Page 179 of Just One Little Bargain

Milo catches both my shoulders this time and turns me back. “Wait.”

“I have to try.”

“Just wait.” His panic gives way to concentration so abruptly that my next argument dies. “I got to thinking about your little arrangement.” Milo shifts in front of me. “Attaching yourself to other demons’ contracts. Poaching.”

“That is a very dramatic word for what is essentially good business.” Krell’s expression hardly changes, though the amusement in it diminishes. “No, I recognize an opportunity before someone else loses it.”

Milo’s mouth tightens. “I thought everyone downstairs might be interested in knowing how often you’ve been doing it.”

That gets a real laugh out of Krell, though it’s thinner than the ones before. “Interested? Certainly. Outraged? Almost definitely. Hell is full of fragile egos.” He tips his head. “But do you honestly think anyone who matters will care?”

“I suspect the demons you’ve robbed will.”

“Robbed,” Krell repeats the word like it offends him personally. “You really are determined to make this sound sordid.”

“Is it inaccurate?”

Krell’s smile slips, revealing a brief flash of teeth sharper than they were a minute ago.

“I have broken nothing. That is the part you seem determined not to understand.”

“Then explain it.”

Krell exhales through his nose. “I attach myself as a third party to a contract already in force. Properly. Legally. Once the magic recognizes me as part of the agreement, I have standing within it.”

“So you let another demon do all the work, wait until they’re about to lose the collection, then take it from under them.”

Krell gives a small shrug. “I prefer to think of it as preventing waste.”

I glance at Milo. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Give me a minute.”

“We don’t have a minute.”

“I know.”

His thumb passes once over the back of my hand, absurdly calm, and I finally understand why he keeps asking Krell questions. He’s been keeping him occupied.

I yank my hand from his. “You did that on purpose.”

Milo turns toward me, and the guilt on his face answers for him.

I pivot toward Krell. “Start again. Whatever I have to say, tell me now.”

He doesn’t answer. His attention fixes somewhere past my shoulder as the pressure in the factory drops hard enough to pop my ears. The temperature plummets, turning my next breath white, while loose grit skitters across the concrete beneath my boots and the rusted beams overhead resonate with a long metallic groan.

“No.” Krell’s jaw tightens.

The shadows at his feet stretch away from him in the wrong direction, thinning across the floor despite the angle of the moonlight, and Milo’s do the same.

“No, that’s not right.” Krell steps back, one hand lifting as though he can physically halt whatever has found him. “There should still be—”

A screech tears through the factory and cuts him off.

His body lurches backward with such violence that one polished shoe skids sideways through loose glass. He grabs the nearest brick column, fingers biting into the mortar, and for the first time since I met him, elegance abandons him. Another wrench drags him several inches despite his grip.

The same invisible pull hits Milo, and his hand tears from mine. I catch his forearm with both hands and nearly lose my footing under his weight.