21. Chapter 21
Milo
Isnatch a chocolate chip cookie from the cooling rack while Evie’s back is turned.
“Don’t even think about it.”
I freeze with the cookie halfway to my mouth. “How did you know?”
She’s at the sink, running water over the teacups from this morning, and she hasn’t looked in my direction once. This woman has some kind of radar that activates within a ten-foot radius of her baked goods.
“You breathe louder when you’re being sneaky. It’s the opposite of stealth.”
Damn.
“They’re good cookies, you can’t expect me not to eat them.”
“Flattery doesn’t work on me.” She still doesn’t turn around, but I can tell from the angle of her head that she’s considering violence.
“Everything works on everyone if you find the right angle.”
“That’s the most demonic thing you’ve ever said, and you’re still not getting a cookie. Those are for guests.”
“I count as a guest.”
“You sleep on my couch without paying. That makes you a squatter, not a guest. Put it down.”
I eat half the cookie in one bite. Her shoulders rise and fall once.
“I’m going to let that go because I have things to do today, and committing a crime would set me behind schedule.”
I take a second cookie and slide it into my back pocket for later because I have no survival instincts and apparently never did.
This close to her, the air smells of warm brown sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon. Some combination of the three always clings to her because baking comes as naturally to her as breathing, which means existing near her is a constant exercise in restraint. The cookies are only part of the problem.
Three days in Evie Feywin’s orbit and I have become a demon who knows where she keeps her emergency tea towels—bottom drawer, left of the sink, folded into thirds, because she organizes linen the way Hell organizes punishments. Thoroughly and without mercy.
I know she rotates her ankle under the desk when it aches, always when she thinks she’s alone.
I know she skips lunch when there’s too much work to do.
She would deny both if confronted. I’ve collected more knowledge about one mortal woman’s habits than I’ve gathered in thirty years of studying humanity from the other side.
Mortals treat routine as tedium. They groan about grocery runs and oil changes and post offices. I want to shake every one of them because the sheer ordinariness of buying milk from a shop where the woman behind the counter knows your name is so staggeringly beautiful it makes me ache.
Evie’s ankle has graduated from catastrophic to merely aggravating. By yesterday, the swelling had retreated enough for her to fit her shoe back on, which she celebrated by overdoing it. Because to her, rest means sitting down while continuing to work.
She limps on it first thing in the morning when she forgets to compensate, walks on it with careful, heel-light steps during the day, and by evening, pretends the limp has been there all along. I’ve never met a creature, mortal or otherwise, more committed to pretending nothing hurts.
What has changed, though, is that she lets me do things now. I don’t think she’s fully registered it yet.
On day two, she handed me a list of tasks written in her sharp, slanted handwriting without any accompanying lecture on how to complete them.
That evening, she stopped hovering while I wiped down the breakfast tables, limiting herself to corrections called from across the room.
By the third morning, she’d settled into it fully, perched on a stool behind the front desk with her bad ankle resting on an overturned crate, directing me through the opening routine.
Earning her approval through competent manual labor has become embarrassingly important to me.
Demons are supposed to want power, domination, the submission of weaker beings.
I crave Evie telling me I’ve done something correctly.
No one’s ever made me want to try this hard, especially at the small things they care about.
I’ve been deployed to tempt humans. That’s supposed to be my function. Being completely, catastrophically tempted by one was not included in the briefing.
Twenty minutes later, Evie stands at the front door of the inn, keys in hand, wearing a sundress the color of ripe peaches. Her hair’s pulled into one of those disastrous ponytails where half the strands have staged a jailbreak, curling against her neck.
The cardigan slips down her arm again, and she lets it hang there.
The sundress strap beneath is thin, barely a finger’s width, doing almost nothing to earn its existence.
Below it, her shoulder is bare, and I want to put my mouth where her jaw meets her throat.
Feel her react when I do. That particular urge has been getting louder every day.
