Page 13 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)

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 the bed, 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.

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, blade still 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.