1. Izzy
ONE
Izzy
M aeve arches her perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “Don’t you think you should slow down?”
I tip the bottle back, letting the tequila burn another hole in my esophagus. “Nope.”
She gives me a long, dramatic exhale. “Three shots in ten minutes is a lot, even for someone who has a longstanding relationship with Don Julio. You had a glass of champagne at my cousin’s wedding and spent the whole reception yacking on a fake palm tree.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“It was last summer.” She leans across the couch and tries to take it out of my hands, but I cradle it to my chest with a growl. Rolling her eyes, she slumps into the couch and returns to her phone. “Come on, Izzy. Getting palm-tree wasted won’t do anything but make you wake up feeling like a busted pinata.”
“Even more reason to stay plastered,” I grumble, although I know she’s right. I could mainline tequila straight into my vein, and I’d still be a jobless, homeless, boyfriendless, twenty-eight-year-old mess with a whole nine dollars and thirty-seven cents in my bank account.
The bank alert came in half an hour ago, making it extra mortifying to be crashing at my best friend’s hundred-million-dollar Palo Alto mansion.
Maeve is a member of the lucky sperm club. Her father is a self-made multi-millionaire who sold his tech start-up company for an ungodly amount of money while she was in diapers. Lennox Carver is known worldwide as the “Titan of Silicon Valley,” a bored techo-god who entertains himself by investing in other “small guys” like himself. Every wide-eyed computer geek with a Zuckerberg poster on their wall salivates at the thought of pitching to him.
Most never get the chance.
Unfortunately, Fletcher Stanley did, which makes everything that’s happened even more of a kick in the gut.
Maeve heaves another exasperated sigh as her fingers fly across the keyboard of her phone. “I wish you wouldn’t let that micro-dick asshole get to you like this.”
“Micro tech .”
“I said what I said.”
“How can I not let it get to me? I mean look at me…” I fling my arms out wide, nearly backhanding a crystal lamp that’s probably worth more than my car. “Yesterday, I had a calm, normal life. I woke up and went to a job where I worked side by side with the man I loved, only to…to…”
“Walk into a conference room and find him drilling that sad, little gherkin into his chief financial officer?” she finishes, tossing her phone on the cushion with a flip of her hair.
I throw my head back with a groan. “What am I going to do? Fletcher wasn’t just my boyfriend. We lived together. We worked together. The man was my boss, for Christ’s sake. How is it he cheats, and I’m the one who gets punished?”
I’ll never forget the cold look in his eyes. He couldn’t even bother to pretend to be sorry. Instead, he stood there stark naked and informed me his position in life required more than what an office assistant could give him. Then, he fired me and kicked me out of his house.
In less than an hour, I lost everything.
My anxiety spins in drunken circles as she turns toward me, tucking her long legs underneath her and draping her arm over the top of the couch. “First thing you’re going to do is stop sucking off Donny J.” A swift, sneak attack gives her a firm enough grip to yank the bottle out of my hand. “The second thing you’re going to do is stop thinking what that noodle dick did to you is the end of the world and start realizing he did you a favor.”
“I’m not sure you’re aware, but there’s no 401k involved in panhandling.”
“Would you forget about money for a damn minute?”
“Says the girl with a twenty-million-dollar trust fund.”
She sets the bottle on the coffee table with a shrug. “It’s thirty-million, but that’s beside the point.”
My laugh comes out way too shrill. “No, that's exactly the point. You’re rich and confident and blonde. You’ll never have to worry about any of this.” I shake my head. “I love you, but you have the world eating out of your hand. All it does is kick me in the ass.”
“Izzy…”
“I’m serious. You have all this.” I gesture around the opulent mansion. “With my parents gone, Fletcher was the only family I had. He made me feel like more than a charity-case sidekick.”
“The fuck…?” she thunders, her astonished head wobble causing the diamond hoops hanging from her ears to swing. “Izzy Hawthorne, you are no one’s charity?—”
A loud crash from the kitchen cuts her off, immediately drawing me out of my pity spiral. My eyes widen, all the woe-is-me truth vomit I just spewed encouraging the tequila to follow.
As if this day couldn’t get any worse.
Maeve gives me a dismissive wave. “Ignore him. He’s probably looking for some twenty-thousand-dollar bottle of bourbon he stashed in there ten years ago.”
