Page 14 of Unholy Bond
I ignored him. The closer I looked at the cracks, the more I recognized their pattern. The imagery came dragging up from deep in my memories. A map. I ran a quick calculation in my head. If these were the same veins I’d seen in my cell andthe bath, then the whole palace was riddled with them, a net tightening with every day I stayed here.
Somewhere in the distance, a bell rang, a long, low chime that reverberated through the stone. Lucifer’s posture shifted. He stood taller, set his jaw, as if preparing for an inspection.
He marched me down a side corridor, then through a heavy, rune-etched door. The room beyond was not an office, not a laboratory, but something older. A punishment gallery, like the ones in medieval torture museums, except this one was in active use.
The walls were lined with thick iron pillars, each one anchored to the floor and ceiling by chains the size of a grown man’s forearm. Every third pillar had a human soul shackled to it. Some standing, some kneeling, some sprawled on their stomachs with their backs exposed. One even hung from its arms, and below there were no legs, just the torn remnants of its torso. Blood dripped and pattered on the floor, grey and purple intestines and organs hung like morbid Halloween decorations. He should have been dead, but his head lolled back and forth, moaning in anguish. Demon overseers moved among them all, wielding whips, flails, and barbed rods, each stroke delivered with methodical, bureaucratic precision. One walked to the man with the ruined body, reached deep into the hanging mess of organs, and tore out a dark red blob that looked like his liver. The tortured soul threw his head back, howling like a scalded dog.
It wasn’t the violence that shocked me. It was the order of it. Each overseer had a clipboard and was jotting notes after every punishment, intensity, duration, type of scream, rate of blood loss. Occasionally, a demon would pause to adjust a victim’s posture, then make a note in the margin and resume the flogging. The air was thick with the sound of wet flesh andthe iron reek of blood, but over it all was the steady, scratchy scribble of pens and pencils on paper.
Lucifer halted me in the center of the room and forced my chin up. “Take a good look,” he said, his breath hot on the side of my face. “This is the fate of every traitor, every double-crosser, every soul who thinks they can outsmart me. Some come here for a day, some for a thousand years. Others, for eternity. I decide.”
I tried to pull away, but he grabbed the back of my neck, his fingers gripped harder, the jagged black nails digging in, pinching the nerve bundle in my neck until fireworks danced behind my eyes. “You think you’re special because you’ve been on both sides. Because you got a taste of mortal pain, and now you’re back for seconds. But you’re nothing without me. You’re a vessel, a tool. Even the Void knows that.”
He shoved me forward, closer to the nearest pillar. The man chained to it was young, or at least had been when he died. His back was a ruin, strips of skin hanging like butchered curtains, the muscle beneath raw and pulsing. White ribs were visible under the red ruin. As the demon switched tools to a braided whip with hooks at the end, the man lifted his head and met my eyes. There was no malice in his gaze, only pleading. A silent “help me.” The demon laid in with the new whip, and the flesh split open with a sound like tearing fruit. The sound that followed wasn’t even human, high pitched and agonized, like a mad dog being flayed alive.
I ground my teeth and balled my fists, refusing to flinch. If this was a test, I’d pass it.
“Could be you,” Lucifer whispered in my ear. “All it takes is one mistake. You’d last longer, of course. I’d see to that personally.”
He lingered, savoring my reaction, then let me go. “Let’s continue,” he said, but I could hear the triumph in his voice.
As we left the gallery, I cast one last look at the suffering. I wanted to turn it off, to not care, but that was the mortal part of me still refusing to die. Evelyn would have run in, tried to intervene, gotten herself nailed to a post in the process. Lilith, though, watched, memorized, stored it for later. Because knowledge was always power, and I was already plotting how to use this against him.
Out in the corridor, the cracks in the marble seemed wider, the blackness bolder, as if the room we’d just left had fed it. I risked a glance at Lucifer, who was scrolling through his tablet, typing with the tip of a claw. When he wasn’t looking, I crouched and touched the edge of one fissure.
Cold. Colder than ice, colder than any lake in winter. The chill leapt up my fingers, over my wrist, and straight into my spine. But beneath the shock was a hum, a message—not in words, but in pure intention. I held my breath and listened.
Lilith, it whispered. Not Evelyn. Not any of the names I’d carried before.
Lilith. He’ll pay, in time. We need to be stronger.
I pressed my palm flat, letting the chill bleed into me. The Void wasn’t an enemy, wasn’t a parasite. It was a co-conspirator, an old friend with a new agenda.
In the pause I gave it two slow exhales. On the second out, the vein hiccupped, then matched me. A hello it would remember.
I drew myself upright, flexing my fingers to drive away the numbness. It ate sensation in one fingertip. A small payment to a larger emptiness. When I turned, Lucifer was watching me, butI gave him nothing—just a blank, obedient stare. Let him think I’d been cowed by the punishment gallery. Let him believe his threats still worked.
In reality, my shoulders had relaxed, my jaw unclenched. I nodded, just barely, to the crack at my feet.
“Good girl,” Lucifer said, but I heard the sarcasm. “Let’s get you processed.”
He led me on, and the black veins grew as we walked, branching and widening, hungry for everything this palace had to offer.
I let him drag me, but I knew better now.
I would feed the Void. And when the time came, it would feed me back.
Chapter 8: Lucifer
The obsidian surface of the scrying pool reflected lit up with images. It didn’t show random images. You had to want to see the subject. You had to hunger for it, and I hungered with every cell. My office in the eastern spire had a grand view of the pits, but today it was the bedchamber on the other side of the palace that occupied me. Lilith stretched on her back, pale in the infinity of black velvet, arms splayed, hair fanned, the body an artifact on a velvet plinth.
She had not slept. The restless twitch in her limbs told me that. I watched as she flexed a hand, running her new nails across her thigh, the motion precise as a dissecting blade. She smiled up at the ceiling. I braced my elbows on the desk and watched.
I traced a claw along the rim of the pool, disrupting the surface. The image swam, then resolved again. Lilith, now upright on thebed, knees pulled to her chest, forehead resting against them. The room’s geometry had already started to warp under her will. I’d need to recalibrate before she melted the tower from inside out. I stroked the ridged shaft of my cock, anticipating the reward. My body, in this form, was a factory of rage and appetite.
The pool’s surface hiccupped. Not the usual ripple, but a shockwave, as if a tectonic plate had slipped. For a split second, I saw three images of her, each overlaid with the last like a filmstrip jammed in the projector. Then the focus jerked, snapped me forward, and my office vanished. The chamber melted away and I was elsewhere, long ago, wearing a different face and a different skin, but inside, always the same.
Ancient Rome.
