Damned by the Vow

Chapter 1

Effie lay starfished across the rumpled sheets, panting up at the ceiling.

Her boyfriend, Belphegor, peered down at her with his head propped on his hand, his pale blond hair in wild disarray, the sheets pooling around his waist, looking entirely too pleased with himself. “The night’s young. Don’t tell me you’re tired already.”

Young, her ass. The night, like Effie, was spent, dawn breaking outside the Palladian window, bathing Belphegor’s bedroom in shades of blue and gray.

A false dawn, the sun, of course, unable to reach the depths of Pandemonium, Hell’s capital, the city located some nine hundred leagues beneath the earth’s surface.

Hell was lit instead by the Morningstar, an eponymous knockoff created by Lucifer, the light bringer himself. He boasted about it often.

“What can I say?” She stretched languidly, arms above her head and feet dangling off the bed, delighting in the soreness of her muscles and the soft ache between her thighs. “It’s been a long week.”

Several long weeks, long months, each tedious day bleeding into the next.

With humans to tempt, deals to make, and souls to damn, a demon’s work was never done.

But most were afforded the freedom to set their own hours.

As long as you were making deals for the devil—souls bargained in exchange for wishes granted—Lucifer couldn’t care less how his demons allocated their time.

Unless, of course, you were Effie.

“Lucifer is still giving you grief?” Belphegor asked, frowning.

She was well versed in the art of making someone’s life a living hell, but this? “It’s cruel and unusual punishment is what it is.”

As if it weren’t bad enough being banned from all major metropolises for the foreseeable future, Effie had been assigned the harrowing task of sowing discord on the internet.

She was now a troll of the lowest order, a shitposter expected to trawl forums and be deliberately, absurdly provocative, derailing discussions and disseminating false information to the media-illiterate plebes with memes for brains.

Every day was a fresh hell; this time last year she’d been making soul bargains with billionaires in Ibiza, and now she was stuck confabulating with flat-earthers and cretins with Cheetos-crusted fingers who believed birds weren’t real and that Stanley Kubrick directed the moon landing.

Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

“You did betray him.”

“Betrayal.” She rolled her eyes. “You make it sound so sordid.”

Belphegor arched a brow. “You aided and abetted a known traitor, darling. What would you call that if not betrayal?”

“I broke into the Social Security Administration office and fudged a little paperwork. Whoop-de-do.”

The look he shot her was dripping with censure.

“I still don’t understand why you helped her.

” His upper lip curled, and Effie swallowed a sigh.

This again. Joy. “Daphne forsook all of this”—he swept out his arm, gesturing to the window and the fiery kingdom beyond—“and for what? The love of a mortal?” He shuddered in revulsion. “Insanity.”

Becoming a demon was straightforward—in exchange for their fealty, Lucifer spared a select few whose souls were already bound for Hell, allowing them to skip the eternity of torment that awaited everyone else down in the pit.

Then, once a demon, always a demon, or so she’d believed until a year ago, when her path had crossed with that of Daphne, a two-thousand-year-old demon who, prior to her defection, had been revered by many of her peers and feared by most and, against all odds, had fallen in love with a human.

A human who had risked her own soul in order to have Daphne’s returned.

Through no fault of her own, Effie had found herself at the wrong place at the wrong time and had gotten tangled up in a whole mess.

When Daphne had nearly died…Effie had been horrified to feel a pang of pity for the demon-turned-human defector, a rare glimmer of a human emotion, the first she’d felt in nearly five hundred years.

It was an awful feeling, one she’d wanted to rid herself of with great haste.

So she’d done the only thing she could think to do and had slipped into the Social Security Administration office, forging all of the documentation a human could possibly need.

Her conscience had been eased of its burden, with the unfortunate consequence of placing her on Lucifer’s shit list.

“What can I say?” She rolled onto her side, facing him. “Idle hands.”

Better to let Belphegor believe she’d acted out of boredom than to tell him the truth, mortifying as it was.

“Better keep them busy, if you know what’s best for you,” he warned, taking her left hand in his and pulling it to his lips, ghosting a kiss across the back of her knuckles. “Next time, you might not be so lucky.”

She gave a high, strained laugh. “Lucky? Not only is it wretched work, what Lucifer has me doing, it’s also a—an affront!

” Yes, that’s exactly what it was. Insulting.

“It’s a waste of my time and my talents.

Instead of toiling away behind a stupid keyboard, I could be out there, causing mischief, wreaking mayhem, striking deals. Doing the real work.”

“You could be trapped in Judecca with the other traitors to their lords and masters.”

Her lower lip jutted out in a pout. “Et tu, Brute?”

His grip on her hand tightened, the look in his eyes grave.

“You jest, but it’s not funny. For all her flaws, Daphne was the brightest jewel in Lucifer’s crown, his favorite.

We all saw the aftermath of her defection.

” Belphegor shook his head, his mouth flat and grim, his brows drawn tight together.

When he spoke next, his voice was low. “Lucifer is—and I say this as his loyal servant, mind—prone to fits of melodrama. But as of late, his moods have been mercurial, his behavior aberrant. Concerningly so, enough that there’s been… talk.”

Her eyes narrowed. Belphegor didn’t mince words. That he was doing so now made her wary. “What sort of talk?”

