Claimed by the Devil

I have the craft guidance. Writing the teaser now.

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The doorman knew my name before I gave it. That was the first thing that went wrong.

I had practiced the whole drive over, hands tight on the wheel, telling myself I was here to collect a debt that wasn’t even mine. My brother Marco owed Luca four hundred thousand and a kneecap, and I, twenty-nine years old, a forensic accountant who balanced other people’s lies for a living, had walked into the Bellard penthouse to negotiate like that was a thing a person could do. Negotiate. With him.

“Miss Sera,” the doorman said, and held the elevator. “He’s expecting you.”

The car went up forty floors without me touching a button. My stomach dropped and kept dropping. I told it to stop. It did not listen, which I would learn was a theme.

Luca was standing at the window when the doors opened, his back to me, a glass of something amber in his hand. The city burned gold below him. He didn’t turn around.

“Sit,” he said.

I stayed standing. Small rebellion. I am proud of it now the way you’re proud of a child’s drawing, fond and a little embarrassed.

“I came to talk about Marco.”

“I know why you came.” He turned then. He was older than me by maybe ten years, gray starting at the temples, a face that had decided things about people and never apologized for it. His eyes went down me once, slow, the way you’d read a contract you already intended to sign. “Marco is not the interesting part of this.”

“He’s my brother.”

“He’s a coward who sent his sister.” Luca set the glass down. “You’re going to fix that for me. Not the money. The other thing.”

I should have asked what other thing. The smart part of me, the part with three degrees and a security deposit and a normal life, screamed it. Instead my mouth went dry and something low in my belly clenched tight and warm, and I hated it so much I almost said so out loud.

Because here is the truth I had not told anyone, the thing I barely told myself in the dark. I was so tired. Tired in a way that sleep didn’t touch. I had been the one holding everything up for so long, Marco and the bills and the firm and my own straight spine, that the word he used, fix, the way he said it like it was already done, like I could just hand it to him, made my throat ache.

I crushed it. I was not that woman. I was a professional standing in a criminal’s living room, and I would walk out of here on my own two feet.

“Whatever you think I am,” I said, and my voice only shook a little, “you have the wrong woman.”

Luca smiled. It did not reach anywhere near his eyes.

“Come here.”

I didn’t move. So he crossed to me instead, unhurried, and the closer he got the harder it became to remember the speech, the kneecap, the four hundred thousand, my own name. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my chin up. He smelled like cedar and money and something underneath that, animal, that made the backs of my knees go loose.

“You walked in here in a forty dollar blouse,” he said, “with your shoulders up around your ears, ready to fight me for a man who wouldn’t cross the street for you.” His hand came up. He didn’t touch me. He just held it there, an inch from my jaw, and I felt the heat of it like a brand that hadn’t landed yet. “When was the last time someone told you what to do, Sera. When was the last time you got to stop deciding.”

The question went in like a key. I felt my eyes sting and I was furious, furious, that he had found the soft place that fast, that a stranger had reached straight past everything I’d built and put his thumb on the bruise.

“Don’t,” I said. It came out wrong. It came out like please.

“There she is,” he murmured.

His hand closed around the back of my neck. Not hard. Just sure. And my whole body went quiet, the way a dog goes quiet when a stronger one stands over it, and the shame of that, the absolute betrayal of it, soaked me through. My thighs pressed together. There was an ache there now, blunt and insistent, that had no business existing in this room.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

“It’s cold.”

“It’s not cold.” His thumb stroked once up the side of my throat and I heard the sound I made, small, mortifying, like something let out of a cage. “You’re soaking through that pretty skirt right now and you’re so ashamed of it you could die. I can see it. You came here to be in charge of something and your body already gave up.”

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to tell him he was a monster, a criminal, that I was leaving. The words were all there. What came out instead was nothing, because he tightened his grip the smallest amount and my knees actually buckled, and he caught me against him like he’d known they would, like he’d timed it.

“There it is,” he said into my hair. “All that work you do, holding yourself up. You can put it down. I’ll hold it.”

No. The word slammed through me, clean and bright, the last flare of the woman who had driven over here. Not this. Not him. You do not get to do this to me, I am not a thing that comes apart because a dangerous man puts his hand on my neck and offers to carry me.

And underneath the no, traitor and quiet and undeniable, my hips tilted toward him on their own.

He felt it. Of course he felt it. He pulled back just far enough to look at my face, and whatever he saw there made his jaw tighten, the first crack in all that calm.

“Marco’s debt is gone,” he said. “Forgotten. He never existed. You understand me. You don’t have to think about him again, you don’t have to think about any of it, the firm, the rent, the whole heavy life you’ve been dragging behind you.” His hand slid up into my hair and closed, and tipped my head back so I had to look at him. “All of it goes to me. And in exchange you give me the one thing nobody’s ever let you give anybody.”

“What,” I breathed. I despised how much I wanted the answer. “What thing.”

“Everything.” He said it plainly. “You stop being the one in charge. You do what I say, you wear what I put on you, you eat when I feed you, you sleep when I tell you to sleep. You get small, Sera. As small as you’ve been dying to get. And I keep you.”

It should have sounded insane. It should have sounded like a threat, and it was one, and my heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth. But the picture his words built, the picture of laying every single thing down, of being told and held and kept, of not deciding one more thing for the rest of my life, opened up in me like a door I’d been leaning on for years without knowing there was a room behind it.

My eyes were wet. I let one tear go because I couldn’t stop it.

“I have a job,” I whispered. Last brick in the wall. “I have a name. I’m not a, I’m not, people respect me.”

“People use you.” His mouth brushed my forehead, almost tender, which was somehow worse than cruelty. “I’m the only one in your whole life who’s looked at you and seen what you actually need instead of what you can carry for them.”

He let go of my hair. Stepped back. Cold air rushed into the space where he’d been and I swayed toward it, toward him, before I caught myself, and the humiliation of that little lurch burned all the way down.

“Take off the blouse,” he said.

My hands were already at the top button. That was the thing that broke me, finally, completely. Not that he ordered it. That my fingers had started before my brain agreed, that the obedient animal in me had been waiting my whole life for someone with a low certain voice to finally, finally tell it what to do.

“I don’t even know you,” I said, working the second button, the third, hating myself, wet and trembling and doing it anyway.

“You will.” Luca lowered himself into the leather chair by the window, unhurried, a man with all the time in the world and a new possession to examine. He nodded at the floor in front of him. “Here. On your knees. Hands behind your back.”

The wall of glass behind him held the whole lit city, and somewhere down in it was my apartment and my office and the woman I’d been at nine o’clock this morning, and I was never going to be her again. I knew it the way you know you’ve already fallen before you hit the water.

I knelt.

The marble was cold through my skirt. He looked down at me with that terrible patience, and his hand came to rest on the top of my head, heavy, owning, and I shut my eyes and leaned into it like a plant turning to light.

“Good,” he said softly. “Now. Let’s see exactly how much of you I have to take apart.”

And he reached for the buckle of his belt.