Page 4 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)

The penthouse belonged to a hedge-fund couple who’d spent a decade filling it with white leather, polished stone, and art that cost more than the gross domestic product of small countries. Ian had glamoured the couple to take a trip to Monaco for the month when we decided to bring Evelyn here.

It was after midnight, and the place was still.

The only sound was the rain hitting the glass walls, dragging the night down in thick silver sheets.

All the city’s light leaked through the cloud cover and pooled at the base of the towers, miles below, so the suite floated in a cold bruise of sky.

The only illumination inside was a small lamp on the bar, a sodium lowlight that made the bottles sweat and turned the edges of the room feral.

I sat in the dark, hunched on the sofa, every muscle wrapped tight as baling wire. My hands, so steady in the violence of centuries, shook now. I pressed them to my face and inhaled, hoping to catch her scent on my skin, anything to prove she hadn’t been a hallucination.

I tried every trick I’d learned during my long existence to track Evelyn.

Focus on the void at the core of your own chest. Listen for her heartbeat in the warp of the world.

Sift the air for a single molecule of her sweat, her hair, the residue of her spit or her sex or her terror. Nothing. Not even a ghost of a taste.

I gripped the edge of the coffee table so hard my fingernails scored the marble, anger boiling within me.

“Evelyn,” I said, as quiet as I could. Not a prayer. I’m not built for those. But the name always produced a response, a tug at the base of my tongue, a hum behind my eyes. This time, it bounced off the walls and died in the carpet.

I tried again. “Lilith.”

Nothing. Not a whisper, not the faintest tremor of resonance.

It’d been like this for hours. With each passing minute, the pressure behind my eyes built until I thought my skull would split along its old tectonic seams, the lines that still ached when I remembered being Hyperion.

Most days I kept that part of me locked down, but it came out when I felt threatened or when I got drunk enough to forget why it was safer not to.

It was out now, stomping around the perimeter of my thoughts, wanting to murder the world for taking her from me.

A low growl started in my chest and bled into the upholstery. The sofa groaned, the seams pulling, the metal frame beneath beginning to warp.

Ian entered first. His shirt was pressed with the collar open. He saw me on the couch and stopped, one hand still on the doorknob. “You’re at it again?”

“Come to mock, or join in?” My own voice surprised me. It sounded foreign, a little guttural, like I’d swallowed jagged gravel instead of vodka all evening.

Ian shrugged and crossed the room, unbuttoning the cuff of his shirt as he went. “I thought you’d be done by now. You’re not exactly subtle with this shit.” He gestured at the dented table and the way the walls vibrated in time with my pulse.

“I can’t feel her,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “She’s angry, that’s all. She’ll come back when she wants something.”

“No,” I hissed. “You don’t get it.” I stood, towering over the coffee table and Ian both. “It’s not anger. It’s absence.”

Absence meant math, not mood. If she’d slipped off the index of the world, fallen between the stitches into the seams, we could howl all night and never touch her. Only the Void ran in the marrow.

He weighed that for a moment, then nodded slowly, as if I’d confirmed a theory he’d rather not be right about. An idea he’d thought of but had refused to accept until I’d spoken it out loud.

Levi arrived with the subtlety of a missile strike. The elevator chimed, and he stepped out laughing at something only he found funny. His hair was still dripping from the rain outside. He swept it back, sending a spray of water behind him, and was already halfway to the bar when he noticed us.

“What’s with the funeral?” he asked, pouring a glass of tequila from a bottle that probably cost more than my gold watch.

I didn’t answer. Ian didn’t either. It took a lot to silence Levi, and for a second, I savored it.

He put the bottle down. “Okay, who died?”

I stared at him, and the glass nearly cracked in his grip. He noticed, set it down, then looked me over with something like genuine concern.

“She’s not answering you,” he said, more a statement than a question.

“She’s gone.” I made the words as blunt as possible. “I can’t sense her at all.”

He smiled, but it was nervous, the kind of smile that telegraphs you know you’re about to get hit. “She’s a big girl. You think this is the first time she’s ghosted us?”

I ignored him. “Ian, show him.”

