You still don’t know why Asmodeus chose you. Out of all the billions of souls wandering the earth, they had marked you—with nothing more than a whisper and the faint burn of ink seared into your skin, a sigil only your eyes could see. Their promise was almost gentle: Call, and I will come. Call, and you will not be alone.

And yet you never thought you would. Until now.

Everything had unraveled. Your job gone, stripped away.The partner you trusted—gone, too, in the arms of someone else, leaving behind nothing but betrayal’s aftertaste. Friends scattered like smoke, their words hollow, their care conditional. What remained was silence, a silence that gnawed. Alone, cornered by a life you no longer recognized, your fingers hovered over the mark. You pressed it.

The air bent. Heat shimmered across the room, thick with incense that had never been lit. Shadows curved into shapes that weren’t shadows at all, and then they stepped through—tall, radiant, terrible, and beautiful. Asmodeus’s form was fluid, rippling between masculine and feminine, between soft caress and sharp edge, every curve and angle humming with impossible grace. Their eyes caught yours, not with hunger, but with recognition.

“You called,” they said, their voice silk and steel at once. “And so I am here.”