I, Rory Patterson, was in dire need of a paycheck.
So when I landed a position as a personal assistant for the CEO at the exclusive Inferno Associates, I ignored the oddities. The mysterious clients. The impossible requests. The fact that my enigmatic boss, Sebastian Morrow, speaks dead languages and schedules meetings at midnight.
Of course, denial only works until you see your boss literally collect a man's soul during a late-night meeting. After that, pretending everything is normal is off the table.
Turns out, my boss is a demon. Not metaphorically, as in my-boss-is-the-worst way, but rather an actual horns-and-contracts demon.
The firm? It brokers deals between mortals, supernatural types, and, yes, actual Hell. And that NDA I signed on my first day? Magically binding. As in, I physically cannot tell anyone what I do, even if I wanted to. (Which, trust me, I did.)
And not every contract is about souls, either. Sometimes it's favors, sometimes it's bizarre errands, and sometimes it's debts that need collecting. Guess who gets to play supernatural phone tag when someone's overdue? That's right, yours truly.
I could quit. Walk away. Pretend none of this is real and go back to eating cereal for dinner.
But the pay is ridiculous.
The work? Never boring.
Now I'm navigating supernatural office politics, morally gray contracts, and her growing conviction that maybe, just maybe, there is a place for me after all. Against my better judgment, I'm starting to realize that in a place built to make deals with darkness, someone has to look out for the people who get steamrolled in the process.
The world had gone to hell long ago, taken over by the vampire race. In order to keep some sort of peace in our land, the Vampire Lords made a consecutive agreement. The rich and powerful humans could survive just as they had been, untouched by the vampires save for the occasional blood collections, or so they thought
In reality, we were all under their control. Castles spread out throughout our land, one landing in each city. Each castle varied in the number of vampires residing there, but all of them carried a Lord. The Lords were the ones in charge in every city, whether we liked it or not. The vampires often roam through the city, making sure that everyone was in order and no one stepped out of line. If you stepped out of line, you died, end of story.
Even if the rich were still under their control, their lives were still better than the poor.
The poorest lives held a much worse fate.
The men were to be put to work as slaves, whether that meant serving a specific vampire, or just building their castles, they were slaves. The women were to be pets.
Pets were the lowest rank you could have. They were forced into cages that were too small to stand in with collars around their necks. They spent their lives in pet shops, just waiting for the dreadful day that they'll be bought. They were treated like animals, trained into what their master wanted, and punished if they misbehaved. Those who were lucky enough to live through that, we're to be slaughtered for their blood at age twenty-five in an act to make sure that our population would stay steady.
I was born into this world. Born into this world full of blood-sucking monsters. Except, I was one of the lucky ones.
Was.
It all ended for me when I was 12, when I was taken away from the last bit of hope and family that I had left. Ever since then, I've lived in a cage, just rotting away, waiting, dreading for the day that some monster would make me his.
This is my life. I am a pet.
~~~
Cover by: @mshacake