“All right, Ronaldo’s our prospect,” Morgan declared suddenly.
Luke perked up. “Really? You’ll let me offer him a Deal?”
“After he stole your sale? To a nun? He deserves it.”
Luke looked touched. “Thank you. I know this is hard for you.”
“I care a lot more about you than him,” she confessed. But then visions of a drunk Ronaldo proclaiming his connections to the Underworld at some bar floated before her. The Shadow Council would be on them in a flash. “But he can’t know you’re a demon. There’s no way he could keep his mouth shut.”
“Then how the Earth are we going to get him to sign?”
“What if we slipped it in with some other paperwork? He never reads stuff. You’d think he’d know better, but the dude cuts every paperwork corner he can.”
“What paperwork?”
“Well…” Morgan thought. “He knows I’m talking to the ad agency’s vendor about a new Salesforce extension. I can tell him it’s part of the chili pepper thing.”
“A Deal has to be something he really wants. There’s no differential otherwise.”
“This gets him more leads. He wants leads.”
“He does want leads,” Luke agreed after a moment. “And he’d sign it? Without thinking that was weird?”
“Trust me, no humans actually read the terms of service on anything digital.”
“Wow.” Luke looked impressed. “If this works, you realize it could revolutionize my own industry.”
“Hold up, Mr. Tech Bro,” Morgan said. “Let’s get my soul out of hock before we revolutionize anything.”
Morgan spent a chunk of the afternoon ignoring the social media posts she’d planned to schedule and instead building a fake contract.
“What are we giving him?” Luke asked. He leaned over to see her screen. She could feel the heat radiating off his skin and felt her ears flush.
“I wish we could give him nothing,” Morgan said.
“That’s not how it works,” he reminded her. “The bigger the ask, the bigger the energy on the other side, remember?”
“Is there a standard ‘fame and fortune’ clause, maybe?” Morgan asked. It would suck watching Ronaldo succeed. But then she brightened. If he succeeded enough, there was no way he’d stay here. She could learn to live with a rich Ronaldo if that meant she’d never have to see him again.
“Yeah, actually,” Luke said. “Three tiers of it. Umm. Lowest tier is probably not enough, under the circumstances.”
“I don’t want to give him the highest,” she said quickly.
“Me either, he’s a dick,” Luke said. She surprised herself with a laugh and choked it back. He grinned at her. “Middle it is.”
“Can it be digital or does it have to be on vellum or something?”
“It’s just the intention that matters. As long as the Deal recipient believes it’s binding.”
She sighed. “I’d do a Docusign, but then there would be a footprint. Paper it is.”
Luke dictated the terms out to her, and she buried it in the middle of the legalese from the prospecting platform’s terms of service. “Will Bel’aliol accept this if there’s all this other garbage around it?”
“I hope so,” Luke fretted.
Morgan waited until Kelly was in her office before she took the paperwork out.
“Hey Ronaldo,” she said casually. Ronaldo was leaning back in his chair in a way the chair had definitely not been designed for, tossing and catching a stress squeezer shaped like a cow that had come home from some conference with someone and had a logo of an already defunct startup printed on its belly. “I’ve got another one of those ToS thingies I need you to sign so I can get your Hot Stuff! notifications set up.”
