I sat at my station and slipped the headset on, staring through my pane at the man I wasn’t supposed to have opinions about. Dear heaven above, if I could only keep to that. The glass-softened distance made him feel close enough to touch,yet forever beyond reach. He sat on the bench, blindfolded, wrists resting open on his thighs, breathing a notch too fast. Bare shoulders, a good map of muscle—not show-offy, just… delicious. His horns should have been a turn-off. But all I could picture was me riding him whilst holding onto those curved bits of…
Erm, perhaps if I didn’t look at him. I might be able to behave. But then I saw the plump curve of his lips. His mouth made promises even when it was doing nothing at all.
Focus, Ivy. Give the man a chance.
A rune blinked green at my elbow.SESSION: HHB-37. OBSERVER: IVY. START.
I cleared my throat and pressed the button. My voice went into the dark. “Subject thirty-seven, can you hear me?”
Static crackled, then his reply—careful, trying not to hope. “Yeah. I can hear you. Hi.”
“Hello,” I said, aiming for smooth and not robotic. “I’ll be your observer for this trial. You may call me?—”
“Ivy,” he said, surprised into something that sounded like relief.
“That’s… correct, Max.” My pulse tripped. Of course he remembered my name. People remember the first voice that steadies them. It doesn’t mean anything. “I’ll ask you the baseline questions. Honesty is required. Lies are recorded as failures. Do you understand?”
“I understand.” A beat, then, lighter: “So this is like therapy, if your therapist is a disembodied voice and your therapist’s boss is Satan.”
I snorted with laughter, barely keeping it from the microphone.
“Please refrain from calling my aunt Satan,” I said firmly. “She likes it far too much.”
“Your—wait. Is that a metaphor?”
“No.” I should have lied with the ease of someone who’d learned the hard way not to hand strangers her soft underbelly. Clearly, I was still new to the demoness business. “First question. In your own words, why were you sent to Hell?”
He let out the tiniest breath, a self-depreciating laugh that surrendered before it began. “I liked winning.” He paused as if turning the sentence carefully in his hands to see if it cut. “Winning came easy, and then it came with perks, and then I started taking the perks like they were owed to me. I worked too much and cared too little. I measured people by what they could get me.” A swallow. “I don’t think I was born cruel. But my mother, she was… religious. Nothing I ever did was right. I suppose I got so used to being told I was bad, I just didn’t care anymore. I might as well use it to my advantage. So I did. I took the shortcut so often, my feet forgot the long way.”
Silence yawned, not empty so much as exact. My throat went tight, unhelpfully so. I ticked a box on the crystal pad just to keep my fingers from confessing anything.
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it.
“You’re not going to argue?” he asked, half surprised, half testing. “Tell me there’s a mistake?”
“No.” It came out softer than I meant. “Your answer registered as the truth. You mentioned your mother. Tell me about her.”
He hesitated at first, but then slowly began to tell me what it had been like to live with a religious zealot who found fault with every move her child made. My heart ached to think of Max as a child, enduring that kind of scrutiny. It was wrong of me to want to punch the woman in the face, but I did.
After a while, I asked the next question. “If you could have lived your life differently, would you—and why?”
He made a sound as if he were weighing his options. “I should say yes,” he admitted. “That I’d be better. Kinder. Andmaybe I would. Maybe I’d stop treating people like rungs. Do I have regrets? Certainly, I wish I’d had a better relationship with my mom. She was my only family. I wish I hadn't always taken the easy way. But then, if I changed something, what if I ended up somewhere else? If I didn’t end here,” the faintest smile threaded his voice, “then I would never have met you.”
The monitor’s display reportedTRUEquickly.
I stared very hard at the blinking cursor. My chest had developed a bad habit of constricting so much that I could hardly breathe. I choked out, “That answer is dangerously flattering.”
“It’s honest.” He shifted on the bench—a scrape of skin on fabric, a small exhale that my body pretended was personal. “You said that we had to be honest.”
I wasn’t certain I would be able to handle much more of his honesty. But nothing could have dragged me away from that chamber or from Max.
“Can I ask you something?”
“I’m here to ask you questions,” I said automatically, and then could have kicked myself. “You can ask.”
“What’s your job like? Outside this.” He groped for words. “Do you… like it?”
The truthful answer? Sometimes. I was new to it, and it was far different from being an angel. Before I knew it, I was telling him the whole story.
