Page 27 of Unholy Bond
I bowed my head, letting my hair fall over my face. “I would be honored.”
He stood, towering over me, and took my hand. “Let’s show the others how a queen behaves.”
He led me to the center of the hall, pressing me up against the cold marble table. He kissed me, hard, his teeth scraping my lips until I tasted blood. He pressed his body to mine, grinding his erection against my stomach, and I let him. The Void roared inside me, not with revulsion but with pure, animal appetite. For a moment, it nearly took over, nearly split my skin with the desire to devour him right there. But I waited. It wasn’t time.
He turned me around, bent me over the table, and hiked up the pink mini dress. He pressed his cock against my ass, then shoved it in, dry and deliberate. I gasped, bracing my hands on the bone tabletop, and arched back to meet him. He fucked me rough, fast, the kind of sex that was more about dominance than pleasure. I let him have it, let him believe he was in control. He wrapped a hand around my throat, squeezing until the room went gray, then relaxed. I came, hard and sudden, but kept the noise to a whimper.
All the while, the Void inside me stole a little of his power. I smiled at that.
When he finished, he pulled out, wiped himself on the hem of my dress, and zipped up. “You’re mine,” he said, and I did not correct him.
He handed me a napkin. I cleaned myself off and smoothed the dress down, straightening my posture.
He stepped back, surveying his work with the satisfaction of a serial killer.
“Back to your room,” he said. “Rest up. You’ve earned it.”
I nodded, then walked out, the humiliation pooling in my stomach, thick and hot. In the corridor, I listened for the footfalls of his guards. None followed.
I took the long way to my room, passing through the lower halls where my offsprings congregated. I found them clustered by the water fountains, whispering in low, urgent tones. When I passed, they bowed, even the ones that were only partially mine. I looked for the eyes that lingered too long, the ones that darted away in fear. Those were the spies, the ones bred by other hands. I cataloged their faces, filed them away.
In my room, I locked the door, stripped off that hideous dress and threw it in the trash, and then stood in front of the mirror. The black veins were spreading, an intricate web across my chest and down my arms. I ran a finger along the line of one, and the surface tingled, alive with something more than blood.
Behind me, in the mirror, the air shivered. The Void pressed up, not as a formless shadow, but as a twin: same face, same hair, the veins even darker on the doppelganger’s skin.
“You’ve been testing me,” it said, the words as sharp as glass in a garbage disposal.
“I’ve been testing us both,” I said, not flinching from the gaze.
The Void moved closer, the reflection pressing its cold, electric hands to my shoulders. The sensation was not pain, not pleasure, but a hybrid of the two, a static that burned and healed at once.
“I am ready to join with you completely,” it said. “The question is whether you are ready to give yourself to me.”
I looked straight at it, at me, at us. “I am not giving myself to you. We are becoming something new together.”
It laughed, the sound like bones popping. “Then let us begin.”
It slipped its arms around me, pulling me back into the glass, and the world went black and sweet and hot. My veins pulsed, skin stretched tight, and for a second, I was sure I would break. The pain was perfect. The pleasure, infinite.
When it ended, I stood alone, the veins thicker, the eyes rimmed in black, the smile cut wider than before.
I smiled at myself. It looked right now.
Tomorrow would be mine.
Chapter 14: Lilith
The trick was to keep the body perfectly still.
I sat on the frozen marble, legs knotted beneath me, hands cupped palm-up on my thighs. Breathing, when I rememberedto, happened shallow and silent. The only thing that moved was the stutter of black veins across my wrists, the Void working overtime as I tuned into the feeds.
I had hundreds of children, who had grown feral and clever over the centuries. I could track them all, but for tonight’s game I selected three. I watched through their eyes, felt the world through the ragged tips of their claws and tongues, ran a simulation in real time while my actual body sweated on the floor, nothing but a tuning fork for sin and possibility.
One of them looked like a Komodo dragon in a cheap suit, the scales on its back arranged in a spiral that tightened whenever it was nervous. It crept along the service corridors behind the main records room, bypassing every ward and watchful imp by sliding under the fluorescent lights, silent as grease. Above, the walls vibrated with the hum of a thousand busy bureaucrats, shuffling through the endless backlog of complaints, demands, and incident reports that powered Hell’s operations.
Komodo-Demon stopped at a side door, sniffed, then spat once on the handle. The acid in the saliva sizzled quietly, unlocking the latch. It entered, moving low. The air inside was colder, a trace of ammonia mixed with ink. Ahead was two rows of filing cabinets, battered and bandaged with tape, the tops lined with empty coffee mugs and the occasional severed finger. At the far end, a single light illuminated a desk where a clerk peeled labels off a fresh shipment of personnel files.
The demon loped up the aisle, keeping to the shadow, then pressed its palm to the underside of the desk. The skin there peeled back, exposing a stinger-barb, and it worked the point into the cheap wood. When it pulled away, the mark pulsed black and started to spread, hairline fractures in the surface radiating outward, slow at first but gathering speed. The effect was notimmediate. The clerk sniffed, scratched, went back to peeling, unaware that the desk would soon infest the office with an old and special kind of rot.
