Someone once told Selena Beer that the devil only worked on Sundays. She did not expect him to pick up her bag.
Seraph City should not have been this quiet.
Even in the old district, the tram lines usually screamed like metal birds and the billboards whispered loans and blessings in soft, digital voices. The city liked to hum in your ear while it stole from your pockets. But on that Sunday evening, when the strap of Selena's backpack finally gave up on her life choices and snapped, everything around her seemed to inhale and hold.
Coins burst across the wet pavement, a silver spray in the yellow streetlights. Her notebooks fanned out like broken wings, paper soaking up the thin drizzle that never really left the riverfront. She dropped to her knees with a hissed curse, already running the numbers in her head: rent, overdue; utilities, hanging by a thread; her mother's next hospital bill, looming over all of it like a judge.
A hand—steady, gloved, and completely out of place in this part of town—picked up the first fallen bill before she could.
The shoes attached to it were wrong for the neighborhood.
Polished black leather, not a scuff in sight. Above them, a charcoal suit that fit too cleanly to be off-the-rack, the fabric catching the streetlight in subtle shifts. Selena followed the line of the tie, a neat, precise red that looked like it belonged on a warning label, and then finally his face.
He was attractive in the way advertisements promised men could be if they sold their souls for skincare and power.
Sharp jaw, pale gray eyes too calm for a Sunday night in Old Seraph, dark hair smoothed back like nothing in this city ever surprised him. He knelt in front of her as if the pavement were not wet and grimy, gathering her scattered notes and damp coins with the practiced, unhurried motions of someone who had never rushed for anything in his life.
"Careful," he said, voice low and clean, the kind that could slip easily into a boardroom or a confession booth. "The devil is out tonight."
Selena's fingers tightened on the strap of her bag.
Criminology professors loved to say that her problem was simple: she expected criminals to look like criminals. She trusted obvious monsters too much. People in suits, she told herself, committed white-collar crimes, the kind you only saw in case studies and ruined pension funds—never in alleys that smelled like fried oil and desperation.
"I can handle my own bag," she answered, sharper than she intended. The words came out clipped, defensive. Honesty did that to her; it made her rude when she was scared.
He smiled. It was small, polite, perfectly controlled.
"Of course you can, Miss Beer."
Her name landed heavier than it should have. The lanyard with her university ID was twisted under her hair, facing the wrong way. There was no way he'd read it, not from that angle, not in this light. Selena's pulse started counting on its own—one, two, three, four, five—her usual rhythm when the world tilted wrong.
"How do you know my name?" she asked. He didn't even pretend not to understand the question.
"I make it my business to know people." He rose in one smooth motion, not a crease out of place. "And Seraph City is very small, when you stand high enough."
The words scraped against something she kept carefully buried.
News segments. Glass towers. Devereux Holdings buying failing hospitals and collapsing schools, smiling for cameras with sick children in their arms. Rumors whispered between café tables and hospital corridors—that if you signed one of their contracts, you either rose with them or disappeared entirely. That the city's real devil wore a suit cut sharper than any knife.
"Then maybe," Selena said, stuffing loose bills and crumpled notes back into her bag, "you should mind your own business."His smile did not falter. It changed.
A fraction sharper, like he had been waiting for her to say exactly that. He stepped closer—not enough to be a threat, not enough for anyone passing by to complain, just enough that she could smell expensive cologne under the rain.
"On the contrary," he murmured. "My business is why you'll get home safely tonight."
Before she could move, he slipped something into the front pocket of her hoodie with a flick of his fingers.
The touch was brief, almost absentminded, as if he were straightening her collar instead of planting something on her. A flash of silver, the whisper of thick card against fabric, and then his hand was back at his side.
"If the devil troubles you," he added, stepping back, "call that number. I specialize in…fair deals."
He left on that, because of course he did.
Just turned and walked into the thin rain, red tie a clean line through the crowd, shoes silent on the pavement. No dramatic glance over his shoulder. No "see you soon." The city swallowed him between a dark pharmacy and a payday-loan office plastered with promises of instant salvation.
Selena stared after him until her eyes started to sting.
She told herself it was from the wind, not from the way the conversation had lodged under her skin. Men in suits said strange, theatrical things downtown all the time. It was basically a side effect of owning a tie.
Still, her fingers dug into the pocket of her hoodie as she walked to the bus stop.
She could feel the edge of the card pressing against her knuckles, cool and heavy, like proof that the encounter hadn't been some stress-induced hallucination. She did not take it out. She refused to give him that satisfaction, even in her own head.
Her apartment greeted her with flickering fluorescent light and the faint smell of instant noodles.
The sink dripped in slow, uneven taps; the old fan above the kitchenette groaned every few seconds like it was protesting its continued existence. It was small, cramped, and one missed payment away from vanished—but it had a lock that worked and a window that faced the hospital.
"Home," she said, because sometimes you had to say it out loud to make it feel true.
First thing: rent.
She dropped her bag on the table, shrugged off her hoodie, and pulled out the worn envelope she had checked three separate times at work. Inside: exactly enough. Her landlord did not believe in bank transfers, only in counting notes one by one while making eye contact.
She opened the envelope.
It was empty.
For a second her brain refused the information.
Then she checked again, fingers tracing the corners, shaking it over the table. Nothing. The extra emergency money she'd hidden in the inner pocket—folded into a tight square, stitched into the lining with her own clumsy hands—should have been her last defense.
The pocket was sliced open.
Neat cut, almost surgical. The threads she'd tied herself curled out like a tiny, quiet wound. Her notes were still there. Her pens. The café receipts. The bus pass for tomorrow's hospital visit, right where she had left it.
Everything untouched.
Everything except the money.
Selena's chest went tight, breath folding in on itself.
She replayed the evening in her head: the streets, the bus, the walk. The moment her bag hit the ground. The moment a stranger in a flawless suit knelt in front of her, hands in all her things, smile too calm for this city.
Slowly, she reached for the front pocket of her hoodie.The card looked even more out of place on her kitchen table than the man had in Old Seraph.
Thick silver stock, edges clean and cold under her fingertips. The logo at the top was simple but unmistakable: a stylized pair of wings made of intersecting lines, the emblem that sat on the top of the tallest tower in Seraph City.
DEVEREUX HOLDINGS
Beneath it, in crisp black letters: Lucian Devereux, Executive Director.
Of course.
Because when your rent money vanished and your future tilted toward disaster, why wouldn't the city's brightest devil leave his calling card like a consolation prize?
There was writing on the back.
Not printed—ink, neat and controlled, every letter perfectly spaced.
For when you get tired of believing the devil has horns.
Selena stared at the sentence until the letters blurred.
Her criminology professor's voice nagged at the back of her mind, reminding her that real predators did not lurk in shadows—they signed contracts, shook hands, and smiled for cameras. Her mother's latest medical report sat on the counter, paper edges curling, numbers circled in red.
Outside, the distant siren of an ambulance threaded through the city's noise.
Sunday evening in Seraph City, and somewhere out there a man in a charcoal suit walked through the rain, handing out deals to people who could not afford to say no.
Selena closed her fingers around the silver card, feeling its weight dig into her palm.
"The devil is out tonight," he had said.
Maybe, she thought, staring at the city lights through the thin curtain, he'd already gone home.