DEAL WITH THE DEVIL #2
Black and white marble laid in the old large square pattern, a ceiling that ran up three full floors before it found itself, a staircase along the right wall that curved the way old staircases curve when they were built by someone who cared more about elegance than efficiency, and a chandelier the size of my entire apartment hanging above all of it, unapologetically enormous.
Then the smell reached me, and that was the part that slowed me down most: beeswax, cedar, and an old paper undertone I recognized instantly from estate auctions, from houses that had not been touched by a renovation crew in a hundred years.
This house had not been redecorated. It was original, floor to ceiling, in a way I had only ever seen in museum period rooms roped off from actual use.
“Yeah,” Mateo said. He had stopped beside me without my noticing him do it. “First time hits everybody like that.”
“This is... what is this?”
“Blackthorne.”
“Sure. Sure, Blackthorne. Of course it's Blackthorne. Why would it be anything else. Why would anything about tonight be a normal, reasonable size.”
Mateo laughed, an actual laugh this time, unguarded. “Come on, man. He's upstairs.”
I caught myself staring at the portraits lining the staircase as we climbed, and they were old, every one of them, oil paint cracked into the fine web pattern that only happens after a couple hundred years, faces from centuries I had only ever read about in the margins of provenance paperwork.
Mateo led me down a long corridor with a runner underneath our feet that had clearly been replaced often enough over the years to still look new despite everything else around it looking exactly its age.
We came to a door near the end of the hall, and he lifted his hand to knock, but the voice on the other side got there first.
“I do not care about your son. I do not care about your son's wife.
I do not care about your son's future, Anton. I told you in March. I told you in May. And I told you a third time on a call I happen to have a recording of. Do not put your hands inside my supply. Do not. And you put your hands inside my supply anyway, and now here we are, and you are calling me to ask for my understanding, and I am telling you...”
A pause.
“No.”
A longer pause.
“No. Anton, listen to me. Listen. I have been polite. I have been generous. I gave you a window, and the window is closed now. You will return what is mine by Friday at noon, in full, with the interest I named, or the men I send to collect it at twelve oh one will not be the polite ones. Do you understand me? Do not interrupt me, Anton. Do not interrupt me.”
There was a sound then, a phone meeting a wall with enough force to come apart on impact, a brief glassy crash followed by a softer skitter of smaller pieces settling, and then nothing at all.
Mateo winced without turning his head to look at me, then knocked anyway.
“Boss. Mr. Venn is here.”
Three seconds of silence answered him from the other side.
“Send him in.”
Mateo opened the door. “Go ahead,” he said, low, almost gentle about it. “He don't bite. Much.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Mostly.”
The office was the size of my apartment plus my shop plus, probably, the alley behind the shop.
High ceilinged and dim, with a fireplace on the long wall to my right that was lit low, and a pair of old leather chairs in front of it.
At the far end stood a desk the length of a small car, and behind it a wall of windows, and standing in front of those windows with his back to me was a man holding a wine glass.
The phone was still on the floor. It had hit the bookcase to my left and shattered into maybe eight pieces, one of which had skidded nearly to the edge of the rug.
“Mr. Venn.”
He didn't turn.
“Mr. Reed.”
“Sit, or stand, whichever steadies you more. I find it rarely matters which men choose, in the end.”
I didn't sit. I had decided that in the doorway.
He turned then. He was in another suit with the jacket off, in shirtsleeves and a black waistcoat, the cuffs rolled exactly twice on each side. His hand on the wine glass was long and pale, his hair was off his forehead, and the lamp behind him drew a thin warm line along his jaw.
He was beautiful, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was the man who had broken my brother.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said.
“You did not interrupt.”
“You broke a phone.”
“Yes.”
“You don't want to clean that up?”
“Someone will.” He said it the way other men say a phone call will handle itself, as though cleanup were simply a fact of the world rather than a task requiring an actual person to do it.
“Right.”
He set the glass down on the windowsill and came around the desk, then stopped on the other side of it. A folder sat on the surface between us. He laid two fingers on it and pushed it toward me an inch.
