Page 15 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)

The sky tried to warn us. If you looked out past the sharp edge of the Boston skyline, you’d see the cloud mass boiling up from the Atlantic like the birth of a new species of god.

The rain battered the windows hard enough to blur the horizon, but from the penthouse suite it looked less like weather and more like a siege.

Levi had picked this place because of the view, but now the view was gone, and we were left with the interior of polished concrete floors, black leather, and the echo of too many conversations about how we’d end the world.

Ian was at the kitchen island, hunched over a run of parchment, his wrists dusted with black ink and silver powder. He inked the last of the protection sigils.

Levi paced the length of the living room in long, angry strides, arms crossed over his chest, blond hair yanked back into a knot that made him look less like a fallen demigod and more like a tennis pro.

He muttered under his breath, sometimes at the storm, sometimes at Ian, mostly at the world for refusing to break according to his schedule.

I sat on the sectional, a duffel bag across my lap, fingers busy packing and unpacking the weapons.

I cataloged the knives, the chains, the bent and dented crucifix that Levi had swiped from the ruins of St. Mary’s.

Every item vibrated with a purpose, but the air in the penthouse was so thick with ozone and unspoken tension that I almost couldn’t breathe.

A lightning strike hit somewhere close, close enough to light the room for an instant. When the thunder came, it rattled the glass and sent a shudder up my spine. I closed my fist around the handle of the biggest blade and listened to the familiar click of the bones in my knuckles.

Ian didn’t look up from his work. “We need another ward on the door,” he said. “Lucifer’s going to smell this from a continent away.”

“I want him to,” Levi said. “You ever think maybe we’re wasting time with all this prep? He’s not going to let us in by RSVP.”

“Maybe not, but I’d rather not get shredded by a security demon before we hit the gate,” Ian replied. He blew a dusting of powder over the parchment, then set it aside to dry.

Levi sneered. “The last time you used a sigil, it backfired and almost cooked us both.”

“That was your fault,” Ian said, voice even. “You swapped the ash for graphite. You think the difference doesn’t matter, but it does.”

“Everything matters,” I said, before I could stop myself. My voice came out raw, like I’d been gargling broken glass. “We fuck up one thing, and he’ll eat us alive.”

Levi turned on me, blue eyes sharp. “Since when are you the careful one, Aziz? I thought the plan was to go in, break everything, and drag her out.”

“That is the plan.” My hands shook as I zipped the duffel shut. “But not if we can’t get past the front door.”

Ian slid a glance my way. There was blood on his cuffs, still wet. He didn’t bother to hide it, just flexed his fingers and rolled his shoulders like a man prepping for a fistfight. “We’re outnumbered, outgunned, and he’s got home-field advantage. We do this my way, or we don’t do it at all.”

Levi planted both hands on the kitchen counter, knuckles whitening. “You’re so obsessed with your own genius you can’t see how much time we’re wasting. She’s probably already—”

I was on my feet before I realized it, the knife unsheathed, the point directed at Levi’s throat. “Don’t finish that sentence,” I said. The words hung in the air, heavy as iron. “She’s alive and we’re bringing her home.”

For a moment, the only sound was the rain hammering the glass, the room lit in the cold blue of another lightning strike. Levi held up his palms, slow and easy, but I could see the tension in his shoulders.

“Go ahead,” he said. “If you want to bleed me, do it. Just don’t pretend you’re not thinking the same thing.”

Ian stepped in between us, still calm. “Put the blade down, Aziz. This is exactly what he wants.”

I let my arm drop. The knife clattered against the table, and Levi looked almost disappointed.

“Lucifer wants us at each other’s throats,” Ian said, turning from me to Levi and back again. “That’s always been the play. You two start fighting, he doesn’t even have to lift a finger.”

I stared at them for a moment. “So what’s the plan?”

Ian smiled, the kind of smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “The plan is, we hit the gate at 0300. We use Levi’s key to force the lock, I handle the wards, and you do what you do best.”

He tapped the grid he’d sketched, a neat box of sigils and numbers that made my skin itch.

“0300 Boston puts us on Third Watch below. That’s when the Council drags every ranking bastard to the dais for roll call.

Wards stay up, but they re- balance—thin around the North Tower while the Watchfires tilt. ”

Levi spun the brass key on his finger, pretending not to care.

