“Yeah, did we win?” Beezle asked. “I feel like we won. She was not a happy camper, Boss!”

I rubbed at the pain in my forehead. The back of my hand grazed one of my horns, and I hissed. So sensitive, the sensation like a live wire shooting straight to my cock. I strode to the corner where there was a vent that emitted steam from the lava lake below. My own personal sauna. That would relax this tension in my muscles.

It did not.

With a growl, I stepped out, pacing across my living chamber, my body too full of nervous energy to remain still. I feared that nothing was going to relax me this night. Not after that encounter with Jemma Bliss.

Not after that kiss.

“Uh … Boss?” Beezle stepped in front of my pacing.

“What?”

“Did we beat Jemma Bliss?”

“I conceded victory to her today,” I grated, blowing out a long breath.

“But …” Bub gasped.

“But Boss! She was crying!” Beezle added, his red eyes aghast.

I shook my head, trying to dislodge the memory of Jemma Bliss’s tear-streaked face. I found that I could not. It had one happy side effect—it deflated my arousal almost completely. Instead, a creeping, swirling, unwell sensation churned in my stomach.

Making Jemma Bliss cry had not been fun. Even when the Soul Token in my pocket had started vibrating from the amount of unhappiness it was absorbing, I had taken no joy in her tears.

“She was, indeed, crying,” I agreed. I cleared the rasp out of my throat. “However, today’s first proper experiment has yielded an interesting conundrum. If the humans were to fail in their first task against me, how are we to continue to torture them? We must make their first three tasks achievable—utterly wretched, but achievable … and then we must make the last one, the one where they have built up a real hope of success, the one that breaks them.”

My stomach cramped as I said the words. Beezle and Bub nodded sagely, as if what I was saying made perfect sense.

And it did … it was exactly the tweak my FiendPay scheme needed to really capitalize on the humans’ misery.

So why did it make me feel this awful, crippling sense of … wrongness?

“Well, well, well,” a simpering voice cooed from the doorway to my bedchamber. “I was starting to worry you’d never show up, Junior.”

I stiffened, turning slowly. But I knew exactly who I was going to find … and in what state I would find her.

“Who gave you permission to enter my rooms, Jezebel?”

The buxom demoness smirked at me, her claws trailing over her ample rose-red cleavage. My eyes followed the movement as if on autopilot. But nothing stirred inside my breeches.