He could be in there mining for diamonds, for all I care. The fact he’s here at all is the problem. It’s the equivalent of a Molotov cocktail being thrown on a raging dumpster fire.
Only the dumpster fire is me, and the Molotov cocktail is Lennox Carver.
My cheeks heat. “I thought you said he was flying to New York for the week?”
It’s the only reason I accepted her invitation to crash at the mansion.
I don’t blame Maeve for being twenty-eight and still living under Daddy’s roof. The Carver estate is twenty-thousand square feet of luxury and excess only one percent of the population will ever see, much less own. I once told Maeve it looked like a medieval castle. She’d rolled her eyes and said castles had fire-breathing dragons guarding them. I was too chicken to tell her hers had just pulled up in his Bentley.
Lennox Carver is an intimidating, perpetually pissed-off man with the face of a god and a jawline that could cut glass. While he played a starring role in all my co-ed fantasies, he also scared the shit out of me. So much so, I planned my visits around his work hours just so I wouldn’t have to interact with him.
Apparently, today was a miscalculation.
There’s another crash then I hear him slamming cabinet doors like they owe him rent. I keep my eyes averted, hoping whatever has angered the god of Silicon Valley keeps him confined to the kitchen.
“He was supposed to,” Maeve says with a shrug. A fucking shrug. As if that information wouldn’t have been important to communicate before I stripped down to my skivvies and got shitfaced on his quarter-of-a-million-dollar couch. “But the investors for his new pet project fell through.” She tips her head in his general direction. “Obviously, he’s taking it well.”
“Maybe I should go.”
“Where…?” she challenges, folding her arms across her chest in that subtle-as-a-brick way of hers. “‘Two-pump Fletch’ changed the locks on his house, and nine dollars won’t even get you a room that rents by the hour.”
A sad reality I never thought I’d have to face, but here I am.
I slump forward. “You’re right.”
“Of course, I am,” she trills, grabbing my laptop off the coffee table, one of the few personal items I salvaged during my surprise eviction. “We’ve fixed your housing situation, and there are hundreds of tech companies in Silicon Valley in need of an experienced personal assistant, so that’s all but checked off, too. That leaves only one thing…”
“If you’re referring to my love life, forget it. That road is closed.”
“Who said anything about love?” She flashes her perfect white teeth, a conspiratorial gleam in her eyes that sets me on edge. “I’m talking about lust, baby…dirty, filthy, no-strings-attached lust.”
She’s got to be joking.
“What the hell, Maeve?” I shout, flinging my leg off the couch, knocking the half empty bottle off the table and onto the floor. I take a heroic leap off the couch and crawl after it as it rolls across the marble. “I’m not screwing some random guy.”
“While getting plowed in the bathroom of a bar might do you a world of good, what I’m suggesting is tamer, more anonymous, and requires a hell of a lot more imagination.” I pause on all fours as she opens my laptop and enters my password. After a few seconds of manic typing, she sits back with a dramatic Vanna White-style gesture at the screen. “Ta-da!”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s ClickBait, a new, fantasy, role play sexting app. The company that owns it reached out and offered a lot of zeros for me to promote it to my followers.” She gives me a wide, Cheshire Cat grin. “But my best friend needs a job and some excitement, so I figure it’s a win-win.”
A win-win ? She’s lost her damn mind. I’m a personal assistant who hides behind a desk tucked inside a cubicle. She’s the top influencer whose entire life plays out online. This is not a simple trade-off. It’s like dropping a mouse in a snake tank and expecting it to adapt.
“No. In fact, hell no.” Crawling back to the table, I plunk the bottle down and rest my forearms on the edge. “And ClickBait ? Who the hell named it, a bunch of frat boys with a pocketful of roofies?”
“No, a tech company with one hell of an advertising budget,” she says, her gaze sharpening. “Come on. What do you have to lose?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe my dignity?”
“Think of it like an interactive version of those romance novels you used to read. Before that idiot entered your life, you were obsessed with them. Remember how you used to talk my ear off about all your favorite ‘book boyfriends’ and how unfair it was that they didn’t exist in real life?”
Of course, I do. Fletcher felt threatened by them, so I stopped reading. Dark romances were my favorite. There was just something about the raw possessiveness of a villain that left me weak in the knees.
“See,” Maeve accuses, pointing a long, red nail at me, “that’s what I’m talking about. You have that goofy smile on your face right now. Those book boyfriends made you confident. Back then, you owned your sexuality. Then, you got with a dick nozzle who thought fucking you missionary style on a new surface was ‘thinking out of the box’.” She curls her fingers in air quotes, a scowl on her face.