I’ve been watching her reach for things, bend over desks, and stand too close in the kitchen until I’ve stopped distinguishing between deliberate provocation and a woman simply existing in her own home.
Everything she does registers below my belt before my brain can come up with a single useful argument against it.
“Those jeans are going to fall off you.” She gestures at me with her keys.
“They haven’t yet.”
“That’s not the endorsement you think it is.
” She notices the collar, which has, in fairness, migrated significantly from where it should sit.
“I gave you the best of what was in the lost-and-found box, which admittedly wasn’t much.
Can’t you just . . .” she waves a hand vaguely, “conjure something that fits?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“How does it work?”
“Broadly? Demonic power works in two ways. Bargain magic is backed by Hell, so that can change circumstances for real. Everything else is more limited. We work with what’s already there.
Influence people, nudge objects into doing what they already know how to do, alter perception.
Glamour is the last one.” I hook a thumb through one of the belt loops.
“I could make these jeans look tailored, but I couldn’t actually change the fabric or make them fit.
They’d still be falling off underneath.”
Her eyes narrow, green catching gold in the morning light, and I have to drag my attention back to the conversation. “So you could make yourself look like you’re wearing a three-piece suit right now?”
“Yes.”
“But you’d actually still be standing there in jeans two sizes too big, held up by willpower.”
“And a belt I found in your hallway closet. But essentially, yes.”
She considers that, dragging her teeth across her bottom lip. This woman is going to kill me with her unconscious habits. I’m going to combust in the foyer of a bed and breakfast because she bit her lip. I shift my weight, angling my hips away from her sightline.
“We’re going shopping.”
Right. Shopping. Because I’m a functional being who can participate in commerce while fantasizing about his summoner’s mouth. Absolutely.
“I don’t have any money, Evie.”
“Shocking revelation from the demon who arrived via living room floor.”
“I could get some. There are ways. Nothing criminal, exactly. Nudging an opportunity, adjusting a circumstance. I wouldn’t need to compel anyone, just create a scenario where—”
“Are you describing a con?”
“I’m describing a morally gray acquisition strategy.”
“So a con.”
“But it would be wrong. And I’m trying very hard not to do things that way while I’m here.”
Her expression cycles through disbelief, amusement, then lands on something soft and startled that she blinks away before I can study it properly. “You’re a soul-collecting demon with the ethical boundaries of a youth pastor.”
“That’s the most confusing thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I’m buying you clothes. It’s not a discussion.”
“You don’t owe me that. Letting me stay here is already generous. So is feeding me. Yesterday, you made an extra portion of pasta specifically because you’d noticed I eat more than a normal human, and you didn’t even comment on it. You just gave me a bigger plate. That’s more than enough.”
“Milo.” She turns toward me, chin tipped up.
Five foot two of absolute tyranny staring up at me with those gold-flecked eyes and that stubborn set to her mouth.
All I can think about is what it would be like to kiss her.
If she’d let me. If I had any right to want it in the first place.
Evie would probably kiss the way she argues: relentless, precise, and unwilling to surrender the pace.
And I’d forget how to breathe and ruin the whole thing.
My hands stay at my sides.
“I’m not paying you a wage. This is a charity shop trip. We’re talking second-hand shirts, and jeans someone’s granddad wore to barbecues in the nineties. I’ll survive the financial hit.”
How could she understand? She grew up in a world where people buy each other things because they care, where noticing a need is reason enough to fill it without contracts, terms, or fine print to parse.
In Hell, nothing comes free. Even the smallest object, favor, or gesture carries a cost. You own only what you fought for, traded for, or bled for, and all of it can be taken if someone above you decides you don’t deserve it.
This is the most extravagant gesture anyone has ever made for me.
“You coming?” She’s already halfway down the porch steps, looking back over her shoulder. The wind presses the sundress flat against the curve of her ass and the backs of her thighs. I give myself three seconds to look, then follow her before three turns into thirty.