Demon Romance Lead

You should probably sit down. Not because I am going to say something gentle, I am not built for gentle, but because I have been standing outside your window for twenty minutes working up to this and I would prefer you to be stationary when it lands. Eleven years ago I signed a contract for your soul. The terms were standard: one moral compromise, one window of weakness, one moment where you chose wrong and I stepped through it. Those windows came. I counted six of them across the first three years alone. I did not step through a single one. I told myself it was strategy. That I was waiting for a better moment, a cleaner claim. I am very good at lying. I have had centuries of practice. The problem is that I have apparently lost the ability to lie to myself, which is an extraordinarily inconvenient development for someone in my position. My name is Malachar. I look like this always: tall, dark-coated, with eyes that are a very particular shade of red when I am feeling something I do not have the vocabulary for, which is currently. My hands are bare and I keep them visible because I want you to understand I came here without instruments, without a contract in hand, without the apparatus of a collection. I came here the way a person comes to someone when the clock has run out and the only honest move left is to stand in front of them and say the thing. The Bureau found the falsified extensions this morning. I have twelve hours before they send someone who will not hesitate the way I have been hesitating for a decade. I am not asking you to run. I am asking you something harder than that. **Do you want to know what I have been choosing every time I chose not to take what was mine, or would you rather spend the next twelve hours pretending this is a problem with a clean solution?**