All Chapters of The Devil's Broken Doll: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

(Apollo & Adelaide) Adelaide’s world narrowed to the sound of his voice and the wooden X at her back. The chamber around them might as well have fallen into the void; the rest of Hell faded to a dull, distant rumble beneath the sharp, immediate reality of wood, smoke, and him. Everything else was heat. The cross groaned, protesting every shudder that racked her body. Her wrists burned where the smoke-bonds held them, arms stretched above her head so long she could barely feel her fingers. Her legs trembled around his hips, the ropes at her ankles biting with every involuntary squeeze. Every creak of timber sounded like a verdict, every tightening of smoke like another line of script being burned into the story of her body. She wanted to breathe. To think. To put words to anything that was happening inside her. There was no space for any of it. Thoughts came in splinters: Lyra’s name, her mother’s hands, the forest, the Offering circle. Each image flared for half a heartbeat befo

(Adelaide)The world came back slowly.Not in pieces— In aftershocks. Like thunder rolling away from a strike she’d already survived, leaving the air trembling in its wake.Her vision stayed blurred at the edges, colours smearing into each other, the room a hazy whirl of stone, firelight, and shadows. The cross throbbed behind her like a heartbeat. The ropes pulsed faintly with dying embers. Her wrists felt skinned. Her thighs trembled violently, so overused they shook without pause. Her chest rose in shallow, uneven gasps. Each inhale tasted like scorched iron and old smoke, as if the air itself had been wrung through the Devil’s hands before it reached her lungs. Somewhere in the cracks of the walls, low flame shivered and dimmed, as though it, too, had spent itself witnessing.Everything hurt. Everything burned. Everything inside her felt scraped raw, stretched beyond reason, wrung out until she wasn’t sure she even existed as a whole person anymore. She felt like a name torn out o

(Caelum Ashborne)Hell shuddered.Not the way it did when souls screamed, or when lesser lords tore at each other’s borders for sport. This was deeper. Older. A pulse through the bones of the realm—through obsidian, through magma, through every shard of dead star that made up the Devil’s palace. A seismic remembering, as if Hell itself had flinched at a name it had not spoken in centuries.Caelum felt it before he heard it.Standing alone on one of the high balconies, half-shadowed behind a column, he felt the first tremor roll through the stone beneath his boots. The air went thin and sharp, as if the world had drawn a breath and refused to release it. The pressure settled behind his eyes, a familiar warning ache that the Emberborn learned to respect young. Somewhere in the mortar lines of the palace, old sigils that had slept like fossils gave a single, quiet itch.Then the fire changed.The braziers in the long hall below flared at once, gold licking through their usual red, twisti

(Caelum Ashborn)Caelum lifted his hand and summoned a thin thread of his Emberborn fire. It flickered between his fingers, the colour of banked coals—darker than Adelaide’s golden blaze, older than Apollo’s infernal red. He pressed it gently against the rope at her wrist.The smoke hissed.For a heartbeat, it thinned, ember-lines shuddering. He felt the structure of the magic—Devilcraft, sharp and elegant and cruel, threaded with the burn of the bond. It was tied into the mark at her neck, anchored in her heartbeat, woven through the cross and the circle on the floor.A whole system, designed to hold.He pushed a little harder. Agony lanced up his arms.The ward hissed at him, recognising foreign magic, but he didn’t try to unmake it. Instead, he worried at the edges, loosening the tension by a fraction.Enough for blood to flow a little freer to her fingers. Not enough for her to slip out. Not freedom. Just circulation. Sometimes survival started as something as humiliatingly small

(Apollo)He stood over her for a long moment, staring, the claws of one hand digging into his own palm hard enough to drip molten gold. The droplets hit the floor and cooled into tiny, imperfect coins. One rolled, stopped at the edge of the rune-circle, and trembled there, as if waiting for judgment.Someone had been here. Someone had put a cloth on her. Someone had touched his bindings. Someone had tasted his fire in the air and decided to meddle anyway.His.His creature. His bond. His experiment. His threat.They had tended what he’d deliberately left undone. They had tried, in their small way, to stand where he stands.The bond twitched faintly, sensing the storm pounding through him.She still slept.He changed that.Apollo didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t have to. He sank his awareness into the mark, into the molten brand that tied her life to his realm like a hook through the heart.He tugged. Not on desire this time. Not on pain. Just… wakefulness. A cold pry at the edge of her