All Chapters of The Devil’s Boy: Chapter 1 - Chapter 4

LucaI stood there for five minutes pretending to choose between two brands I couldn’t afford. They were both cardboard and regret in a box, but one was cheaper by twenty-nine cents, and that twenty-nine cents meant I could get two eggs instead of one. My left boot had a rip along the side. I’d stepped in a puddle an hour ago, and now my sock squelched with every motion. I didn’t want to move too fast. It made the wet slap louder.I had five dollars and sixteen cents. A loaf of bread. One onion. Three packs of ramen because they were ten for a dollar, and I told myself it was “stocking up,” like some kind of prepper. Like I wasn’t just broke and starving and trying to make it look like a choice.When I reached the front counter, the clerk didn’t even look up. Just scanned the barcode off the limp bread like he’d seen a hundred other losers walk through that door tonight. Which, to be fair, he probably had.The air outside smelled like rot and damp pavement. I held the little brown ba

Sold.That was it. That one word.No applause. No celebration. Just a finality that hit harder than the lights on my face.“Sold to… Mr. Smiley Face.”The words rang in my earpiece like a bullet casing hitting concrete. I stood there, blinking through the light, swallowing past the acid burning in the back of my throat.The curtain shifted behind me.A hand wrapped around my wrist—cool, elegant, unhurried—and I was pulled back behind the veil like a prop whose scene was over.My feet stumbled. I was weightless.Then I was spun gently, and I came face to face with her.The Fox.Her mask was off now, hanging from her fingers by a thin silver ribbon. And god—she was even more devastating without it. That black hair like a waterfall, sleek and shining. Black eyes under heavy lids, lashes thick, lazy, ringed with dark eyebags that made her look like she hadn’t slept in centuries. A beauty mark sat right above the left curve of her lip like a painted-on sin.She looked… mythic.I swallowed,