Page 107 of Just One Little Bargain

Milo’s looking everywhere in the room except at me.

“They’re small,” he says tightly. “I know. Other demons have significantly more impressive—”

I reach for his hand.

He stiffens. “Careful, they’re—”

“I see them.” I take his hand in both of mine and turn it palm up. I draw one fingertip slowly along the curve of a single claw. “These don’t scare me.”

“They should.”

“They don’t.” I reach up and run my finger along the ridge of his left horn.

Milo jolts so hard his hand snaps up around my wrist.

“Sensitive?”

“Extremely.” He’s panting. “Last night was the first time I let anyone touch them.”

“Why?”

“Demons don’t exactly offer each other horn-touching privileges. Evie, it’s . . .” I trace it again and a shudder rolls the length of his spine. “It’s intimate.”

“They’re beautiful,” I tell him.

The guarded look falls away, and his arms come around my waist, gathering me in against him. I get both hands into his curls and map the warm base of each horn with my fingers. His forehead drops to my shoulder.

“This isn’t what most people would choose to look at, let alone like.”

“Good thing I’ve never once done the sensible thing where you’re concerned.”

The laugh he lets out is ragged and disbelieving.

For the first time in my life, I hold someone I can’t organize or predict or protect, and I don’t let go.

Chapter 31

Milo

The leaflet wasn’t there for me. It was meant for the guests, propped between a hiking map and a breakfast menu in the inn’s front hall, the paper gone soft and warm in the afternoon light. I walked past it four times before my willpower finally collapsed on Monday, when the entryway smelled like lemon polish and the cinnamon rolls Evie had left cooling on the sideboard. I swiped it while she argued with a jammed printer in the back office.

BRINDLEWOOD AFTER DARK: A HAUNTED HISTORY WALKING TOUR.

A cartoon ghost on the cover, holding a lantern, looking significantly more cheerful than any departed spirit I’ve encountered in infernal literature. I found it scientifically inaccurate and completely wonderful.

I took it to the bathroom, locked the door, and read every word, including the fine print about comfortable footwear and the reminder to bring a light jacket. Then I went through it again because the sentence prepare to discover what lurks in the shadows of Brindlewood’s past gave me a genuine, full-body thrill, and I needed to sit with that for a moment.

A demon, thrilled by a tourism leaflet. My father would disintegrate on the spot.

I asked Evie if she wanted to go. She said yes, and also, “You realize my sister runs that tour?” and the way her eyebrow lifted suggested I’d just volunteered for something I didn’t fully understand.

I understood enough. Twelve days from now, I’ll be dragged back to Hell. They’ll station me at a rack with a blade in my hand and a quota carved into the wall above my head. The Soul Furnace doesn’t rehabilitate; it conscripts. You stand there and you do the work, while the soul beneath your hands screams, thrashes, and begs. But you don’t stop. Because stopping isn’t a feature of the system. You do it until the sound stops registering. Until your body performs the motion without your brain’s involvement. Until the demon who got excited reading a ghost-tour leaflet in a bathtub is so far gone that no amount of excavation could recover him.

Evie’s mine until she isn’t, which is its own particular cruelty. I’d rather feel everything this world hands me, hoard each hour of her I’m allowed, and take it down into the dark with me when the time comes.

So yes. I wanted the ghost tour.

There are things humans do when they care for each other. I know this academically, which is not as useful as one might hope. They go places together. Bring flowers. Hold hands in public without first negotiating terms of ownership, conquest, or blood debt.