He darted a glance toward the door as if making sure it was still shut. “Whispers of discontent.”

She arched a brow, and Belphegor sighed.

“Mutiny, Effie.”

“Oh, spare me.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t care how short his fuse is, no demon would be foolish enough to attempt a coup.

” He fixed her with a look that strongly implied she might be so foolish.

She tried not to let it rankle, but it did anyway.

“My god, Belphegor, I’m not actually trying to court disaster. ”

“No?” He smirked. “It must have been those idle hands of yours that gave me reason to think otherwise.”

Effie stuck out her tongue. “I may, on occasion, be a touch brash”—he snorted—“but I’m not harboring a desire to be hoisted by my own petard.

If this last year has taught me anything, it’s that I have no desire to defy Lucifer ever again.

” Consider her properly rehabilitated, as penitent as someone without a soul could be.

Effie vowed to be a good little demon from now on, Scout’s honor.

“I only wish I knew how long he intends to punish me. I’m not—” She broke off with a frustrated sigh and squeezed her eyes shut.

“I’m not sure I can keep doing this for much longer without coming unglued. ”

It was as close to vulnerable as their kind got, and for good reason.

What an awful feeling, being so exposed to another, all tender-bellied and cracked open.

Belphegor was silent, and the longer the moment stretched, the hotter her face grew until she was certain her flesh would melt right off the bone.

Just when she was sure she couldn’t stand a second more of weighted silence, Belphegor cleared his throat.

“Forgive me for making light of your plight.” He kissed her fingertips, one by one, and with each kiss the tension in her muscles eased.

“I hadn’t realized how heavily your assignment weighed on you.

Though”—he smiled against her skin, a touch of wry amusement tingeing his tone—“I imagine that was by design.”

Effie huffed and cracked open an eye. “No. You think?”

He sighed fondly. “I could talk to him, if you’d like. He might consider a request for your pardon more favorably if it came from me.”

The closest Lucifer—narcissistic, sociopathic bastard that he was—came to having friends was with the Seven Princes of Hell, an exclusive fraternity of high-ranking demons who collectively served as his right hand. Belphegor stood among them.

“I don’t need my boyfriend to fight my battles.” She’d rather spend an eternity in Judecca than have a man, any man, do for her what she could do herself. “It’s fine. I’ll just…bear it.”

A contemplative furrow formed between his brows. “I detest that word, you know. Boyfriend.”

Effie stared, flummoxed. Never had he complained about her calling him that before.

This was the first she was hearing of it.

“Well, I hardly know what else to call you. We both have other lovers, so that’s out, and manfriend sounds utterly ridiculous.

What are we left with?” She wrinkled her nose. “Paramour?”

He laid a kiss on the center of her palm and stared at her from beneath heavy lids fringed with lashes so pale they looked nearly white in the dim light of dawn. “Fiancé?”

“F-fiancé?”

His smiling lips brushed over the old line of corded scar tissue that bisected her left palm. A nauseating sense of wrongness twisted in her gut, and she quickly snatched back her hand.

He frowned. “We make a good match, do we not?”

She sat up and gathered the sheet to her chest. “Yes, but—”

“But nothing.” He joined her, his back against the headboard. “Your cunning and my ingenuity? Effie darling,” he implored, reaching for her, his big hand cupping her cheek. “Imagine how powerful we could be.”

Effie had no grand designs, no desire to amass power or hoard wealth, and yet to call Belphegor’s proposal anything short of tempting would be a lie.

He was everything a demon could want in a partner—handsome, bright, a generous lover, and yes, one of the Seven Princes of Hell, making him the ideal combination of shrewd and ambitious, ruthless without being an irascible, bloodthirsty brute.

She had every reason to say yes. She pressed her lips together in a small frown and looked at him askance. “What’s in it for you?”

He gave an easy shrug. “You’re brilliant and beautiful.

Moreover, you don’t bore me to death. Less could be said for others.

” He paused as if choosing his next words carefully.

“Assisting the defector…Reprehensible though your actions were”—Effie rolled her eyes—“there are a great number of demons who feel that what Lucifer did was equally iniquitous.”

Effie grimaced. To say Lucifer had handled Daphne’s defection poorly would be the understatement of the millennium.

He’d attempted to confine her to the second ring of the seventh circle of Hell to be picked apart by harpies as punishment for her ingratitude, he’d called it.

Iniquitous was certainly one word for his behavior, though she had several others in mind.

“What Daphne did was repugnant. You’d be hard pressed to find a demon who would argue otherwise,” Belphegor continued.

“But she was respected by many, many who feel that Lucifer mishandled the whole sorry situation, that he acted without regard for her many years of fealty, for the nearly one thousand souls she’d gathered for him.

That respect didn’t die; thanks to your reckless act of abetment, it was passed to you.

An untold number of Hell’s denizens hold you in quite high esteem.

Is it really such a mystery how a marriage would be a boon for us both? ”

He made no mention of love, and why would he? Love was a human construct, unnecessary and diverting. Alliances, the consolidation of power, the security of wealth, those were why demons wed. Those were what mattered, what she cared about, not love.

There were no troublesome feelings clouding her judgment, the absence of butterflies a blessing. The choice was obvious.

Effie stuck out her hand. “I accept.”