The problem with Asmodeus — ancient Prince of Hell, Commander of seventy-two legions, he who had broken kingdoms and unmade saints — was that he had terrible timing.

He manifested at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday.

She was eating cereal standing over the sink.

Not even good cereal. Store-brand corn flakes that had gone slightly soft because she’d left the box open since Sunday. She was wearing one sock, a sleep shirt that said I Paused My Game For This, and had a face mask on — the kind that dries chalky white and makes you look like a Victorian ghost with pores.

Asmodeus appeared in a column of sulphuric smoke in the centre of her living room, which was barely large enough to contain him. His wings knocked a stack of unfolded laundry off the couch. His horns scraped the ceiling fan, which began rotating in the wrong direction.

He spread his arms wide. The shadows lengthened. His voice dropped to a register designed to loosen bowels.

“Asmi Sharma.“

She looked up from her cereal.

She looked at him.

She looked back at her cereal, considered it, then set the bowl down on the counter with a small click.

“Did you just knock my laundry on the floor?”

Asmodeus blinked. His left eye was gold, his right was void-black and bottomless. Neither had ever been used for blinking in a confused way before tonight.

“I am Asmodeus,” he said. “Prince of—”

“Yeah, I can see that.” She was already walking toward the couch, picking up a shirt, giving it a shake. “Sulphur smell is going to be a nightmare to get out of these. Do you know how long it took me to do this laundry? No, obviously you don’t, you just appeared in my living room. Which, by the way — how? There are wards on this building. Mrs. Pillai downstairs does a havan every Thursday. I have a rudraksha on the door.”

“Your rudraksha,” Asmodeus said stiffly, “was hung upside down.”

She paused folding. Turned around fully to look at him.

“…Are you serious.”

“The intentions were correct. The execution was flawed.”

She stared at him. He was eight feet tall, smelled of char and something underneath it — strange, like thunderstorms before they broke — and had the kind of face that artists across three millennia had tried and failed to capture: too symmetrical, too sharp, luminous in a way that hurt to look at directly.

She looked at him anyway. Directly. With the mild, assessing look of a woman who had once argued successfully with an auto driver at 2 AM about a fifty-rupee difference.

“You could have just, I don’t know, sent me a message,” she said. “Some ominous crow. A bad dream.”

“I was sent,” Asmodeus said, with the faintest note of dignity. “I do not choose my assignments.”

“So you’re like a consultant.”

“I am a Prince of Hell.”

“With a boss.”

The silence that followed was long enough that the ceiling fan finished one full wrong-direction rotation.

“…There is a hierarchy,” he said finally.

“Right.” She went back to the laundry. “So what are you supposed to be doing, exactly? Terrorising me? Is that the brief?”

He straightened. The shadows snapped back into formation. “I am here to unravel you. To find the threads of your fears, your shames, your unspoken hungers — and pull. Until there is nothing left but ruin.”

“Okay.” She held up a kurta, checked it for a stain, seemed satisfied. “Can you do that after I finish folding? This stuff has been sitting here since Saturday and I have an early morning.”

Asmodeus opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

“You are not afraid of me.”

“I’m a little afraid of you,” she said, which was actually generous of her. “But I’m more afraid of not sleeping. I have a 9 AM. Do you know what my manager does if I’m late? Actually, you probably do. You’re the demon of—what is it—lust and wrath?”

“Among other domains.”

“My manager has wrath covered.”

Something happened in Asmodeus’s chest. A small movement, like something long-calcified shifting. He was unfamiliar with the sensation and therefore ignored it.

“You’re folding laundry,” he said, because there seemed to be nothing else to say.

“I’m folding laundry.”

“While I stand here.”

“You can sit if you want.” She gestured at the cleared half of the couch without looking up. “Just don’t knock anything else over.”

He did not sit. He stood very still in her small living room surrounded by the smell of detergent and old cereal and her — warm, human, stubbornly present — and tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing.

The instructions had been clear: Asmi Sharma, twenty-nine, lapsed Hindu, three outstanding credit card bills, emotionally unavailable since 2021. Find the cracks. Wedge them open. Standard operation.

What the instructions had not accounted for was that her cracks were — he searched for the word — comfortable. Lived-in. She wore them the way she wore the mismatched socks (he noticed now she’d put on the second one, rooting it from behind a couch cushion). Without apology. Without the desperate papering-over that usually made humans so easy to unravel.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I am observing.”

“Same thing, in a creepy context.” She looked up. The face mask had started flaking at the edges, and somehow this made her look less like a Victorian ghost and more like — he couldn’t place it. He had watched empires fall. He had no vocabulary for this.

“Why aren’t you afraid?” he asked. It came out less like a demand than a genuine question, which annoyed him.

She considered it. Set the last folded shirt on the pile. “Honestly? I think I used up my fear on smaller things. Like — whether my parents would be disappointed. Whether I was too much. Whether I’d end up alone.” She shrugged. “After a while, all the big scary stuff starts looking kind of manageable by comparison.”

Asmodeus was very old and had heard many confessions. None of them had landed quite like this.

“That,” he said carefully, “is either the healthiest thing I’ve heard a human say, or the most concerning.”

“Oh, definitely both,” she agreed cheerfully, picking up the laundry pile. “Tea? You probably don’t drink tea. Actually, you smell like char — you might like tea. It’s ginger.”

He should leave. He should go back and file a report. Target unresponsive to standard methodology. Recommend reassignment.

“…Ginger,” he said.

“Ginger.”

The ceiling fan continued its wrong-direction rotation. Somewhere downstairs, Mrs. Pillai’s havan ash was still warm.

Asmodeus, Prince of Hell, Commander of legions, folded his wings to fit through the kitchen doorway.

He stayed for two cups