Ian looked irritated but did as asked. He closed his eyes, breathed deep, and extended his senses.

If anyone could, it was him. He was always best at tracking, the only one who could ever keep up with me in the old world.

He twitched, a faint ripple passing over his face, then opened his eyes and looked at Levi.

“She’s not here,” he said, “Not in this plane.”

Levi rolled his eyes. “Spare me the drama. I’ll show you how it’s done.

” He didn’t walk so much as blur, one moment standing at the bar and the next sliding out of phase, gone.

The air snapped in his wake, static popping along the countertop.

I’d seen him do this a thousand times, and I still hated it.

The silence in his absence was worse than before. Ian poured himself a drink, and I stared at my hands, the knuckles pale, veins standing out like map lines.

“He’ll be back,” Ian said. “Or he’ll get stuck somewhere and we can finally have some peace.”

I snorted. “You’d miss him. We always do.”

He gave me a sidelong look. “Do you remember when you tried to kill him? On that beach in Tyre. Three days, nonstop.”

I remembered, of course. I remembered every time I’d tried to kill either of them. In some ways violence was our purest form of communication. I shrugged. “He deserved it.”

“He always does.”

We lapsed into silence again. The rain picked up, slashing harder at the windows, as if the city wanted to get in and devour us along with its own.

There’d been so much rain lately. As if the world itself was trying to wash its own sins away.

If so, it was failing miserably. I sat, but didn’t relax, my spine burning with a need to do something, anything.

I remembered the wars, not the tidy human ones with treaties and ceremonies, but the old, slow wars that were measured in mountains razed, continents shattered.

This situation would have resolved itself by now, back then.

I would have leveled the world until I found her.

The air popped, and Levi tumbled back into the room. He was pale, the bravado gone for once, a confused frown on his face. “She’s not in Hell, either. Not in The Pit, not in The Fields of Fire, she’s nowhere in Boiling Seas. I can’t sense her anywhere .”

I stood, every nerve in my body a live wire. “What did you see?”

He rubbed his hands together, like the act of phasing in and out had left frostbite. “Nothing. Not even a footprint. No trace of her. It’s like she got erased from all existence.”

Ian spoke softly. “That’s not possible. Not unless—” He let the words dangle.

Levi filled the silence, and this time he didn’t try to sound amused. “If she were dead, we’d know. We’d all know.”

I gritted my teeth so hard I tasted iron. “She’s not dead. But she’s not free, either.”

The three of us looked at each other, the old triumvirate, each one waiting for the others to flinch first.

Ian finally said what none of us wanted to. “There’s only one place she could be where you wouldn’t be able to sense her. The Black Castle. Lucifer has her.”

Levi let out a long, unsteady breath, then nodded. “Okay. Great. We go and get her. Simple.”

I laughed, a jagged, joyless sound. “You think it’s that easy?”

He squared his shoulders, trying to regain some bravado. “If you’re scared, just say so.”

That did it. I crossed the room and grabbed him by the throat, slamming him back against the bar. Glass shattered, expensive liquor poured down his shirt. He grinned at me, even as my hand closed on his windpipe. The sharp smell of alcohol burning my nose as I bared my teeth at him.

“I missed this,” he said, the words a little choked. “Almost makes you seem human.”

I let him go, disgusted, but not as much with him as with myself. Ian watched us, lips pressed tight. For a second, I imagined the three of us killing each other, here in the high-rise, reducing the place to dust and bone.

“We’ll get her back,” Ian said.

I didn’t trust myself to answer. Instead, I walked away, hands shaking so bad I could barely get the bedroom door open. I closed it behind me, leaned against the wall, and slid down until I was crouched on the floor.

I fished the ring from my pocket. I turned it over in my hand, pressing the cold metal to my lips.

“She’s ours,” I whispered. Not a question, not even a threat. Just a fact, as old and inescapable as gravity. “She doesn’t belong to him.”

When I looked up, I saw my own reflection in the window, superimposed over the skyline. For a moment, I looked almost human. The storm outside let up, the rain shifting to a thin, icy mist. Thunder rolled in, low and long, and for a split second, it sounded like someone screaming.

We’d find her or burn eternity trying.