Page 28 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)
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, imitating your 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.
I left the office door open, just to see if the next person to come in would notice the office that probably hadn’t been empty for a thousand years.
The next one was easier. Two corridors down, past the billing department, another loyalist, marked for extermination by Lilith’s demonic offspring.
This one was an angel-fall reject with gold wire threaded through his lips and nose.
He spotted me in the mirrored glass, but didn’t run.
He pressed a panic button under the desk.
The glyph above the door blinked blue, then fizzled.
The Void had eaten the security system two floors ago.
“I have nothing to do with the resistance,” he said, even as his hand trembled, even as the sweat started to bead along his receded hairline. “I just handle disbursements.”
I slid over the desk, landed on him with both knees, and pinned him in the chair.
He tried to stand but the Void was already crawling up his thighs, wrapping the veins in black until he couldn’t move, couldn’t even twitch his toes.
I pressed my thumb to the center of his forehead, right above the spiral tattoo that marked him as a “trusted resource,” and drove it in until I hit bone.
The angel-fall’s head jerked back. The eyes rolled, then filled with black. His thoughts came out in a whimper, muffled by the wires, and then he slumped, empty, the body already folding in on itself like a punctured balloon.
On and on it went. One at a time, never a ripple, never a sound.
I moved through the archives, the code review chambers, the mediation cubicles.
Each target marked on my list, each one dispatched without effort, each one more satisfying than the last. The only evidence I left behind was the sickly sweet stink of the Void, which the custodial demons would chalk up to “printer toner incidents” and move along.
When I reached the main archive vault, the head scribe stood at the lectern, wings hunched tight, four arms clutching at scrolls as if he could shield himself with paper. His backup, two lesser demons and a human convert, stood behind him, eyes locked on the floor, refusing to meet my gaze.
I slammed my palm on the lectern, sending a stack of contracts flying. “Time for new management,” I said.
The head scribe tried to muster a challenge. “We serve only the Morning Star.”
I smiled. “That loyalty just expired.”
I grabbed him by the throat, lifted him over the desk, and forced him to his knees.
The other two lesser demons started to move, but the Void swept them up, yanking them against the wall.
They clawed at the stone, trying to dig in, but the Void peeled them away, leaving behind only black smears and the faint rattle of dying ambition.
I set the scribe down, careful not to break his spine. “Here’s the new rule. Sign this, or be erased.” I produced the contract. Parchment still wet, the ink glimmering with Lilith’s signature in void ink. “Swear to serve Lilith, or serve no one at all.”
The human convert watched, then snatched a quill and signed, not even hesitating. The scribe’s hand hovered, then scribbled his name in tight, angry script. The second demon tried to stall, but I locked eyes, let him see what the Void could do with hesitation.
“I’m not asking twice,” I told him.
He signed.
One holdout refused. She was tiny, barely a demon, just a wisp of old magic and bad dreams. She spat on the page.
I shrugged and broke her neck with a quick twist, then pressed her hand to the contract anyway. The Void took the print, blackening the signature to nothing.
When it was done, I had a roomful of witnesses. Every one of them legally, existentially bound to Lilith. The new regime.
I stacked the contracts, locked the vault behind me, and let the survivors shake as they watched me go.
The Void didn’t purr. It crackled, hot and electric, not just satisfied but pushing for the next step. It wanted the whole world black, every contract rewritten, every trace of the old order erased.
I let it lead me down the Spine, past the main records office, through a warren of corridors that grew colder and older with every turn.
I passed rooms where the furniture had rotted in place, passed windows that looked out over fire pits and battlegrounds, passed memories of every war I’d ever started.
Sometimes, when the green light hit the wall just so, I saw flashes of my old Titan body.
Bigger, stronger, with hands that could squeeze a planet to rubble. I missed the simplicity of that.
But here, in the endless repetition of office politics, the old violence had a new flavor. It was elegant. It was personal.
The central legal apparatus was a cathedral built from black glass and the bones of extinct monsters.
At its heart, Lilith sat behind an obsidian desk, the surface piled high with contracts, scrolls, and ancient, dust-caked tomes.
Levi and Aziz stood on either side, arms crossed, eyes glancing to every entrance, every movement.
Around them, a ring of Lilith’s children.
Some winged, some clawed, some all eyes and no mouth, waited for orders.
The marble underfoot was alive with black cracks, like a map of Hell itself. Every time Lilith dipped her quill in the inkpot, the cracks deepened, widened, then glowed with a sickly blue before settling. From observation, blue meant listening, not yet fed.
She worked in silence, the only sound the drag of parchment and the soft click of the Void’s tendrils tapping the desk.
I entered and stood at attention, like a soldier reporting in after a massacre.
She didn’t look up. “How many?”
“All of them,” I said. “Anyone who refused is gone.”
Aziz grinned. “Did you save any for me?”
I tossed him a scroll I pulled from my sleeve. “If you want to clean up the stragglers, be my guest.”
Levi chuckled. “Nice work.”
Lilith kept writing, her hand steady and fast. “Once this is signed, there’s no going back,” she murmured, almost to herself. “The system will recognize the change, and so will the throne.”
The demon nearest me, something with too many eyes and a tail like a whip, bared its teeth in a smile. I nodded back.
“Is Lucifer aware?” I asked.
Lilith paused, just for a second. “His scrying is blocked. The Void’s got him spinning his wheels. He still thinks he’s in control.”
Aziz laughed. “He always does.”
I watched as Lilith finished the contract, then rolled it and pressed her seal into the wax. The Void in the floor pulsed, the cracks widening, sending a ripple through the chamber.
Levi looked at me, then at her. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
Lilith finally looked up. Her eyes were black as the ink, rimmed with blue fire. “That’s it,” she said.
The air in the room changed, heavier, charged. The survivors of the purge, every clerk, every scribe, every notary, filed in, one by one, to witness the event. They stood at the back, silent, hands folded, the fear in them replaced by a dull awe.
I heard one whisper to another, “The throne will know. It will have to recognize her.”
I smiled, just a little. “Let’s see if it does,” I said.
The cracks in the marble widened, reaching the walls, the ceiling, the edges of the world.
Hell was changing. And for the first time since the world was born, I was the one holding the pen.