Page 2 of The Demon Kept Me

"Mine to sell, if the price is fair." Varek follows my gaze, and something calculating crosses his expression. "Human. Strong back, quick hands, eats less than you'd think for the work she's good for. I've carried her three valleys now, and frankly, I'm tired of feeding another mouth for roads that don't turn me a profit."

The woman doesn't speak. She stares at the mud instead, hazel-green eyes fixed somewhere past my boots, and I recognize the particular stillness of someone who has learned that drawing attention rarely ends well for her.

"How old?"

"Four and twenty, or near enough." Varek shrugs like the detail barely matters to him. "Healthy. No sickness, no debts of her own, nothing that follows her here."

I think of the storage room I've meant to clear for a full season now, the ledgers I can't finish alone during harvest, the mornings I've stood in this doorway wishing there were more hours in a day than one demon can fill by himself.

"I'll want to see her hands," I say, because that tells more truth than any merchant's word ever could.

Varek waves her forward without ceremony. She holds them out — calloused, scarred faintly along the knuckles, nails bitten short. Hands that have worked. I've seen enough idle hands passed off as capable to know the difference between the two.

"Name?"

For the first time, she lifts her eyes to mine. There's fear in them, but something steadier beneath it too, waiting to see what kind of monster I intend to be to her.

"Wren," she says.

I name a price. Varek doesn't haggle long — eager to be free of the burden, and the coin I offer is fair enough for an off-season sale that he has no reason to argue it. When the exchange is finished, he climbs back onto his cart without a backward glance at the woman he leaves behind, and the rain swallows the sound of his wheels within a minute of him leaving the yard.

I look at Wren, soaked through and small and entirely unafraid to meet my eyes now that we're alone together in the mud.

"There are rules," I tell her. "Follow them, and no harm comes to you here. That's the only promise I make to anyone."

She nods once, chin lifting slightly, and I find myself curious, against every instinct I have, what kind of woman survives three valleys in a dark elf's cart and still looks at a demon like she intends to hold him to his word.

2

WREN

The mill smells like river water and cut wood, not the rot and mildew I braced myself for. I stand inside the door with my satchel still clutched against my chest, waiting for the moment his patience runs out and the true nature of him comes forward. It always does. Eventually.

He's enormous — taller than any man I've ever stood near, his shoulders filling the doorway like he was carved to block it. The gray of his skin catches the lamplight strange, and his eyes are the color of banked coals, slit through the middle like a cat's. I've heard stories about demons my whole life. None of them prepared me for how quiet he is.

"Three rules," he says, and his voice is low enough that I feel it more than hear it. "Work honestly. Steal nothing. Do those two things, and no harm comes to you here. Ever."

I wait for the rest. There's always a rest — a caveat, a threat dressed up as kindness before the real terms show themselves.

"That's all?" I ask, because I can't help it.

"That's all." He turns without ceremony and starts up a narrow staircase, expecting me to follow. "The living quarters are above the grinding room. I'll show you where you'll sleep."

I follow because I don't know what else to do. Varek never explained anything, only pointed and expected obedience, and the silence of not knowing what's coming has always frightened me more than a raised hand ever could.

The room he leads me to hasn't been touched in years, I'd wager. Dust sits thick along the windowsill, and the single chair in the corner has a leg that doesn't quite meet the floor. But there's a bed, real and solid, and someone — him, it must be him — has already laid a folded blanket across it along with a plate of bread and dried meat.

"Eat," he says, like it's an order and not an offer. "You'll start work at first light."

He leaves before I can ask why there's food waiting for a woman he bought an hour ago sight unseen. I stand alone in the dust and the quiet and the strange, uncertain warmth of a full plate, and I don't understand any of it.

I don't sleep well. Every creak of the old building has me half-rising from the bed, listening for footsteps that never come. By the time gray light creeps through the shutters, I've decided the silence itself is its own kind of unsettling, so I get up and do the only thing I know how to do when a place feels wrong beneath my hands.

I clean.

The stairwell first, sweeping years of dust and grain husk into a pile I carry out to the yard. Then the sitting room below the living quarters, where cobwebs hang thick enough to catch moths, and a hearth sits cold and unused despite the chill already settling into the walls. I find a cracked washbasin and scrub it until the crack is the only flaw left. I find dishes stacked and forgotten, and I wash every one.

Nobody lives like this by choice. Nobody keeps a home this bare unless there's nobody left to keep it for.