Page 1 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)

I used to rise at dawn, roused by birdsong and the smell of old hymnals.

My mother said I always woke like I’d been waiting hours, eyes already open, hands folded on the blanket.

That was Evelyn. The good girl, upright and eager, ready to run herself ragged for the love of the world.

I remembered mornings with clarity and the memory twisted every time I looked at the walls of my new room.

Nothing in Hell was ever clean, not even obsidian. And Hellstone morphed, so the appearance of the walls would change under the grime.

I paced barefoot from one end of the chamber to the other, counting steps, a habit from the convent. Fifty paces round the perimeter. Fifty more, if I included the sweep between bed and bath. My toes left no prints on the stone, but static clung to my skin with a constant hum.

There were no clocks here, only the measured slide of color outside the windows.

Sometimes the light slanted gold, but mostly it was a horror-movie shade of evening, the hour before any sane person would dare look in the closet.

I stopped beside the windows, pressing my forehead to the cool bars.

Thoughts of the demons who had become mine in a short period entered my mind.

For a moment, I imagined what it would be like if they were here, and I wasn’t Lucifer’s prisoner.

They wouldn’t be panicking or worrying. Aziz would make some sort of game out of the pain, or Levi would talk a fallen angel out of his pants, or Ian would stir up a mob of the damned just for the drama of it.

A phantom ache tightened my chest. I missed them intensely.

Aziz would have said I needed to fuck it out of my system, preferably with him as an assistant.

Levi would have laughed and tried to tease me out of the mood with a dance.

Ian would have told me to fight. He’d say I needed to destroy who was holding me before they could do the same to me.

Ian always admired destruction more than hope.

I paced my room. Each round bled off some of the itch in my nerves, but not much. My body had recalibrated itself. This Lucifer wasn’t like the one in my memories. I didn’t know how to overthrow him. However, I would find out his weaknesses.

I pressed my hand to the lines on my arm and let my mind wander to apple orchards, Christmas pageants, the heavy, homesick sweetness of being loved by mortals. None of it belonged to Lilith. It was all on loan, a costume the universe forced on me for a season.

Last night, I’d mostly ignored the mirror save for a few brief seconds.

It was a monstrosity, ten feet tall and framed in brass that never tarnished.

In the convent, we’d covered mirrors with veils during Lent, to remind ourselves that beauty faded.

Here, the mirror was uncovered and impossible to ignore.

Every time I crossed the room, my reflection tracked me like a wolf, pale and lean and unfamiliar.

The glass wasn’t glass. It was some kind of mineral, flecked with gold and deeper bits of hematite, so that my image looked stitched together from a million fractured pieces.

I made myself stop before it. For a moment, all I saw was the new me. My eyes were almost transparent, the blue so diluted it looked like old milk. I didn’t blink. The mirror didn’t either.

Then it began to shift.

The image swam, as if the mirror remembered too many faces and couldn’t decide which one to show me. The first overlay landed with a shock, and I recoiled, not recognizing myself at all.

A woman lounged in a bath of blood, red hair fanned like a banner over the edge, one arm draped out and fingers trailing gore.

Her lips split in a slow, lazy smile, and she arched her back, exposing breasts half-submerged in the viscous red.

Crimson liquid sliding across hard nipples.

My mind snapped to Countess Bathory, a monster from children’s history books.

I remembered my father warning me not to study such things, how he’d laughed that girls who read about evil would slide down a wicked path.

The “bathwater” in the image steamed, but I sensed a coldness in her, like a reptile.

She held a rose in one hand, and its petals bled into the water.

The vision fluttered, became a young woman with no flesh at all, only a scorched skeleton visible through strips of translucent skin.

She howled as flames licked up her arms. Her mouth yawned wide, teeth white and endless, eyes gone.

I watched her burn, and the taste of ash, copper, something spiced washed over my tongue.

Bloody Mary, I realized. The icon of martyrdom and rage.

I watched her incinerate for a heartbeat and then she vanished.

The third face was Russian. High cheekbones, hair black as pitch, a whip coiled around one gloved hand.

Her dress was silk, but stained and torn, exposing the crosshatch of scars on her inner thighs.

