“You’re cooking our dinner with hellfire.” Mia looked at Ava, eyes wide. “Your boyfriend is literally cooking with hellfire.”
“Fake boyfriend,” Ava corrected automatically.
Victor’s hand paused mid-stir. His expression tightened before he resumed.
“Right.” Mia grabbed the Parmesan from the cabinet and began grating with aggressive enthusiasm. “Fake. That’s why you two arrived looking like you’d spent the entire weekend trying not to jump each other.”
“Mia!”
“What? I’m just saying.” She pointed the grater at them like evidence. “There’s fake dating and there’s whatever you two are doing. Which apparently involves hellfire pasta and enough sexual tension to power Manhattan.”
“The pasta is perfectly normal,” Victor said. “Only the flame is enhanced.”
“And I suppose you enhance flames for all your fake girlfriends?”
“I haven’t had a girlfriend, fake or otherwise, in over a century.”
Both women turned to stare at him.
“What?” He kept stirring, not meeting their eyes.
“A century?” Mia repeated.
“The 1890s, specifically. It was a different time.” His voice had flattened, the way it did when he was controlling something. “Different circumstances.”
“What happened?”
Victor went still. The blue flame flickered, then dimmed to normal orange.
“She died.”
The kitchen went quiet. Steam rose from the pot. Somewhere in the building, a door slammed.
Ava watched his profile, the rigid line of his jaw. He’d promised to tell her about his past.Tomorrow, he’d said, and tomorrow was technically today. But this, the way his knuckles had gone white on the wooden spoon, the careful blankness in his voice, this wasn’t a conversation for Mia’s kitchen with pasta bubbling on the stove.
She could push. She wanted to push. But some doors, once opened, couldn’t be closed again.
“I’m sorry,” Mia said softly. The combativeness had drained from her voice.
“It was a long time ago.” Victor adjusted the flame with his hand this time, no supernatural assistance, just a twist of the dial. Human. Deliberate. “The pasta’s ready.”
They serveddinner in careful silence, the earlier sparring dissolved into something more tentative.
The sauce was remarkable, rich and layered, with depth no ten-minute enhancement had any right to produce. Ava tried not to think too hard about what hellfire did to tomatoes. Or what a century of grief did to a person. A demon. Whatever Victor was.
“This is actually amazing,” Mia admitted, twirling her fork. “Like, stupid good.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t think good pasta gets you off the hook.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“But it does buy you points.” Mia reached for the bread. “So explain how this arrangement works. Ava tells me about demons, which, by the way, I’m still processing, and suddenly you’re fake dating her?”
“The breach of confidentiality put her in danger.” Victor set down his fork, giving the question the weight it deserved. “The partners would have… the consequences would have been severe. A claim, a romantic claim, offered legal protection they couldn’t circumvent.”
“And fake dating was the only solution?”