“Read it before we speak,” he said.
“You're not going to give me the speech first?”
“I do not give speeches, Mr. Venn. They embarrass me, and worse, they waste time neither of us has enough of tonight.”
The contract was beautiful. I was a man who had restored Georgian writing slopes, and I knew what good paper felt like. This was thick and cream, and the type had been set, not printed.
The first paragraph was the debt:
Twenty-two thousand to Reed Holdings, plus accrued interest of an unspecified amount, plus related obligations incurred by Remigio Venn under Side Agreement Three.
I would have to ask about Side Agreement Three. I had a feeling I wouldn't want the answer.
The second paragraph was the alternative. If the debt was not paid, the principal debtor and all secondary parties named in Side Agreement Three, that phrase again, would forfeit their lives to the holder at his sole discretion and without prejudice to other claims.
I read that line three times. It did not become better. I kept reading.
In exchange for the satisfaction of the debt and the safety of the principal debtor and all secondary parties named in Side Agreement Three, the undersigned agreed to reside at Blackthorne Manor for the duration of the contract, to comply with the reasonable directions of the holder, to permit measured access to the person and the blood of the undersigned at the holder's request and within the limits of the undersigned's freely given consent, and to remain in the holder's protection and authority until the debt was judged satisfied by both parties.
I read that paragraph twice, and then I looked up.
“You want to own me.”
“No.”
“This says otherwise. I've read contracts before, Mr. Reed.
I've signed leases with worse men than you hiding better intentions behind smaller print, and I know what the word reside means when a landlord uses it, and I know what comply means, and I definitely know what authority means when someone puts it in a sentence next to my own name.”
“I know what it says. I drafted every clause of it myself, over the course of several days, and I did not choose those words carelessly. Own, however, is your word, not mine, and I would ask you to notice the difference before you decide it does not exist.”
“Then educate me. What's the difference between owning me and having, and I am quoting your own paper here, measured access to my person and my blood at your sole discretion?”
“The difference is that ownership implies I would take without asking. I am not asking you to sign a document that permits that. Every access this contract grants me, it grants because you have agreed to grant it. That is not ownership, Mr. Venn. That is consent, formalized, in writing, because I do not trust verbal agreements to survive contact with fear, and I suspect, by the time we are finished with this conversation, you will not trust them either.”
“That's a nice distinction for you to make from your side of the desk.”
“It is the only distinction that matters, and I am not standing on this side of the desk to make you comfortable with it. I am here to make sure you understand it, in full, before you put your name beside mine.”
“Because that's what this is.” My voice had climbed, and I let it. “Reside. Comply. Access. Authority. Forgive me if I don't see the meaningful gap between this and whatever the eighteenth century version of it looked like, minus the powdered wigs.”
“Mr. Venn.”
“You want me to sign a piece of paper that says you can have my blood and my obedience for as long as it takes you to decide you've had enough of me, and you want me to call that consent because you were polite about asking.”
He did not blink, and he did not look away, and the stillness in him told me he had been waiting for exactly this question the whole time he had stood there watching me read.
“Yes. That is approximately what it says, stripped of the courtesy I wrote into every clause I could manage. The contract names access to your blood, your time, and your person. Whatever I want of you, Mr. Venn, while it holds, I will have, and I am not going to insult either of us by pretending otherwise in this room. There are no clauses I have left unwritten out of modesty. There are no rooms in this house I have agreed in advance to stay out of. There are no parts of you I have promised myself I will not ask for, given the right circumstances. You will learn the shape of what I want when I want it, and not one moment before, and that is the contract in full. I will not dress it up as anything kinder than it actually is, because you deserve better from me than a lie wrapped in good paper.”
He didn't look away, and I felt heat climb the back of my neck that had nothing to do with anger, even though I would have sworn, five minutes earlier, that anger was the only thing left in me.
“That's an interesting sales pitch.”
“I am not selling anything, Mr. Venn. A sale implies I am trying to convince you this is a good deal. I am not. I am telling you exactly what it costs, in language plain enough that you cannot later claim I hid the price from you.”