Page 37 of Unholy Bond
I could have killed her. Part of me wanted to. But there are punishments worse than death, and I’d spent an eternity inventing them.
I rose and addressed the hall. “This is what happens to traitors. But also,” and here I paused, letting the weight of it land, “to those who underestimate me. Remember that, if you value your own skin.”
I seized her by the hair, claws sinking into her scalp, and dragged her up the steps to the private chamber behind the throne. The door slammed shut behind us, the heavy wood muffling the crowd but not the anticipation in the air.
The room was built for one purpose, and it wasn’t diplomacy. Chains hung from the ceiling, their ends fitted with cuffs lined in gold. The walls were studded with hooks, whips, and every instrument of pleasure and pain I’d collected over the millennia.The bed at the center was more slab than mattress, the headboard carved with runes that radiated heat.
I tossed her onto the bed, then circled, stripping off my suit as I did. My true form was never subtle, skin red, muscles stacked on top of more muscle, every inch of me designed to make the next inch seem inadequate. My cock was already out, hard enough to bruise steel, ridged all along the shaft. The head flared, slick with anticipation and ringed with a vein that pulsed in time with my temper.
She didn’t move, not even when I loomed over her, horns nearly scraping the ceiling. I grabbed her by the throat. With my free hand, I ripped the dress down the center, exposing tits that, even now, managed to make me want her more than anything else in the world.
“You’re going to learn your place,” I growled, forcing her legs apart with my knee.
She glared up, no fear, just the stubborn anger that had drawn me to her in the first place. “I already know it,” she said. “You’re just afraid of what comes next.”
I jammed two fingers inside her, expecting resistance, but she was wet, sopping, actually, the slick pooling out and running down her thigh. I paused, not out of mercy but confusion.
She laughed, the sound richer and lower than before, tinged with something alien. “You don’t get it, do you? I want this. I want all of it.”
I pressed the head of my cock to her cunt, stretching her open, the ridges along the shaft flaring as I forced my way in. She gasped, but not in pain. The sound was a moan, raw and ugly, the kind that starts in the soul and rips upward. I drove in, hipsslamming hers to the headboard, the whole bed groaning under the impact.
With every thrust, the ridges on my cock scraped her insides, designed to both punish and reward, the sensation building in a crescendo of agony and ecstasy. She met me, thrust for thrust, arching her back and digging her nails into my biceps until blood welled up and mixed with the sweat.
I fucked her harder, trying to break the resolve in her eyes, but it never wavered. If anything, she got louder, the moans splitting into a strange, dual-toned sound. For a moment, her eyes rolled back, then snapped forward, solid black, no white at all, the Void staring straight through me.
The black veins on her arms pulsed, then spread, creeping up her chest and across her neck, snaking toward her jaw. They writhed in time with my cock, every vein a new declaration of war. The Void wanted this. It wanted all of it, and it was using her body to tell me so.
For the first time, I hesitated. I’d expected tears, begging, maybe even a collapse into pleasure, but this was something else. She was growing stronger with every second, every pulse of the ridges, every drop of sweat that fell from my forehead to her breasts. The darkness in her eyes laughed at me, mocking, inviting, daring.
I slammed in deeper, burying the entire shaft, feeling her cunt milk me for everything I had. My balls slapped against her ass, each impact sending a new shockwave through her body. She shrieked, not in terror, but in pure, uncut delight.
The black veins reached her face. For a heartbeat, her skin went solid obsidian, the teeth in her mouth lengthening, her tongue slid out to lick my chin. I lost all control, unloading a torrentof cum inside her, hot enough to burn. She clamped down, the walls of her cunt squeezing so tight the ridges almost caught.
I pulled out, trembling, the cock still hard, still ready, but the room felt colder now, the Void wrapping everything in a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
She lay back on the slab, arms spread, the black veins receding as she shuddered in the afterglow. Her smile was wide, feral, satisfied.
I stood at the foot of the bed, hands shaking, the world starting to spin just a little. The air tasted metallic. I looked at her, at the body I’d just tried to break, and realized I’d done the opposite.
She was mine. But only because she let me.
For the first time in centuries, I was afraid.
Chapter 20: Ian
If there was a nerve center in Hell, it wasn’t the throne room or the endless, fanged parade ground where generals did their chest-thumping. It was the cold-lit, climate-controlled corridors of the bureaucracy, where every sin and every promotion got chewed up, spit out, stamped, and triple-archived in triplicate. They called it the “Administrative Spine.” I called it the morgue. The Void called it home.
I slipped down the corridors, my footsteps deadened by the marble—yes, marble, but shot through with wet-looking veins that pulsed. The walls were the color of old bruises, lined with mirrors etched in the runes. There was an echo, but it never matched the footfalls. The building anticipated you, imitatingyour rhythm a step ahead or behind, so you were never quite sure who was stalking whom.
The Void had made me invisible in a way that no glamour could. It fuzzed the edges of my outline until I read as “background noise” to any casual observer. To the security wards, I was just another minor functionary, no threat at all. If I passed a demon in the hall, they didn’t look up. If I passed a human promoted from tormentee to temp, they just shrank a little, tried not to breathe, and never registered what was happening right under their noses.
The first target sat in a glass-walled cubicle, hunched over a ledger so old it had probably been chained here since the first treaty. The clerk’s hairless head gleamed under the sickly green sconce. I didn’t bother knocking. I opened the door, stepped inside, and placed my hand on the demon’s shoulder.
He froze, fingers still hovering over the page, then turned. He had the eyes of an animal caught in a trap, but the rest of his face was pure resignation. “I’m not on the schedule,” he started, then stopped when he recognized me, or what the Void was letting him see. His mind cycled through the options. Resist, comply, or beg.
I leaned in close. “Your services are no longer required.”
I drew a couple of lines on the parchment with one claw, the tip oozing a bead of black. Where it touched the page, the Void-ink flared red, then black, then erased itself. Text, signature, whole existence. The demon tried to scream, but I sealed his mouth with a twist of the Void, a soundless blood sigil that clamped his jaw shut. I pulled him back from the desk, wrapped my free hand around his neck, and twisted until the cartilage snapped. There was no mess. The body slumped to the floor, eyes already dissolving, skin melting to gray sludge before disappearing.