Her smile was private, almost gentle, but the eyes bored into me, judging.

Darya Nikolayevna. I had no memory of her, but I could hear the screams of agony she’d wrought.

Her name echoed in my mouth like a spell.

The whip in her hand curled and uncurled, alive as a serpent.

The image in the mirror snapped back to me. I stared into my own eyes, looking for a hint of Evelyn behind the Lilith. The calm, obedient, and peaceful woman I’d been before. There was none. Only the faint blue glow around the irises, the newness of me.

I pressed my palm to the mirror’s surface.

The glass rippled, cold at first, then warming to match my touch.

My fingers tingled, and the lines on my arm lit up faintly, gold threads winding over bone.

I traced the outline of the Bathory’s mouth, the hollow of Mary’s eye, the elegant arc of Darya’s cheek.

Each touch sent a shock through me, a ping of recognition and longing.

These were not strangers. They were me, or I was them, or we were all iterations of the same need.

Past lives, old names, and long-gone deeds.

“Evelyn,” I whispered, testing the name, then, “Lilith.” The words fuzzed in the air, as if the stone itself were listening, waiting for me to make up my mind.

The mirror fogged with my breath. The urge to smash it rose and died in a second.

I wanted to see, needed to know, but I also hated the proof of what I was becoming.

In the convent, we talked a lot about vessels for the divine.

I’d believed it, once. Now I understood that a vessel could be a disguise as much as a blessing.

Sister Evelyn had been a holding pattern, a way to keep Lilith contained and hidden until she was needed again.

Aziz would have made a joke about my reflection. “So serious. You look like you’re about to order the crucifixion.” Ian would have said I should enjoy every bit of it. Levi would have tried to drag me into bed, saying I looked hot in any incarnation.

I let my fingers linger on the mirror, pressing harder until the pad of my thumb went numb. The glass warped and rippled, and for a moment, I thought I saw all three men behind me, standing shoulder to shoulder in the dark, hooded eyes gazing back at me, waiting for me to make my next move.

I whirled around but my men were not there with me. Were they looking for me? Lucifer wouldn’t make it easy for them. I knew that with the certainty of my own breaths. That meant I needed to embrace Lilith and save myself from Lucifer’s prison.

“Goodbye, Evelyn,” I said, barely a whisper. “You can rest now.”

I turned from the mirror, shivering in the draft from the window, and made my way toward the bath.

The bathroom sat at the far end of the chamber, with a tub sunk into the floor like a mausoleum for drowned queens.

Black marble again, but older and veined with something that pulsed faintly whenever I looked at it too long.

No pipes, no taps, but the bowl filled itself at intervals, sometimes steaming, sometimes icy, always tinged with that brackish, chemical shine that promised no kind of comfort.

When I stepped close, the air shifted. Ozone, sulfur, and a ripe metallic tang I recognized as blood before I even bent to sniff it.

The water was thicker than water had a right to be, more syrup than liquid, and I doubted it would ever rinse clean from hair or skin.

The last time I’d bathed, I’d been Evelyn Adams. The bath now waited, already filled to the rim, dark as licorice, vapor curling from its surface in lazy, concentric rings.

I let the sheet fall, pooling at my feet.

My new body surprised me. It was so pale I could map the blue of every vein, curves I never knew I had, nipples, a ridiculous candy-pink that made me want to laugh and bite myself at the same time.

I ran a hand from collarbone to hip, marveling at how soft and supple the skin was.

I looked like a Greek beauty cast in white marble.

I dipped a toe in the bath. Heat slicked up my calf, hugging it.

As I lowered my body inch by inch, the water clung to me like oil.

I braced my palms on the marble edge and eased all the way down.

I tried to relax, but every muscle stayed tensed.

No matter how much I forced myself to sink, a part of me stayed ready to leap from the tub.

I hated that. I wanted to melt. I wanted to dissolve the borders between myself and whatever this place was trying to make of me.

I watched the waterline crawl up my chest, saw how it refracted my breasts into funhouse distortions, then settled in to watch the way the black liquid beaded on my skin, never quite soaking in.

When I lifted a hand, the water clung in long, shivering drips before falling back, leaving a faint shadow, a stain that faded only as I wiped it away.