Chapter 239 Nude.

Chapter 239: 239 Nude.

"Come in, Milesy!" sang the bubbly, impossibly cheerful voice on the other side.

I pushed the heavy oak door open, but immediately froze one step over the threshold.

I knew the exact square footage of the guest suite Lilith had claimed. I had toured the chalet a dozen times before buying it. But the scale of the interior completely threw off my depth perception.

The room was massively, impossibly bigger than I remembered. It had been hollowed out and warped by demonic architecture, transformed into a bizarre cross between a high-end fashion runway and a luxury penthouse.

Heavy drafting tables were propped up across the hardwood floor, covered in scattered sketches for new, increasingly dangerous-looking villain costumes.

Racks of velvet, leather, and Kevlar lined the walls. But the undisputed centerpiece of the room was a massive, circular canopy bed that seemed to pull the eye like a gravitational anomaly.

Lilith was currently sprawled out across the silk sheets, sketching on a notepad. She looked like she had just woken up, and she was also completely, unapologetically nude.

Her dark, bouncy curls tumbled freely over her shoulders, her curved horns rising proudly from the mess. Her long, crimson legs were kicked up behind her, her spaded tail swishing a happy rhythm in the air.

As the door clicked, she rolled onto her back, stretching her arms high above her head with a contented, purring hum.

Her chest thrust upward, full and entirely bare, her yellow eyes blinking with lazy, affectionate warmth as she spotted me.

"Uh, sorry," I stammered, freezing in my tracks. "I didn’t mean to... uh..."

"Oh, Milesy! Don’t be a stranger!" Lilith squealed, immediately abandoning her sketchpad.

"I can come back later if you need to—"

"Don’t be silly, sweetie! I always lounge around my room in the buff! It’s totally freeing! You should try it!"

"I... think I’ll pass."

"Suit yourself!" she chirped.

She didn’t reach for a robe. She just hopped right off the mattress and skipped toward me, every step carrying a bouncy, overwhelming energy.

I tried to keep my eyes locked on the ceiling molding, but I was only human. She was a literal succubus; she was biologically engineered from the ground up to short-circuit the male nervous system, and holy fuck, was she succeeding.

"It’s my house," I pointed out weakly as she closed the distance, bringing with her an intoxicating wave of heavy vanilla and brimstone.

"So true, sweetie," she giggled, pressing her bare crimson chest directly against my shirt and looping her arms around my neck. "So very true..."

"Glad we got that out of the way," I muttered. I didn’t even try to stop her as her hands deftly slipped my suit jacket off my shoulders and tossed it onto a nearby drafting chair. She was impossibly strong, and fighting her when she got handsy was a losing battle.

Focus, Miles. Focus.

It was incredibly hard to prioritize a tactical debriefing when a six-foot-three demon was actively unbuttoning my shirt, but I had just watched a woman turn into a pile of greasy ash in my boardroom. I needed intel.

"Lilith. Stop. Look at me, I have a massive problem."

"I know, Milesy," she pouted, her glowing yellow eyes dropping downward. "Your pants are still zipped."

"A bigger problem."

"So I can see," she purred, dragging a sharp fingernail tracing the line of my belt. "Mmm. And I have a huge problem too, sweetie. I haven’t had a proper stress-relief session all day. But don’t worry! I am, above all else, a very hands-on problem solver!"

My belt buckle clicked open with a soft metallic snick.

I cleared my throat loudly, grabbing her wrists to stop her from pulling my zipper down. I really, really couldn’t let myself get distracted right now.

"Listen to me. I need to know about a specific entity from your neighborhood."

"So talk, sweetie. I’m all... ears," she breathed, leaning in close, her fangs lightly scraping against my jawline.

I shivered. Ohhh, fuck, that was distracting. But if I didn’t ask the question right now, I was going to lose the next three hours, and I needed to secure the chalet.

"Do you know a demon named Legion?"

Lilith froze. Her hands stopped roaming. The heavy, seductive atmosphere in the room instantly vanished, popping like a soap bubble.

She pulled her head back, her face scrunching up in profound, unadulterated disgust.

"Legion?" she groaned, rolling her eyes so hard I thought she might sprain something. "Ugh. That little loser?"

"Loser?" I asked, blinking in surprise.

She let out a heavy, dramatic sigh, pulling away from me entirely and throwing her hands up in the air. "Oh, my God, yes. I know him. He is the absolute worst, Milesy. Just the most annoying, obnoxious guy at the party. You wouldn’t believe it."

"Annoying?" I repeated. I thought back to the molten skin, the flaming wings, and the psychotic ranting about ruling the world. "He seemed pretty intense."

"He is a total try-hard," Lilith huffed, walking over to her vanity mirror and crossing her arms. "He’s a multiplier demon. A hive mind. He doesn’t have an original thought in his entire head, he just possesses a bunch of vulnerable host bodies and spreads his influence like a bacterial infection. He’s basically a walking, talking pyramid scheme, sweetie. He bothers me with his promotional rubbish constantly."

"Promotional rubbish?"

"Oh, totally. Hold on..."

She turned around, entirely unbothered by her nakedness, and yanked open the top drawer of her designer nightstand. She rummaged around for a few seconds, tossing a few highly questionable toys aside before pulling out a glossy paperback book.

"Ah, here it is," she said, skipping back over and slapping the book against my chest. "Take a look."

I caught the paperback, glancing down at the cover. It featured a generic stock photo of a man standing on a mountain peak at sunrise.

The title read in bold letters: Unleash Your Inner Multitude: 7 Habits for Maximizing Collective Wellness.

I stared at the cover. "Is this... a self-help book?"

"Isn’t it tragic?" Lilith sighed, shaking her head. "So incredibly tacky. It’s painful to look at! But I’ll give the loser credit, he found his demographic. Human beings are always so desperate for validation and a quick fix for their fragile egos. Legion realized a long time ago that you don’t need to conquer a city with fire and brimstone when you can just charge them two thousand dollars a ticket for a weekend wellness retreat in Sedona. He’s basically a guru now."

"A guru."

"Well. A cult leader, technically," Lilith corrected, waving a hand. "He feeds on the collective devotion of his downline. It’s a multi-level marketing cult."

Huh.

I stared at the glossy paperback. I had always suspected the high-end self-help and wellness industry was secretly run by soul-sucking demons. It made a terrifying amount of sense.

I flipped the book over, reading the back cover. The author bio promised a pathway to ’ultimate inner synergy and absolute communal submission.’

I was about to ask how a self-help guru managed to track a fake occult artifact to my front door, but my train of thought completely derailed.

Lilith had stepped back into my personal space, and I suddenly felt her warm, bare hands sliding right past my unbuckled belt.

"Ah!" I hissed, my breath catching in my throat as she firmly grabbed my bulge. "Lilith, wait, this is actually important."

"So is this, Milesy," she whispered. She leaned up on her tiptoes, pressing her naked body flush against mine. Her breath was hot against my neck, smelling heavily of that intoxicating vanilla and brimstone. "So very, very important..."