Sin and seduction

Aurelia hated Friday nights. Not because she disliked people — she loved them, actually, the way you love something you can never fully have. She loved watching them laugh, argue, fall in and out of love across sticky bar tables. What she hated was the noise inside her own head. The thoughts that weren't hers, pressing in from every direction the second she walked through a crowded door. He's not going to call her back. God, I hope nobody notices I'm crying. If she orders one more drink I'm cutting her off. It never stopped. It never had, not since she was seven years old and realized other people couldn't hear what she heard. She'd learned to build walls, over the years — thin ones, but enough to get through a shift without a headache splitting her skull in two. Tonight the walls weren't holding. "You're doing the face again," said Marnie, sliding a tray of empty glasses across the bar toward her. "What face?" "The one where you look like you're listening to a fight happening behind my head." Aurelia forced a smile and grabbed the tray. "Just tired." She wasn't tired. She was twenty-three years old, orphaned since she was a baby, working a bar in a city that never seemed to notice her, and she was so, so tired of being the only person in every room who couldn't just not know things. That was when he walked in. She felt it before she saw him — a strange, sudden quiet, like the volume had been turned down on the whole bar. She looked up, glass still in hand, and forgot how to breathe. He was tall in a way that made the doorway look smaller, wearing a black coat that fit him like it had been poured onto him rather than sewn. His hair was dark, pushed back like he hadn't thought about it, though she got the sense he thought about everything. His jaw was sharp enough to cut something. And his eyes — when they landed on her, and they did, immediately, like he'd known exactly where to look — were a deep, unsettling gold. Nobody in this bar had eyes like that. He crossed the room slow, unhurried, like the world would simply wait for him. Which, she noticed, it seemed to. Conversations paused. Heads turned and then quickly looked away, as if some instinct warned them not to stare too long. He sat down directly across from her, at the bar, and the quiet in her head — the quiet that had started the second he walked in — didn't break. "You're not thinking anything," she blurted, and immediately wanted to disappear into the floor. Something flickered across his face. Surprise, maybe. Or interest. "Excuse me?" "Nothing. Sorry. What can I get you?" Her face was hot. She never said things like that out loud. She'd trained herself for years not to. "Whiskey," he said. "Neat." She poured it with hands that were, embarrassingly, not quite steady, and set it in front of him. He didn't touch it. He was watching her the way you'd watch something rare — carefully, like he didn't want to startle it into running. "Why were you doing that?" he asked. "Doing what?" "Looking at me like you were listening for something. And didn't find it." Her stomach dropped. She'd been caught doing this her whole life — staring too hard, going quiet mid-conversation, answering questions people hadn't asked out loud. Usually people laughed it off, or got uncomfortable, or asked if she was okay. He didn't do any of that. He looked delighted. "I don't know what you mean," she lied. "I think you do." He finally picked up the whiskey, turned the glass once in his hand, but still didn't drink. "What's your name?" "Aurelia." She hadn't meant to answer so fast. There was something about his voice that made her want to keep talking, keep answering, keep looking at him. "Aurelia," he repeated, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth. "I'm Damien." "Well, Damien." She made herself busy wiping down the bar, needing something to do with her hands. "You're not from around here." "What makes you say that?" Because everyone else in this room has a voice in their head I can hear, and you're a locked door. She didn't say that. "Lucky guess." He smiled, and it did something unfair to her chest — a slow, private smile, like she'd said something only the two of them understood. "You're an interesting person, Aurelia." "You don't know me." "No," he agreed, and there was something almost hungry in the way he said it, though not in a way that frightened her. It felt more like recognition. Like he'd been looking for something for a long time and had just, against every expectation, found it. "Not yet." She should have laughed that off. Should have moved down the bar, gone to check on Marnie, put distance between herself and a stranger with unsettling gold eyes and a voice like a low fire. Instead she stayed exactly where she was, elbows on the counter, close enough to catch the smell of him — something like rain on warm stone, something like a storm that hadn't broken yet. "Are you going to drink that?" she asked, nodding at the whiskey. "Eventually." His gaze didn't move off her face. "I'm in no hurry." Outside, the city carried on the way it always did — cars, laughter, someone's phone ringing three tables over. Inside her own head, for the first time in as long as she could remember, there was nothing but silence. And somehow, that silence felt louder than anything she'd ever heard. Damien had not planned to come here tonight. He'd meant to be gone within the hour — one drink, unnoticed, back across the divide between worlds before anyone thought to ask where the Devil's son had wandered off to. Demons visited the human world often enough that no one questioned it. A little indulgence, a little noise, nothing that mattered. Then he'd walked through the door and felt something he hadn't felt in three hundred years. Silence. He could hear everyone in this building. That was simply what he was — every mind in the room was open to him the moment he chose to look, thoughts sliding past like pages turning. It was so constant he barely noticed it anymore, the way a person stops noticing the sound of their own heartbeat. Except her. He'd reached for her mind out of habit, the way he'd reach for anyone's, and found — nothing. A wall. Smooth, complete, absolute. He had never, in three centuries, met a single soul he could not read. He told himself it was curiosity. That was the polite word for it. But standing here, watching her worry a rag over a bar top she'd already cleaned twice, watching the color rise in her cheeks when she caught him staring, he suspected curiosity was not going to be enough of a word for very long. She was human. That much was obvious — no mark of magic on her, no flicker of anything beneath her skin that would mark her as witch or something stranger. Just human, ordinary, breakable. And yet he could not stop looking at her. Careful, he told himself, in the voice he usually reserved for warning his younger siblings. You know exactly what this would cost. He knew the law. Every demon knew the law. A human was beneath consideration — a weaker vessel, incapable of carrying anything worth carrying, a passing amusement and nothing more. His father had made that law himself, centuries ago, and enforced it without mercy. None of that seemed to matter, sitting here, close enough to see the small furrow of confusion still creasing her brow. "You're still staring," she said. "I am," he agreed, and didn't stop. He picked up the whiskey at last and drank, though he barely tasted it. Whatever this was — whatever had walked into this bar wearing an ordinary though extremely beautiful woman's face — he was not leaving until he understood it. He had a feeling that understanding it was going to take a very long time. And for once, for the first time in three hundred years, Damien found he didn't mind the idea of taking his time at all.