Ian kept going. “Lightning clocks the gate. We ride sky-fire through the lock, or we bounce. Window’s sixty-six heartbeats on our side, call it seven minutes while they chant the Litany.

During that verse, corridors empty, supervisors sit their asses in Council, and your brother’s posted guard either gets reassigned or stares at an empty hall. ”

I felt the storm breathe against the windows—glass flexing, old bones humming. “Sixty-six heartbeats,” I said. “We miss it, we die.”

“We miss it,” Ian corrected, “we arrive off-cycle and paint the floor with our organs. Roof gives us a clean line to the Well. Levi turns the key on the flash. I peel the wards. You break whatever’s still standing. We’re in and out before the Council finishes its third refrain.”

Levi’s mouth quirked. “So we crash the meeting.”

“We steal its shadow,” Ian said. “They won’t feel us until it hurts.”

I closed my hand around the duffel, heard the knives settle like a promise. Third Watch. Council singing to itself while we ghosted their palace. I could live with those odds. I could kill with them.

“Hell’s expecting us,” I said. “You don’t think they’ve set up a kill box?”

“They have,” Ian said, rolling his sleeves. “But the best way to break a kill box is to be more suicidal than the idiots who set it up. You two are the only people I trust to make that calculus.”

Levi laughed, a sharp bark that sounded like it belonged to a different person. “And what about you, Ian? I always figured you’d jump ship if things got too hot.”

Ian grinned. “I’ve got too much invested. Besides, I want to see the look on his face when we punch a hole into his kingdom.”

Another lightning strike, another boom. The lights flickered, and for a second we were all shadows. I could smell the charge in the air, the tang of metal and magic and human fear. My heart hammered so hard I thought it might split my ribcage.

I hefted the duffel, let its weight anchor me. “Then let’s get this over with.”

Ian passed out the amulets, one for each of us.

They were battered old things, but he’d burned a sigil into the back, a mark that would burn hotter than holy water if it came in contact with demon flesh.

It was a good thing that we weren’t demons.

Levi put his on, grumbling, but I could tell he was relieved to have it.

He set three slivers of blackened bone on the bar. The guard-brothers’ index keys, lacquered in soot. “We’ll fall between the stitches of Lucifer’s ward. For sixty-six heartbeats, the castle will read us all as nothing.”

We didn’t say goodbye to the penthouse. There was no point—none of us expected to come back. As we walked to the elevator, the windows groaned again, thunder echoing through the bones of the building. I pictured Lucifer on the other end, watching us through a hundred eyes, savoring the spectacle.

Ian said, “Once we hit the portal, it’s point of no return.”

I nodded. “Then let’s make it count.”

The elevator doors opened on the roof. Rain lashed at us sideways, and I could feel the city vibrating beneath our feet, a million souls all dreaming of apocalypse.

Levi took the key from his pocket, held it up to the sky, and waited for the lightning. When it struck, he jammed the key into the lock of a maintenance door and turned.

The air ripped open. The storm was nothing compared to the suck of the portal, the wind dragging us forward even as our bodies tried to resist. Levi whooped, Ian cursed, and I just held on to the duffel and followed them in.

We’d aimed for the seam, not directly for the hall. Lucifer’s wards netted the surface; but the Void ran through it like marrow. Slide in with the marrow, and the net doesn’t catch you.

I landed in Hell with a slap. For a few seconds, I couldn’t see or hear or even think. My lungs filled with steam, my skin crawled with biting cold.

I rolled onto my side and forced my eyes open. The ground was less ground and more ancient compost, sinking and sucking at my elbows. For a second I thought the portal had glitched, dumped us in a random hellscape, but then the geometry resolved, and I saw what we’d come for: the gate.

It rose from the earth like a bone working its way out of a wound, old stone fused with something darker, veins of black iron shot through the surface.

It was at least ten feet tall, and twice as wide as I remembered from the diagrams in Ian’s notebooks.

Vines clotted its base, flowers the size of infant skulls crowding up the flanks, but no matter how much the forest tried to bury it, the structure remained.

The arch was engraved on every inch with sigils, so old they looked eroded, but the moment I tried to read them my vision doubled, the lines crawling like worms beneath my eyelids.