Chapter 1167. Your Goodness Was the Leash I Used to Drag You Here

Chapter 1167: 1167. Your Goodness Was the Leash I Used to Drag You Here

Apollo’s pupils dilated until his irises were mere rings of gold around a void of black terror. He looked as though he had been struck physically, though Rex hadn’t moved an inch.

Rex watched with predatory satisfaction as the specific piece of the puzzle dropped into place. It was a masterpiece of psychological demolition.

He had waited for this exact moment, the moment where the past stops being a refuge and starts becoming a prison. Every conversation Apollo had cherished, every moment of vulnerability they had shared, was being retroactively weaponized, twisted into an instrument of torment.

"Talyra," Apollo whispered.

The name was a broken thing, barely audible over the low hum of the domain’s power. "Aisella... Nerith... Mireya... They—"

"All mine." Rex cut him off, the words landing with the wet thud of a guillotine blade. "For a while now."

"Talyra, Nerith, Mireya, and Aisella—they’ve all been in my bed... getting FUCKED while you were sleeping soundly in the next room..."

"You didn’t notice because they were good at it, Apollo..."

"They’re excellent performers..."

"They kept the charade up in front of you because they knew how much you needed to believe in it."

Apollo began to shake.

It wasn’t the tremor of exhaustion or the shiver of physical pain. This was something structural, the soundless shattering of a man’s foundational reality.

Rex had seen this expression before: once on Theo Nightwing’s face when his betrayal was laid bare, and once on Mordecai Vrael’s when he realized his kingdom had been hollowed out from within. It never got less satisfying to watch.

This was the precise moment a man discovers that his grief was incomplete. He had believed he was mourning three dead companions and one betrayed friend.

He was actually learning that the four women still standing beside him, the ones who still smiled at him, still touched his cheek, still spoke of love every single day, had been Rex’s playthings for months. They hadn’t just been complicit; they had been reporting on his every heartbeat.

The dead were only the part he had already counted. The living were the real wound.

Rex could see the gears grinding behind Apollo’s eyes. He could see that glassy, distant quality that overtakes a person when they begin to re-examine their entire history through a new, poisoned lens.

Apollo was running through the memories, applying Rex’s words as a corrosive acid to every precious moment.

’Nerith.’ Apollo remembered her laughing at the waterfall on the last night of the canyon expedition.

He remembered the way the moonlight caught the droplets on her skin as he finally found the courage to confess his feelings. She had cried then.

He had thought those were tears of joy, a breakthrough in their intimacy. He had spent weeks afterward basking in the glow of that moment.

Now, he wondered if she had been crying because she was thinking of the touch of Rex’s hands.

’Talyra.’ He remembered her returning from the island assessment with her hand still wrapped in blood-stained bandages.

She had insisted she was fine, but she had sat closer to him at dinner that night than she had in months, her thigh pressed against his in a gesture of comfort.

Now, the memory felt like a violation.

Had she been seeking comfort from him, or was she simply seeking a distraction before she returned to Rex?

’Mireya.’ Three days after the canyon expedition, she had come to his chambers in the dead of night.

She hadn’t asked for words; she had simply asked him to hold her and not ask why. He had held her for hours, feeling protective and like her anchor.

Now, he wondered whose arms she had truly been seeking when she asked for silence.

’Aisella.’ The memory of the plaza fight burned fresh.

She had knelt over his broken body, healing his wounds with desperate magic, her tears falling hot against his skin as she sobbed that she didn’t know what she would do if she lost him.

He had felt her love in that moment raw and terrifying.

Now, that memory felt like a mockery.

Was she crying for him, or was she crying because she was terrified of losing the protection Rex provided?

Every memory remained true. That was the cruelty of Rex’s design.

None of those moments had been faked. The laughter had been real, the tears had been real, and the touches had been real.

But they had all been performed within a context Apollo was never permitted to see—a context where every act of intimacy was merely another layer of the trap being set around his throat.

"Why," Apollo whispered.

The word was fractured, a broken thing that seemed to bleed out of his throat. "What is wrong with me?"

"What kind of monster am I?"

"What did I do to deserve this?" His voice rose slightly, cracking with a desperate, childlike need for a reason—any reason that would make sense of the carnage. "What could I have possibly done to make you want to destroy everything I love?"

Rex tilted his head to the side, studying Apollo with the clinical interest of a scholar examining a particularly fascinating specimen of decay.

For a moment, he actually considered the question honestly. He considered it because it deserved an honest answer and because the truth was far more devastating than any elaborate lie he could have woven.

Then he smiled. But it wasn’t the amused smirk from before, nor was it the predatory grin of a hunter.

This smile was something new, something hollow, empty, and utterly alien.

"Nothing," Rex said, his voice as calm as a still pond before a storm. "You didn’t do anything wrong at all, Apollo."

"You weren’t cruel... You weren’t selfish... You weren’t even weak..." He leaned forward slightly, his eyes locking onto Apollo’s with terrifying clarity. "You simply happened to be the protagonist of a story that was never supposed to be yours."

"You were playing a hero’s role in a world that was already written by someone else."

The silence that followed was absolute. It was a vacuum, sucking the air out of the domain, leaving Apollo gasping in the emptiness.

Then, Rex started laughing.

It began as a low chuckle in his chest but quickly spiraled into something far more primal. It was an unrestrained, genuine bark of laughter that tore through the quiet like a blade through silk.

The sound rolled across the impossible geometry of the domain, bouncing off surfaces that defied physics, returning distorted and echoing like the screams of something dying.

He laughed until his shoulders shook, until tears pricked the corners of his eyes, not from sadness, but from the sheer, overwhelming absurdity of it all.

He laughed at the question. He laughed at the pathetic, shattered expression on Apollo’s face.

He laughed at the cosmic irony of the entire situation: that this man, this paragon of virtue, had spent eighteen months being counseled on his own inevitable destruction by the very architect of that ruin and had thanked him for his wisdom every single time.

’How perfect,’ Rex thought, his mind racing with the dark euphoria of the moment. ’How deliciously grotesque.’

As the laughter subsided, the last vestiges of humanity vanished from Rex’s face. It didn’t fade slowly; it vanished instantaneously, like a candle being snuffed out by a cold wind.

What remained was something colder, sharper, and infinitely older than the man Apollo thought he knew. His features became angular, carved from something harder than stone, and his eyes, previously ordinary, began to pulse with a deep, malevolent violet-black light.

It was a glow that held no warmth, no recognition, no mercy, only a bottomless, ravenous appetite.

Rex’s grin widened, stretching unnaturally across his face as the magical pressure in the room began to spike, making the very air hum with lethal intent.

"You want to know what I find the funniest about all of this, Apollo?" Rex asked, his voice now carrying an unnatural resonance that seemed to vibrate in Apollo’s very bones. "You spent your entire existence trying to be a hero worth the title."

"You strove to protect every innocent, to uphold every principle, to be ’good’ at all costs."

Rex took a slow, deliberate step forward, the violet light from his eyes casting long, dancing shadows across the floor. "And that was your fatal flaw."

"Every noble choice you made, every sacrifice you offered, every ounce of compassion you showed... every single one of those choices was exactly what made you the perfect target."

"Your goodness wasn’t your shield, Apollo."

"It was the leash I used to drag you to this place."