The Broker

I wanted to smack the pen out of her hand, shake her frail shoulders and say, “Are you out of your damn mind? Don’t sign that!”

But I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that.

It was my job to get that signature. It was my job to win her trust, to convince her I could make her wildest dreams come true. And I was good at my job. Great at my job.

For the first time, I wished I wasn’t.

The pen shook in her slender fingers, a bead of crimson ink dripping from its tip. That pen had damned so many souls to an eternity of darkness, an eternity of pain, and now it was in the hand of the woman I loved.

My eyes slid to the scabbed pieces of skin around her nails. Her thumbnail was stained with blood from the tiny wound she’d been nervously picking all day. A nasty habit that developed after meeting me.

“Are you sure I should do this?” Her voice trembled as she looked up at me with those soft hazel eyes. Eyes that turned a shade greener when she laughed, and a shade browner when she cried. Eyes that didn’t belong in Hell.

No, you shouldn’t do this. Get up now and leave. If you see me on the street, turn and run the other direction. If I show up at your apartment, slam the door in my face.

That’s what I wished I could say.

But instead, I raised my brows with faux nonchalance and said, “I’ve given you the spiel a hundred times. You want me to do it again?”

Her lips quivered into a small smile. If I’d still had a beating heart, that smile would’ve shattered it.

“Just one more time?”

“Okay. One more.”

***

Audrey Marie Rhodes was unlucky. She was talented, beautiful, and kind, which meant the devil wanted her. And he sent me to get her.

When I first received the assignment, I was irritated. Another young, aspiring starlet? Boring. No offense to young, aspiring starlets, but they’re easy targets. My track record was the envy of all the devil’s brokers, and I’d leveled up to more exhilarating targets: world leaders, celebrities who already had all the fame and money they could want, and pastors at mega-churches, to name a few. This assignment was beneath me.

But then I met the young, aspiring starlet, and I realized it wasn’t going to be an easy assignment at all. Not even close. It would be the hardest of my career.

“How long have you been here?” she asked me, pulling the wool scarf tighter around her neck.

I pretended like I’d just noticed her, like I didn’t know who she was or that she’d taken the Q train from Brooklyn to get here. Like I wasn’t standing in below-freezing temperatures at seven in the morning because of her, and her alone.

“Oh, uh”—I glanced at my watch—“about ten minutes.”

She burrowed her hands into her pockets. “What do you think our chances are?”

“Well, there are eight people ahead of us—nine in front of you, if you count me. So, I’d say about fifty-fifty, at this point.”

She exhaled, and her breath crystalized in the air between us. “I really shouldn’t have stopped fucking that guy in the ensemble. It would’ve been easier to get tickets that way.”

That was the moment I knew I was in trouble. It was the glimmer in her eyes, the single dimple on her left cheek, the slight twitch of her jaw whenever she cursed, as if her body was exorcising the filthy word. The woman in front of me—a 23-year-old theater graduate with lofty dreams of starring on Broadway—suddenly became the one target I wanted to lose. The one assignment I wanted to fail.

Because my soul, damned as it was, gravitated toward hers. And hers gravitated toward mine—I could sense it in the way she stepped closer to me, in the way her heart fluttered a second faster than usual when I spoke.

“You should give him a call. I bet he’d still be open to it,” I said with a grin, hoping she found me as attractive as I found her. Women normally did. The shell of my 30-year-old body had been frozen in time by underworld magic, and even enhanced with a few upgrades: broader shoulders, an extra two inches of height, and a wider, more dazzling smile. Attractive, but not so attractive that it was intimidating. In my line of work, I needed to appear both aspirational and approachable.

She waved a gloveless hand in the air. Her fingers were white as ice. “I was kidding,” she said. “Kind of.”

For the next two hours, we talked outside that run-down theater on West 44th Street, and I fell deeper and deeper under her spell. When it was my turn to step up to the box office, I bought the best pair of tickets available—orchestra, obstructed views—then handed her the extra.

The moment she walked into the theater that night in a long-sleeved, backless black dress and combat boots, I realized—with dread—that I was going to fall in love with her.

It was a cardinal rule of the job—you could fuck your assignments, sure, but fall in love with them? Never. If I acted on it, did anything that might betray I still had some morsel of human feelings, I’d lose my job, which meant losing my privilege of escaping Hell to spend half my days up here, on Earth, working. I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t be stuck down there forever.

“So,” she started, as she lingered outside her apartment later that night, “are you going to kiss me or not?”

Neither of us had paid much attention to the show. I had to focus all of my efforts on resisting the pulsating electricity of her soul, which kept reaching out, tempting me to touch her hand.

