He cuts her apart. He butterflies her, taking care only to slice along the dotted lines, undoing what he’d done before, the topography of her flesh unraveled into bloodless petals until she lays there, exposed, lung and liver bare as the descent of her clavicles.

It hurts. That is part of the price.

If he were anyone else, he’d tell her the truth of her denuding: that she is exquisite like this, raw as a trust newly broken. But he does not. Most nights, he is perfunctory, lingering only as long as necessary to unspool what he requires. Some evenings, he laminates his butchery with precious metals, transforms her into a study of kintsugi.

But today, he does neither.

“Why?”

It is the first time he has ever asked her why, and he thinks of when they first met, the halogen cold on her skin and her eyes immense. She looks up, past the firmament of her ribs, down past the trellises of her hips, down to where the devil sits chastely between her thighs.

“Because it’s hard.”

The devil nods. No one makes a deal for something simple, something sweet as a kiss, as summer, as that first dance of fingers brushing against one another.

“I loved him,” she says.

“Love him,” she corrects, sighing, as the devil unspools a filament of tissue from her naked heart. He winds it around a finger, while she counts the ceiling tiles, enumerating the mundane until she finds balance in their banality, stretches and tugs until the flesh goes pop. “Utterly. But you knew that.”

The devil nods again.

“And it hurts to love something that should not love you back. To love and have no place to put it. To love and to know you don’t want compensation, but in fact, that love’s indifference.”

“Then, why?”

“Because love isn’t fair.” Her heart does not, to the devil’s surprise, bang against her bones. Instead, it merely sits, a wound spread wide. “When we love, we hope that the other reciprocates with more because it’d be a shame to be the one more invested. But affection isn’t competition and even if it was, you can’t win every wager you make.”

The devil says nothing. He threads her muscles with string he’d wefted from the hairs of a hanged man. The strands are infinitesimal enough to be forgiven as striations of her dermis. In response, she endures, half-breaths and half-lidded eyes.

“What do you want of this?”