Page 34 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)

The floor beneath my cage vibrated in slow, arrhythmic pulses, each tremor a drumbeat in the funeral march of my once-immaculate dominion.

I pressed my forehead to the obsidian bars, staring through the haze of shadow and Void that now saturated Hell’s every molecule.

Not even my breath steamed in this new cold, and I amused myself by counting how many times the freshly-dead above would trip and fall on the crack that split the dais from the main hall.

Sometimes I imagined the bones of the weak embedding themselves into that crack, a macabre grout for the foundation of my old world.

The cage was a joke, as were all things now.

I could shatter these bars with a flex of my tail or swish of my hand, but what waited outside was worse than the confinement.

My former throne room had become an exhibit.

Me, the legendary rebel, left to rot in a cell barely large enough for a grown dragon, directly beneath the seat of the new Queen’s power.

On the days I wished to draw attention, I could rattle the bars, let my laughter echo through the stone, remind the courtiers above that every party eventually ends in blood and tears.

But even the impulse to entertain had faded. The Void above had deadened everything that made suffering worth inflicting.

I watched the motes of black drift through the cage, each one a silent reminder of the world’s entropy. They didn’t even sing to me, anymore. It was all absorption, all hunger, all nothing.

I knew something was off when the temperature dropped by another ten degrees and the hair on my forearms prickled straight up.

Even the Void liked a routine. Disruptions meant trouble, and there was only one creature in existence that found pleasure in disrupting Hell’s monotony for its own amusement.

She announced herself with a flash of motion in the far corner of the cell. I tracked the outline, she was always an outline, never a form, and watched as the shadow condensed into something human-shaped.

The Seer did not so much materialize as she did overwrite reality. A shimmer of black feathers, an afterimage of a woman’s jawline, and there she was, perched on the back of a petrified cherub like a taxidermist’s fever dream.

I clacked my teeth, baring them, just for the sound. “Come to gloat, witch?”

Her gaze cut through the dark, slicing with an icy calm that had always annoyed me more than all the howling, writhing threats in the pit. “If I wanted to gloat,” she said, “I’d wait until you were reduced to a husk, too stupid to remember why you ever mattered.”

I grinned, wider. “I’m touched. Can’t bear to let me go quietly, can you?”

She glided off the cherub and into the cage proper, walking right through the bars as if I had never spent a thousand years perfecting the geometry of containment. Her eyes, black as everything else, but flecked with gold, settled on me, and I had to resist the urge to spit at her feet.

“You said if I didn’t take care of her, she’d be my downfall,” I sneered. “You warned me. But I did. I shaped her. I corrupted her. I made her into what she is now. And she’s still my downfall. Explain that, witch.”

She regarded me with that flat, dead stare for a moment.

Then a faint smile curled one side of her mouth.

She lifted her hand, and with a gesture that was more suggestion than movement, conjured a ripple in the air.

The ripple caught, then flared, forming a vision between us.

A memory, sharp and perfect as the blade I’d once run through my own father.

In the vision, I saw myself, resplendent and untouchable, holding court in my favorite study. My hair had glimmered with a pulse of liquid mercury, and my hands sparkled with the residue of a thousand blood pacts.

The Seer’s real-time voice layered itself over the image, icy and clear. “I told you to mind her. To beware her.”

I watched, eyes narrowing. In the memory, I’d dismissed the warning with a wave of my hand, too enraptured by the prospect of turning this trembling scrap of innocence into the next great engine of perdition.

I remembered the words I’d spoken, something about the satisfaction of corruption, about the pleasure of stripping away every last pretense of virtue.

“You were always arrogant,” the Seer said, her tone neutral, “but never stupid. What made you think you could handle her?”

I snorted. “Because I did. The only reason she’s anything at all is because I burned away everything weak in her. I made her. If she wins, it’s only because she was molded by my hand.”

The Seer stepped closer. Her feathers rippled in a wind that didn’t exist, and the cage trembled around us.

“That’s what you never understood. You always believed that to control a thing, you had to break it first. That discipline and suffering were the only routes to loyalty.

But sometimes, Lucifer, there is more power in letting something become itself.

She wasn’t meant to be chained. She was meant to ascend. ”

I laughed, and the sound rang off the obsidian walls with the sweetness of a funerary bell. “If she was destined to win, why the warnings? Why send me the prophecy? Why interfere at all?”

She paused. This, more than anything, unsettled me.

The Seer always had an answer. Always. “I never told you to corrupt her. That was your choice. You thought bending her to your will would keep her in your hands. All it did was quicken her becoming. You didn’t stop her from being your downfall. You ensured it.”

The memory flickered, shifted. Now Evelyn, no, Lilith, stood over my throne, her arms streaked with blood and Void, her hair wild, her eyes ablaze with the color of inevitability.

The Court, my Court, bowed before her, and I watched as my own body, my own will, knelt and offered up everything I had ever built.

“She was always going to be your downfall,” the Seer said softly. “You just made sure it happened sooner.”

For the first time in this endless, freezing new regime, I went silent. The Void above us hissed and spat, the cracks in the floor widened, but I couldn’t think of a single retort.

She watched me, her own amusement now gone. “You’re not dead, Lucifer. She won’t let you die. She needs a witness. Maybe even an adversary, if you grow interesting again. But you are no longer the prime mover. You are the lesson.”

She stepped back through the bars, each footfall a silent insult. As her shape faded, the last thing I saw was her lips, curled in something that almost resembled pity.

I was alone again, in the cage, in the cold, in the new Hell that wore my old skin like a trophy. I braced my forehead against the bars, and for a moment, I considered the possibility that the Seer was right. That everything I’d ever loved, built, or broken was just fuel for another’s ascension.

Then I let out a laugh so full of poison it curdled the air, and settled in to wait.

Because even in the bottom of a cage, even in the ruins of Hell, I was still Lucifer.

And nobody, not even the Void, could ever leave me forgotten for long.