Page 106 of Just One Little Bargain

“I can’t.” He sighs. “The summoning is what’s holding me in your world. Think of it as an anchor. Demons don’t just walk the mortal realm because they’d like to. We need a reason binding us here: a contract, a tether, something. Without one, the realm sloughs us off and Hell reels us back in. Right now, that tether is the only thing keeping me here.”

“There’s always a loophole. You said Hell runs on technicalities, so there’s a clause, a workaround, some awful office I can petition, something that—”

“Evie.” He reaches over and takes my face in both hands. My contingency planning stops dead. “I need you to stop.”

“Someone has to think about this.”

“Not you.” He tips my face up until there is nowhere left to look but at him. “I’m not going to spend one of the days I have left watching you take apart a problem that was never yours to solve. You carry enough. Put this one down. Please.”

I have six arguments ready. Then I remember Julian Ashford’s card, still tucked in my bag on the kitchen counter. A possible feature in The Hidden Getaway. I’d meant to tell Milo the second I saw him, watch his face do the delighted thing it does when I have good news.

But I can’t. The timing is obscene. I’m not going to hold up my bright new future in front of a man being marched toward the Furnace and ask him to be happy for me.

And there’s the older reflex besides. Nothing is signed. Julian hasn’t promised anything. I’ve never once trusted a good thing until it was too solid to be taken back. Announcing it now feels like daring the universe to snatch it.

“Fine. I’ll stop.” I won’t, not really, but I can pretend for him. “So what do you want then, if we’re not fixing anything?”

His thumbs sweep my cheekbones. “There’s a festival next weekend, and it has a Ferris wheel. I’ve never been on one. I’ve never eaten anything from a stall out in the open air, or gone through a corn maze, or carved a pumpkin.” He pauses. “I’d like to do those things with you.”

“Your standards are catastrophically low.”

“My standards were set in a subterranean cave built of brimstone. Anything you show me will be the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever experienced. I know that sounds dramatic, but I’m a demon from a realm of eternal suffering, so the baseline is quite low.”

A laugh breaks out of me, suspiciously close to tears, and I press my forehead to his.

“Okay. We’ll make a list.”

He kisses me, and his lips curve into a smile against mine. When he draws back, there’s a thin ring of violet burning around each iris, brighter than the eyes I’ve grown used to.

“Your eyes.” I gesture at his face. “Last night they were glowing.”

“My mortal form takes active concentration to maintain. Under normal circumstances, it’s second nature.” A flush climbs his throat. “In moments of, ah, heightened intensity, the concentration required to hold it becomes significantly more demanding.”

“You mean last night when you were—”

“Experiencing a significant amount of simultaneous stimulation, yes.”

“That’s a deeply clinical way to describe what we were doing.”

“It’s the description I can manage before nine in the morning.”

“Why hold it at all when it’s only us?”

His shoulders tense. He leans back, creating distance. “It’s not something you’d want to see.”

“Why?”

“Because this isn’t what I look like naturally, Evie.”

“Show me.”

“You say that without any frame of reference for what—”

I lean forward and press my mouth to the side of his neck. Whatever he was saying disappears on a rough inhale. When my teeth skim the base of his throat, Milo locks beneath my mouth. Both hands find my waist, grip tightening slowly against the bare skin above my hips. A sharp point grazes my waist. When I look down, his nails have lengthened and darkened into fine curved points. He pulls them away quickly, angling his hands so the claws keep their distance from me.

His skin flushes to a deep, luminous rose-gold. When I look up, his eyes are incandescent. Not the muted blue-violet I’m used to, but a vivid, depthless violet that catches the morning light and fractures it into something entirely unearthly.

And at his temples, partially hidden by the mess of his curls, two small curved horns have breached the skin. Without question, they’re the most elegant things I’ve ever seen.