She snorted. “Is that a threat or a promise?”
“Why not both?” I let my gaze rest on her, heavy as a hand.
“And what has to happen within those three days, Samiel?” she asked, and I knew the answer she was after.
I wanted to see if she’d flinch, so I didn’t sugarcoat it. “We have to consummate. Within three days. It’s the only part of the contract that isn’t optional.”
It was a litmus test, and I watched her for the tell: the blanch, the tick, the intake of breath that said the honeymoon was over before it started. Her eyes went wide for a quarter second—less shock than calculation. Then the corner of her mouth lifted, as if this confirmed a private suspicion.
“Is that a demon thing, or just a you thing?” she asked, voice low and sharp.
“Both, probably,” I said. “But if you want, we can call it off now. No shame.”
She pondered that, turning the thought in her mouth like a cherry pit. “I’m not a virgin sacrifice. I know what I’m doing.”
CHAPTER
THREE
Annie
Mara left us with the cupcakes and a polite "good luck" in the same tone as "have fun storming the castle." Samiel didn't go back to the table; he just stood there, wings half-raised, as if he was ready to scoop me up and take off if the ceiling allowed it. I took a moment—finally, genuinely—to look at him.
He was beautiful, but not in the way that made you want to pose for a selfie. It was a more ancient, predatory type of beauty: posture like a centurion, skin the color of overripe cherries, the red so dark it was almost black along the veins at his temples and the crooks of his arms. His hair was long and glossy, the kind of black that reflected purple in cheap lighting, and did little to hide his ears—pointed like a wolf's, delicate and sharp even with the bulk of his body. The horns were even more intimidating up close, curving back and up from his forehead in a way that looked both ornamental and utilitarian. If you needed to impale a watermelon at thirty paces, Samiel could do it every time.
He caught me staring—like, really staring—and didn’t look away. I’d grown used to men who performed “smoldering” as a kind of joke, a way to look hot while pretending not to care if you thought so. Samiel wasn’t pretending. He studied me as openly as I studied him, and when I squared my chin in response, something in his eyes said,Yes, good. Show me more.
The silence didn’t seem to bother him. He just stood there, wings shifting lazily, tail whipping the air in a slow S-curve behind his calves. The shirt he wore (black, of course, but with a pattern of tiny skulls embroidered like polka dots) was rolled at the sleeves, revealing forearms that would make most pro wrestlers weep with envy. His fingers, now idly shredding the paper of a cupcake, looked dexterous and unhurried, made for more than just brute force.
I wanted him. There was no intricate calculus, no six-point plan. I just wanted this demon to fuck me. Not metaphorically, not performatively, but in the precise, world-shaking sense. He'd looked at me like he could read the variations of my pulse from across a room, and now that I had a moment to catalog his physical presence—not just the flesh, but the gravity of him—I felt my own blood doing something new, something reckless. I let the thought hang, let it settle, and decided I would not wait for him to ask. I would ask first, just to see what he’d do.
But not yet. I wanted to draw it out, see if I could make him squirm.
The chaperone arrived exactly on cue: a demon with the shape and gravitas of a sentient filing cabinet, his badge reading “Clem” in listless handwriting. He escorted us to the parking lot, where a battered black shuttle bus idled in the sun. Samiel’s hand found the small of my back, hot enough to burn through fabric even though I knew it was just skin. I didn’t flinch. If anything, I pressed closer, the way you might lean into a thunderstorm just to see if you could out-stare the lightning.
Inside, the bus was empty except for the driver and the sticky ghosts of past passengers. I slid into a seat near the back and Samiel wedged himself in next to me, his body spanning the entire row and most of the aisle. The seat groaned in protest beneath him. His thigh, the width of a skateboard, pressed flush to mine, and his shoulder blotted out half my peripheral vision. The heat off his body was overwhelming—dry, elemental, like standing beside a kiln. I didn’t hate it.
The chaperone made a show of pretending we didn’t exist, picking at his phone and occasionally muttering into a walkie-talkie. Samiel draped his wing over the back of the seat, the membrane folding in on itself with the soft, leathery susurrus of a bellows. I could feel eyes on us from the parking lot, a few leftover bachelors and Mara, who leaned against the curb and watched with open curiosity.
The bus lurched onto the main drag, and we passed the bingo hall, the pawnshop, the little diner with blackout curtains and a hand-painted sign that said FRIED THINGS. There were no pedestrians, just heat mirages and bored-looking demons in lawn chairs, watching the day bleed out. It was the kind of place where you could disappear if you wanted.
Samiel’s hand landed, casual as a cat, on my knee. He didn’t squeeze or make a show of it—just left it there, a promise and a dare. I twisted my body to face him, my knee knocking against his. “So,” I said, “are we supposed to make small talk? Or do we just sit here and wait for the urge to devour each other?”
He looked at me sideways, eyes brighter than polished garnet. “I’m not good at small talk,” he said. “But I’m told that’s what humans prefer, so I can try if you want.” His thumb drew a lazy circle on my kneecap, a microcosm of friction and heat.
“I’m thirty-two,” I said, “so I’m at peace with awkward silence. But I do like to know what year my potential spouse was manufactured.”
He blinked as if surprised by the question. “How old do I look?”
I studied him, the unlined red skin, the ink-black hair, the hands like sculpture. The only clues were in the eyes: some depth there, a sort of tiredness that felt older than language but not quite immortal. “You’ve got, like, two generations of damage. Forty, maybe? Fifty, if you moisturize?”
Samiel’s smile went jagged, amused. “I arrived in 1985. They made us pick an age and stick to it for paperwork reasons. I was ‘twenty-nine’ for about thirty years. I guess that makes me, what, a vintage millennial?”
He winked, and it was somehow both self-aware and deeply, disturbingly sincere.
I tried to picture him in the 80s—shoulder pads, maybe aMiami Vicesuit, the hair just as long but feathered, the horns a little more clandestine. “You don’t look like you lost much sleep over Y2K,” I said, and he snorted, a sound that vibrated straight through the vinyl upholstery.
“Technology’s wasted on most demons,” he said. “We only really care about three things: food, sex, and winning. Sometimes all at once.” He gave me a look that was, somehow, both predatory and shy. It made my brain short-circuit for a second.
