Page 105 of Just One Little Bargain

I could lie. The Evie who built a life out of wanting nothing she couldn’t provide for herself would lie, hand him a graceful exit, and let last night become one more thing we never mention, the way I’ve let a hundred other things disappear rather than reach for them and risk rejection.

He’s leaving. There’s a date on it. I’ll be the only one left standing in the wreck of it. They’re all reasons to keep my mouth shut, neat as index cards and every one of them true, but they’re not enough anymore.

“I don’t have a tidy reason for it.” I turn the mug in my hands so I have somewhere to put my eyes that isn’t his face. “I came home, and the part of my brain that insists on organizing everything just walked off the job. And I keep waiting to feel like it was a mistake, or the drinks, or something I can hand back and pretend didn’t happen.” I make myself stop hedging. “But I’ve wanted it for a while now and I kept talking myself out of it right up until I didn’t.”

I’ve never in my life said anything that naked out loud on purpose. Heat climbs my throat and pools high in my cheeks.

When I finally look at him, his eyes are bright and stricken.

“I don’t regret it.” His hand goes into his curls and makes it worse. “I didn’t think you’d ever want me like that. I’d made a whole quiet arrangement with myself about it last night.”

“Milo.”

“I know it complicates things.” His jaw tightens. “But I’m not willing to pretend nothing happened. I did that once already, after the bonfire, because you asked me to. I would do a great many difficult things for you, Evie, but I don’t think I can do that twice.”

He holds my eyes, and for once, there’s nothing sheepish in his gaze.

“And if you want to do it again, I’d like that a lot.” He takes off his glasses and cleans one lens with the hem of his shirt. Once the frames are back on, his eyes lift to mine. “I’d like that more than I have words for, and I have, historically, an alarming number of words.”

I laugh, because of course he would turn wanting me into a vocabulary emergency.

“Milo.” I look down, but the smile takes over anyway. “I’d like that too.”

I set the mug on the nightstand. There’s another question waiting underneath all of this, one I’ve been avoiding since the evening he told me why he came here.

“What happens now? With the deal?”

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he leans down, sets his mug on the floorboards, and lowers himself onto the edge of the mattress.

“There isn’t going to be one.”

The sentence refuses to resolve into meaning. “You came here to take my soul.”

“I did.” He meets it head on. “And I won’t. There’s no version of this bargain where I take your soul. I’m not handing you over to Hell.”

Relief lasts about a second and a half before alarm takes over.

“That’s your job. If you’re a demon who refuses to collect, what does it mean for you when you go back?”

“I’ll be a failure.” He shrugs it off. “And I’ll face punishment.”

“Milo.” The part of me that has been managing crises since I was small is already breaking this into pieces and searching for a way out. “What exactly will they do to you if you go back with nothing?”

He takes a second before answering. When he does, there’s none of his usual careful maneuvering around an ugly truth.

“When the thirty days run out and there’s no contract, the case closes and gets marked as failed. They will place me somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“The Soul Furnace.”

“You told me what it is. A place for damned souls.” The name hits harder now that it belongs to him. “But what does it mean for you?”

“Nothing good.” The pad of his thumb presses a slow circle into his own knee, over and over. “You maintain and operate the torture machinery. For most demons, it’s a demotion. For someone like me . . . I’d have to become someone who could do that work every day. Eventually, there wouldn’t be much of me left.”

I can’t reconcile the Milo who apologized to a squirrel last week for existing too loudly near it with the place he just described.

“Then don’t go.” I hear how naive it sounds, but someone has to say it. “Can’t you just . . . stay here?”