Page 15 of Unholy Bond
I stood in a colonnade of flawless white marble, the air thick with the stink of rendered animal fat and incense. The sun burned through the clerestory windows and painted gold on every surface. The Senate house was two blocks away, but the senators did not come here except to beg for their daughters or to bribe a higher power. My temple, they’d called it, though I preferred the term slaughterhouse.
Lilith, in a different body, stood in the nave, hands wrapped in strips of linen, red hair bound in a crown of thorns. Her body was different, but the engine behind the eyes had never changed. She was taller than the men who escorted her, and each time they tried to bow or gesture, she interrupted with a flick of the wrist, a shake of the head. She wore only a thin tunic, more suggestion than garment. Her legs were bare and marked with a lattice of scars, old wounds and new. I recognized my own handwriting on her, a scar above the kneecap where I’d once torn out the patella for insolence.
She approached the altar, the white stone shining with recent blood. The amphora at its base still steamed from the morning’s work. Lilith ignored the priests. She knelt, head bowed, and laid her hands flat on the altar. Her captors shifted uneasily, uncertain whether to restrain her or not.
I waited for her to speak. I always did. She never wasted words.
“Do it,” she said, looking up, eyes drilling straight through me.
The guards hesitated. I let them. Incompetence was a pleasure to punish. One stepped forward, placing a palm on her shoulder. In the space of a breath, she flipped him onto the altar, spine cracking, the sound echoed by the stampede of sandals as the others tried to swarm her. Lilith whirled conjuring a blade in her hand and drove the point straight through the first soldier’s mouth, the tip bursting out the crown of his skull.
The gore sprayed up, hot and red, speckling her face and the altar behind her. I felt the convulsion in my cock, hot semen pulsing out as waves of pleasure washed across me while I watched. The priests screamed, but she dispatched them with surgical quickness, slicing from jaw to clavicle, then using the blade to carve the old sigil into the flesh above their hearts. She did this for each one, taking the time even as her own blood drained from the gash on her calf, the white floor blooming red under her bare feet.
She turned to me at last, panting, blade slick, eyes gleaming in the gold light.
“You sent them to bind me,” she said. “I chose the binding.”
I didn’t move. My cock hardened again, still ready even after my release. I enjoyed the performance, but even more the certainty that she would come to me, always. She stalked forward, blood painting the marble with every step, and climbed the altar, bladestill raised. When she reached the top, she pressed the point to my abdomen, just above the navel. It dimpled the skin, not yet breaking it. I let her.
“Last chance,” I said. “Kneel. I’ll be merciful.”
She spat in my face. The saliva mixed with blood, warm and sweet. Then, with a shriek, she thrust the blade in, twisting it sideways, the metal cold against the hot meat inside. Pain howled through me, pure, electric, not the pain of defeat but the reward at the end of a long siege. My cock pulsed, ridges flaring, and another gush of semen shot across the marble, milky white mixing with my blood in a froth.
Suddenly, the world snapped like a whip, the white light replaced by the black glass of the scrying pool, the familiar stink of my office. My cock was still hard, the head purple and angry, ridges shining with slick wetness. I slumped in the chair, one hand pressed to my abdomen where the phantom blade had entered. The memory vibrated through me, every nerve singing, the pleasure and the pain inextricable. My other hand toyed with my shaft, slow at first, then faster, the tail curling around my ankle while I thrust my hips forward to fuck my own fist. I came in a long, stuttering gush, the cum shooting up and arcing onto the desk, splattering the pool’s edge. I wiped it off with the back of my hand and licked my fingers clean, growling in delight at my own taste.
In the pool, Lilith was awake. She stretched her arms overhead, spine curving, breasts rising. She mouthed something, and I leaned forward, curious. The glass was thick and did not transmit sound, but I read the lips easily.
“Come and get me,” she said, and smiled.
I barked a laugh. The sound scattered the imps huddling outside my door, sent them scurrying down the hall in a panic of wings and claws. I stood, cock still half-erect, and stalked to the window overlooking the main pit. The souls below were shifting slag, an ocean of labor, every so often interrupted by a geyser of agony or the collapse of a work crew. The world was orderly, built on rules and consequence. I had engineered it that way. But Lilith was the flaw in every system, the entropy that made even eternity interesting.
Lilith traced circles in the bedding, plotting, always plotting. I imagined her on her knees, wrists bound behind her, teeth bared in anticipation, waiting for the moment I broke her again. The thought made me harden, the cock swelling and lifting, eager for the next round.
I traced a talon across the surface of the pool. The image rippled, distorting her face, stretching her mouth wide. I pressed my lips to the glass and whispered.
“You’ve always been mine,” I said.
The surface vibrated, and for a second I saw her shudder, nipples pebbling, eyes darting to the ceiling. She heard me, even if she’d never admit it. I licked my lips, savoring the taste of remembered blood.
The anticipation was exquisite. The reward would be more so.
I wrapped a fist around my cock, squeezed until the ridges ached, and watched as she tried to break the world for me, one more time.
Chapter 9: Lilith
I sat motionless on the bed, legs folded under me in the centerof the midnight quilt, eyes clamped shut. It was a discipline I’d brought from the convent, a way of hollowing out thought and breathing until nothing but the rhythm of the world remained. Here, in Lucifer’s prison, the air was never really still. There was always a low static that moved with the air, a tingling from the runes etched in every surface, and a sense of being watched that crept under the skin.
The Void made it easier, paradoxically. The parasite-turned-co-conspirator rode the current of my thoughts, thinning them, flattening the peaks of panic until only pure sensation remained. I could feel Lucifer’s gaze, scrying in through a dozen hidden lenses, brushing over my body like a surgeon plotting the first incision. The touch of it was different from what I’d expected: not sharp, not cruel, but cold. Clinical. A curious scientist more than a torturer. He wanted to catalog me, to find what had changed in the transfer from Lilith to Evelyn and back again.
I let him stare. I slowed my breathing, deepened it, counting not just the ins and outs but the smaller fluctuations. I became a statue, the room a diorama with me as centerpiece. It was a game I’d learned from years in the courtroom, years in the habit, years spent under scrutiny and learning to wear a mask. Even here, the trick still worked.
The Void watched too, but it had no eyes. It curled at the base of my skull, black and sleek as a hunting cat, waiting for me to move. Not predatory, not exactly. More…expectant. Like a loyal dog waiting for the first touch of a master’s hand.
I waited until the sensation of Lucifer’s surveillance shifted, a barely perceptible thinning of the tension in the air. The moment I sensed him turn away, I opened my eyes.
The room had not changed, but it had. The lines of the obsidian floor ran straighter, as if some invisible hand had pressed all theirregularities flat. The veins of light in the walls, which usually pulsed in a slow, hellish red, shining instead in ultraviolet, too faint for mortal eyes but vivid to the new me. A prickle of satisfaction ran up my spine, and I knew the Void was pleased.
I slid a hand under the mattress, fingers searching for the thin, sharp comfort hidden there. The blade was black glass, obsidian, flaked down to a surgical edge and sheathed in a wrap of lambskin and old prayers. One of my demon offspring had slipped it to me during the night. They had signed it in the old tongue, the only language we’d shared before this latest fall:Remember, mother.
