken Doll: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

(Adelaide)The moment Adelaide’s feet hit the forest floor, the cold stabbed up her legs like knives. The shock of it ripped a strangled gasp from her chest, nerves flaring as if she’d plunged into a river of ice instead of leaves and loam.Dirt. Roots. Frost. Stones.Barefoot. No protection. No time. Every texture imprinted itself into her skin—slimy moss, jagged pebbles, the slick sting of frost-slick bark—until her soles felt flayed raw within the first dozen strides.Her legs pumped on instinct—pure, feral, blinding instinct. Breath tore from her throat in harsh, uneven gasps as branches whipped at her arms and stung across her cheeks. Bristling twigs raked her shins, snapping against her skin hard enough to raise welts, the air tearing in and out of her lungs like she was breathing knives.Behind her, the woods exploded with sound.A roar—violent, raw, full of bloodthirst and triumph—ripped through the night, shuddering down every tree trunk. Birds burst from branches with franti

(The Devil)Pain.Real pain. Not the distant echo of a blade that never quite reached him, not the dull, background ache of ancient wounds long since turned to myth—this was sharp, immediate, present pain that lit up his nerves like a struck sigil.The spear tore into his back-left shoulder with a force he had not felt in centuries. The wood punched through fur, past hide, scraping through muscle like fire-tipped teeth. Hot blood surged around the wound, spilling in thick rivulets down his flank. Each pulse of it felt wrong, an insult to the very idea of what he was—Devil, nightmare, pact-bound sovereign—reduced, in this moment, to a body that could be so easily pierced.He roared. It wasn’t a warning. It wasn’t dominance. It wasn’t ritual. It was shock. The sound ripped out of him raw and unshaped, tearing the night open from root to sky.The forest shuddered beneath him. Birds launched into the sky in frantic bursts. The trees vibrated. The ground quaked. Distant hills answered with

(Adelaide)For a long moment after he disappeared, Adelaide didn’t move. Sound peeled away from the world in layers—the distant rustle of leaves, the soft rush of the stream, even the ringing in her ears—until all that was left was the echo of his roar vibrating through her bones.The forest swallowed his massive shape, darkness rushing in to fill the space he’d occupied, but his presence clung to the air like smoke. Her knees stayed pressed into the cold earth, her fingers still curled around the useless stone, her lungs dragging in broken, shaky breaths that hurt all the way down. Every inhale scraped along her ribs, each exhale shuddering out of her as if her body was learning how to breathe again without his weight pinning her.He was gone. She didn’t understand it. The Beast had had her pinned. His weight on her chest. His teeth at her throat. One more breath and he could have ended it. He should have. That’s what everyone said the Devil did: he chose, he hunted, he claimed.But

(The Devil)She went limp in his arms the moment his teeth left her skin. The sudden absence of tension felt wrong, as if someone had cut the string on a bow he’d drawn too tight, leaving the echo of strain vibrating through his muscles with nowhere to go.One breath, she was fire—thrashing, clawing, fighting him with every scrap of strength—and the next—Gone. Her weight shifted all at once, no longer resisting but slumping, and the Beast inside him snapped its jaws on empty air, furious at losing the fight in the very instant it became interesting.Her blood—fresh, hot, streaking across his tongue—still dripped from the corner of his mouth. He felt the throb of her pulse under his lips as he pulled back, ragged breath shaking through him. Each faint flutter against his mouth felt like a question: alive? alive? alive?—and every answer came back yes, to his own bafflement.The world around them seemed to flinch with her collapse. The trees stilled, the wind stopped its howling, even th

(The Devil)The moment he stepped through the veil, Hell greeted him like an old, hungry friend.Heat slammed into his skin. The air thickened, heavy as wet ash. And beneath it all, the sound rose.Screams.Endless, layered, trembling screams woven into the very wind. Some sharp, some low, some hardly more than broken sobs. Souls who had wandered too far. Souls who had never left. Souls whose names he did not care to remember. They braided together into one constant, ragged hymn—pain and rage and regret spiralling upward toward a sky that never listened.The sound did not simply echo—it vibrated, rattling through the blackened stones and rippling across the molten rivers far below. The sky, a swirling throat of smoke and ember, pulsed dimly as if reacting to the disturbances in his magic. Hell recognised its king. It also recognised what he carried.Her unconscious body stirred faintly against him. He held her closer. The shift was instinctive, an almost imperceptible tightening of hi