I glanced at her lips—chapped from the winter wind, but full and bright red against her porcelain skin. Damn, I wanted to kiss them. More than I’d wanted anything in my life, and afterlife.

But doing so would be a breach of my contract.

“I would,” I began, forcing my gaze away from her mouth, “but I think we should just be friends.”

Hurt flashed through her eyes, but she replaced it quickly with a look of indifference. She was an extraordinary actor. She’d be a success regardless of whether or not she signed with me. But if she did sign with me, I’d make her huge.

“I get it,” she said. “Cool.” Then, without so much as a goodbye, she turned and walked into her apartment.

I had to stage our next run-in at the obnoxiously trendy bar where she worked. After several drinks and a shameless amount of friendly flirting, I’d won her over again.

“I have this feeling,” she said, wobbling drunkenly on the corner of 12th and Avenue A, “that we were meant to meet. Like fate.”

I wanted to tell her there was no such thing as fate, just two sides playing an excruciatingly long, intricate game of chess with human souls. She was a pawn, and I was going to sacrifice her to win.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

By the end of the night, I’d convinced her to be friends. She easily bought my excuse of why our relationship could go no further than that: I lost my wife to a terrible car accident a year prior, and I wasn’t emotionally ready for anything romantic, nor did I know if I ever would be again.

“I could really use a good friend, though.”

She blinked up at me with watery eyes, overwhelmed by my fake sob story, too empathetic for her own damn good. “Okay,” she said. “I think I could do the friend thing. Just for you.” Then she threw her arms around me, and it took every ounce of my steel willpower to walk away from her that night.

For the next several years, I tortured her. I wasn’t proud of it, honest. I hated it. But we all have to do things we hate sometimes. I rigged auditions so she wouldn’t land roles, even though she was twice as talented as the second-best choices; I flexed my Devil-given powers of persuasion to get her fired from three jobs and evicted from two apartments; and I even introduced her to the pathetic man-child I knew would be her downfall.

Through it all, I was always a phone call away. In a heartbeat, I’d be there for her, comforting her, letting her cry on my shoulder, trying to convince myself over and over again that this was just a job. She was just another soul in an endless black sea of souls.

“I didn’t think my life would end up this shit,” she murmured through tears one night, as I pulled her into my chest. She and her boyfriend—piece of shit; I’d definitely be seeing him in Hell at some point—had just gotten into another one of their knock-down, drag-out fights. The shards of a shattered wineglass sparkled on the kitchen floor.

“Hey, it’s not shit,” I said in my most comforting voice. “You’re just going through some tough times.” That I created.

But it wasn’t until she got pregnant that I knew I had her. I knew she’d sign with me. And I loathed myself for it.

“I can’t have this baby,” she cried in my car, after I picked her up from a doctor’s appointment. The boyfriend was long gone, spooked by the news like the spineless idiot I always knew he was. “I’m twenty thousand dollars in debt, I can’t hold a job for longer than six months, and my career is going nowhere. I can’t bring a child into my clusterfuck of a life.”

“Do you want the baby?” I asked gently.

She hesitated for a moment before giving a slow, teary nod. Bingo. I had her.

“Then let me help you.”

***

“So I sign here, and all my problems really just disappear? It’s that simple?” Her hazel eyes flickered from me to the little black book splayed open in front of her. I’d told her not to flip through its previous pages. She didn’t need to see the names of the souls I’d tethered to Hell before her.

“Not just that,” I said. “Your problems disappear and you get everything you could ever wish for in this life.”

“You promise?”

It was my last chance. I could tell her to leave. I could still save her.

“I promise,” I said.

She nodded, and with a rattling sigh, moved the pen across the paper, her signature now stamped in crimson ink in the devil’s little black book forever. I wanted to rip my own dead heart out of my chest.

“So that’s it?” she asked, leaning warily away from the book. “I don’t feel any different.”

“No? Why don’t you check your purse?” I gave her a mischievous wink.

She kept her eyes on me as she dug through her bag. I knew she found it when her heart stopped for a moment, her eyes widening. Then she pulled out a neatly-folded wad of one-hundred-dollar bills.

She gaped at me. “How much is this?”

“Twenty thousand. And that’s just the start.”

A tear slipped down her cheek. She brought a hand to her swollen belly.

“So, what now?” she asked.

“You go live the life of your dreams.”

And it would be the life of her dreams. I’d make sure of that. She was going to have the best damn life she could imagine, and I’d stay far, far away. I wasn’t going to ruin her time on Earth any more than I already had.

I’d get to see her forever in Hell, anyway.