Page 135 of Hell Bound

“Commander, please.” Jovran shook his head. “You leave the pack open to retribution with this.”

Asmodeus would have had Lilith brought to the dungeons. There was no lower place in the palace, either physically or metaphorically.

Just the memory of their stench made my nose twitch.

If Lilith was unlucky, he would’ve had her put in a cage with a neighbor… with no regards whether that neighbor was still alive or not.

I couldn’t let her spend the night next to a corpse.

She could survive the darkness, the cold, the loneliness… but to sit next to a rotting body, knowing it was only inches away, was something this mortal version of Lilith might not be able to get through.

“How are you going to get past the guards?” Jovran asked, his words more pointed when I sped up instead of slowing down.

I’d rip through them. Slaughter them all and break the bars.

“I’ll do whatever it takes,” was what I started to say.

The chains of the curse snapped tight around my chest, winding around my limbs.

I stopped so suddenly Deasley ran into my back.

My breath wheezed out in a strangled exhale as the chains squeezed tighter, expelling every bit of air I had in me.

Dark spots began to bloom across my eyes until I took a step back.

The chains relaxed the tiniest bit.

I took another, and another.

By the time I’d retraced my steps to the doorway of the ballroom, they were nothing more than a mere suggestion of weight across my chest, a whisper of what would happen if I dared to take that way.

The dungeons were far enough that the chains would ravage me to pieces long before I made it to Lilith.

Still taking deep, measured breaths of air, I looked into the ballroom and saw Asmodeus’s smiling face looking right back at me.

He excused himself from the throng of nobles he was with, tossing back his glass of dark liquor as he strode towards us.

“Leaving my celebration so soon, Morningstar?”

He tossed the empty glass over his shoulder and a servant rushed to grab it, barely catching it before it shattered on the floor. The servant’s relief was so palpable it was painful.

Within seconds, another servant had brought a fresh glass to the king.

Asmodeus raised it to his lips, sipping it as he watched me breathe with my hands braced on my knees. “You used to love my parties. Perhaps your precious lovebird doesn’t remember that… the way you had a different demoness in your bed every night.”

I sneered at him. “Times change.”

“That they do,” he agreed. He swirled the glass around, letting the light glint through the liquor in shades of emerald and amber. “And now it is you who shall be gracing other beds. You’re not much more than the whores you used to run through and throw aside.”

An icy fist squeezed my heart, stopping my lungs.

“Kneel, Lucifer,” Asmodeus whispered, his voice poisonous and low.

As though they knew I was still weak, the chains attacked once more, this time dragging me to the floor.

They were like fish hooks embedded into every inch of my skin, forcing me to contort to their whim no matter how hard I fought.

A low groan of pain escaped me as I finally stopped fighting, my knee hitting the floor with a sharp crack.

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