I wince. Three years of boring sex with a selfish man wore out a lot of vibrators. Getting shot down every time I suggested something new and exciting chipped away at my self-esteem.
I frown. “Things were different back then.”
“No, you were different,” she counters, tapping a nail on the screen. “But I bet this app can find the old Izzy and bring her back.”
“Oh, sure.” I roll my eyes. “Because a robot knows how to get a girl hot.”
“It’s not AI, smartass. It’s a database of real men ready to bring those same book boyfriends to life in a way you never thought possible.” She sighs. “Look, your confidence took a hit. I get it.” She taps a button and an art-drawn image of a dangerous-looking man in a black suit pops up. “But what better way to get it back than with a mafia boss.” She scrolls again, and another avatar appears. “Or a billionaire dom or a werewolf shifter or even”—turning the screen around, she grins and waggles her eyebrows—“Lucifer himself.”
Something in my stomach clenches. I expected ram horns and sharp teeth, but the image of Lucifer is nothing like that. He’s in a hooded black cloak with black motorcycle gloves, his face painted black and white like a skull. But it’s his eyes that have me mesmerized—stark blue and soulless, almost as if looking at them too long will turn you to stone.
“Hello, Earth to Izzy…”
I look up to find her head cocked and lips pursed in smug satisfaction.
Crap. How long was I staring?
Sweeping what’s left of my pride off the floor, I climb back onto the couch. “It’s clear you’ve never seen a Dateline Special.”
She gives me a patronizing chuckle. “Stop being dramatic. There’s no danger of ending up zip-tied in someone’s trunk. It’s a perfectly safe, fantasy role-play site. Just two anonymous people getting their freak on behind the safety of a screen.”
“I don’t know. It just seems so…”
“Dirty?” she says, lifting both eyebrows. At my reluctant nod, she sets the laptop on the coffee table. “Yeah, that’s kind of the whole point.” There’s an awkward silence as she engages in more furious typing, then retrieves her discarded phone and stands. “There, I’ve made you an account and linked it to my credit card.”
“Maeve!”
My objection goes in one ear and out the other.
“I’m going to go to bed, and whatever happens after that will be between you, the walls, and Lucifer.”
“You don’t know I’d pick Lucifer,” I mutter.
“Oh, you’d totally pick Lucifer.” Giving me an exaggerated wink, she heads toward the staircase. A quarter of the way up, she calls out over her shoulder, “Have fun.”
I sit and stare at the screen for a good ten minutes. It’s ridiculous. Someone who just got the rug pulled out from under her shouldn’t throw a baited hook into shark-infested waters.
But my finger hovers over the enter key the longer I look into Lucifer’s hypnotic eyes.
One click.
Just one press of a button.
What’s the worst that could happen?
“Screw it.” I click on Lucifer’s avatar and start typing.
I’m a good girl who finds the chance to sin with the Devil too tempting to pass up.
I hit send and stare at it for a few seconds before dropping my head into my palms. “God, this was a bad idea.” Groaning, I go to exit out, when I see three dots appear.
I freeze, unable to move or breathe. Finally, the three dots stop bouncing and a message appears on the screen, sending panic and adrenaline shooting through me like a firework.
You won’t be good for long, love.
Seeing him call me “love” knocks me sideways. I usually hate pet names, but there’s something about the way he does it that feels like a lit match under my skin. I attack the keyboard, fighting for balance.
My name is Izzy.
Excellent. A first-name basis makes negotiating easier.
Oh, great. Hidden fees. I’m going to kill Maeve for this.
Excuse me?
I barely get the last word typed when a whole paragraph appears.
Sin is my specialty, but the darkest pleasures come at a cost. If you want to play the Devil’s game, you must pay the Devil’s price.
Air expels from my lungs as a hot flush creeps up my neck. Eventually, it makes its way to my cheeks, drawing beads of sweat across my forehead.
“Close it,” a voice in my head warns. “Shut it down.”
Instead, my hands shake as I type out a three-word response.
What’s the price?
There’s a pause, and then the three dots appear, my mind dipping into a warped, dangerous place where I imagine the prince of darkness sitting on a massive onyx throne, fire licking at his feet as he types out his response.
What else would you expect, love? Your soul.