Page 5 of Hellbound

“Apologies; it’s habit. Please, do sit down.”

Tension escaped her in an exasperated sigh.

“Fine.” She marched across the room and collapsed into the chair.

Mr. Vale rewarded her with a satisfied smile that unleashed another swarm of unwanted butterflies in her stomach. He took a shallow sip of whiskey before settling into the seat across from her. “How long has it been since last we were together?”

Marian squinted as he set his drink on the table. Something about his phrasing made her skin crawl.

“Two months, maybe?” She jerked her chin toward the shelf behind his desk. “It was when I delivered the, uh, Hell bells.”

“Of course.” The demon propped his chin in his free hand, sounding infuriatingly distant.

Marian bit down so hard, she heard the clack of colliding molars. How could he forget? Ah, but her repeat deaths were just outsourced errands to him, weren’t they? He hadn’t nearly lost his mind in Hell’s labyrinth to find the trinkets he sent her to fetch. He only wrote the check.

“I trust you’re rested and ready to work, then?”

She concealed her twitching lip behind her left hand and pretended to massage her jaw as the floodgates of her mind trembled and creaked against the rushing tide of nightmares half-remembered. The scar tissue under her sleeve twinged.

“You’re the last person I’d be speaking to if I wasn’t.”

Mr. Vale’s cutting stare suggested he didn’t much care for her answer, and she couldn’t fathom why. His chair creaked as he leaned back. “You should see a doctor about that.”

‘That?’ Did he mean the Jackson Pollock she’d carved into her wrist? How could he know about that? She’d kept it well out of sight. Don’t look at your scar.

She didn’t look at her scar. Instead, she held his frigid gaze. “About what?”

The ice in his features cracked as he regarded her with a spine-melting smirk.

“This testy attitude of yours,” he said as he sipped his whiskey. “It can’t be good for your health given the nature of your clientele.”

Six months ago, she wouldn’t have dreamed of going toe-to-toe with him. A greener Marian had shaken like a leaf where she stood across from his desk and stared open-mouthed at Vale’s shadows; he was only the second demon she’d seen. He’d looked at her the way a wolf considers a lamb newly strayed from its flock. He’d commanded her to either speak or close her mouth. She nearly wept.

Now, Marian wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of frowning. True, mouthing off to a demon was not in a diver’s best interest. Valuable though their services were, a bit of maiming was never off the table. But Mr. Vale wasn’t most demons, and after yet another dinner of ancient toaster pastries, she felt particularly prickly.

“That’s the problem with getting good at dying,” Marian replied louder than she intended, her voice brimming with bitterness. “You get worse at staying alive.”

Mr. Vale tilted his head, as though she amused him, and Marian suddenly found his stare too much to bear. She looked to the floor, at the hands she’d shoved in her pocket, at the bright blue fabric peeking out of the left—

—A knife. Cold and exacting. That’s what she needs. Elio shouts her name and tries to wrench the blade from her hands, but she moves with strength she’s never possessed so soon after death. She grips the hilt like a lifeline and—

The memory released her, and Marian snapped back into the moment with an involuntary shudder and racing heartbeat.

“Are you alright?” The demon drawled from somewhere in the rapidly blurring room.

“I am so good,” Marian slurred as she stared at the floor. Her shoes slipped in and out of focus. Darkness tinted her vision. Every breath came too shallow, too fast. Her gaze drifted from the carpet up to the shadow that had fallen over her. She caught a dark tendril out of the corner of her eye trying to stroke her arm, only to dissolve on contact.

A warm hand against her cheek shocked her fully back into her body. The demon’s fingers trailed along her jaw to curl under her chin. Marian went rigid, but his hold remained unyielding as he tipped her head back, forcing her to meet his hooded gaze.

Something deep inside her screamed at her to jump out the window or into his arms, and that nothing in between would do. He smelled like whiskey and a blazing fire, and it made a mess of her mind, scrambling the signals screaming at her to run, but the lazy brush of his fingers along the underside of her jaw was downright paralytic. “What are you doing?” Marian rasped.

He bent forward.

“Helping.”

His breath warmed her cheeks as that single word rumbled like distant thunder, shattering Marian’s daze. The cruel gleam in his eyes held the truth she sensed within him.

He was toying with her.