“I meant what I said.” He closed his eyes and relaxed into the tub, the water glistening on his tanned skin. “You’ve been brought into the circle. Trust and loyalty are essential for this to work. They are the most important things to me.”

Suddenly, the hot tub seemed like a terrible idea. Here I was, in a small, enclosed space, with a total asshole. Forget all the good stuff he did. None of that erased the bad. “Says the guy who didn’t tell me what would happen when I signed that contract.”

His eyes flipped open. “I was never going to take your soul, Mia.”

“Then, why make a contract at all?” I fisted my hands, and the water slipped through my fingers.

“Lucifer is alerted every time one of us signs a contract. He doesn’t know the details of the deal, but he receives a rolling tally. If we go too long without a deal, he grows suspicious. We have a quota we have to hit.”

Narrowing my eyes, I folded my arms, hiding my lacy bra from view. “And so that’s all I am? A quota.”

“It was never supposed to mean anything more than that,” he said quietly. “But you are impossibly complicated, Mia. And you’ve made things far more difficult than they needed to be.”

“Gee, thanks,” I replied dryly. “I guess you thought I’d be a good little pet human and fall in line just like everyone else.”

“If it weren’t for Serena, you never would have known. You would have walked away from this happy and content. Soul intact.”

I fell silent at that. Obviously, he was wrong. The angels would have still approached me, telling me everything. But if I hadn’t known Serena all my life, I probably would have run. I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to be totally unaware of supernaturals, and then find out you’d signed a deal with a demon.

Az was right. Most humans would scream and run in the opposite direction.

“There is one thing I like about you, Mia,” he finally said as he plucked a gin and tonic from the table beside the hot tub. He took a long, slow sip, meeting my eyes. Thankfully, the steaming water blanketed the flush in my cheeks.

“Oh, just the one thing?” I asked sarcastically.

He ignored me. “You don’t try to obscure your emotions. You wear guilt, but it isn’t a heavy anchor dragging you into the ground. Whatever you feel guilty about, it’s a small thing. It’s not for something as terrible as manslaughter.”

I stiffened and slammed against the back of the hot tub. Water sloshed around me as my heart hammered my ribs. “What are you talking about?”

“Mia,” he said as his piercing eyes latched onto mine. “You will never move forward as long as you pretend your past doesn’t exist.”