Page 45 of Bargain with the Demon King
"Bad bargains destroy you. Complicated ones transform you." His eyes hold mine, gold burning through black. "Which was yours?"
"Still deciding."
"Good." He releases me, but his heat lingers. "Indecision means you're still fighting."
I return to my chamber wearing a demon flower, carrying Senna's warmth on my palm. The ceiling still has seventeen cracks. Everything exactly as I left it.
But something shifted. Fragile. Dangerous.
I'm still broken. Still empty. Still counting everything except the days since Chad shattered me. But sixty families sleep peacefully in demon lands tonight. Senna chose a demon over her own kind and seems content.
That's not hope. Hope is a liar I'm done fucking.
Chapter 16
Adraya
"Boundary surveys," he begins, the words overly formal, "require specific elevation perspectives." He won't quite meet my eyes, focusing instead on a point just over my shoulder. "The eastern ridge provides optimal viewing angles."
"That's the worst lie you've told yet." I don't move from the window where I've been counting shadow patterns for the last hour. Forty-seven distinct gradations between light and dark in demon twilight. "Even Chad came up with better excuses, and he once claimed he needed to inspect his mother's chickens at midnight."
"Would you prefer honesty?"
"I'd prefer to stop existing, but we're both disappointed today."
He crosses the room, and I track his reflection in the glass—all controlled violence and careful distance. Since the human village, he's maintained exactly three feet between us unless physically moving me. I've measured.
"You're dissolving." Direct. No dancing. "I'm attempting to prevent it."
"Noble. Pointless. But noble." I turn because resistance requires energy I'm hoarding for breathing. "Fine. Show me these boundaries that definitely need surveying."
The path he chooses winds higher than usual, away from the fortress and its soul-stone pulse. My legs protest—too many days of stillness—but moving beats counting wall cracks. The twilight necklace sits against my collarbone, neither warm nor cold, just present. Like me.
"Nine hundred and twelve." I announce after twenty minutes of climbing.
"What?"
"Steps. Since we left. Your stride length is remarkably consistent. Thirty-one inches exactly. Do demons practice walking in formation, or is precision just part of the package?"
"Part of the package." He glances back, and something flickers in those black-gold eyes. "Though I appreciate you've found a new counting project."
"Counting keeps the brain occupied. Occupied brains don't remember things like—" I stop. "Never mind."
We crest the hill, and my automatic counting stutters. The lake spreads below, vast and impossible, its surface scattered with drifting lights. Not reflection—actual light moving beneath the water, slow spirals of trapped soul-essence that escaped their stones somehow.
"That shouldn't exist."
"Most beautiful things shouldn't." He indicates a blanket spread near the shore, laden with food. "Sit. Eat. Pretend you taste it."
"I taste everything. It all tastes like disappointment now, but I taste it."
I sit because standing suddenly seems complicated. The food is elaborate—things that glow, things that steam without heat, things that smell of home if home was designed by demons. I eat mechanically, but for the first time in days, my throat doesn't reject swallowing.
"The lights in the water," I say between bites of something that might be bread. "Escaped souls?"
"Fragments. Sometimes when a stone breaks wrong, pieces escape. They're drawn to water."
"Why?"
