Plotwist, under the hideous and far too Barbie-coded tracksuit is a black and gold snake Bvlgari bracelet "In a world of boring Eves, be the snake that made her fall. Merry Christmas. -- Amos (ᒪᑌᑕIᖴEᖇ) Von Bismarck."

The rain wasn’t pouring; it slashed across the sky with such strength it almost hurt when it soaked Eva Smith through her long black cocktail dress, freezing her to the bones. She didn’t remember running here consciously, or sobbing through the building’s hallways and marble floors until she reached the elevator and pressed the last floor’s button with haste. All she could remember was the sound of her mother’s voice, sharp and victorious,  and the cacophony of her own heartbeat crawling up her throat like she was about to choke on it.

The Mexican heiress knocked once, then twice, before she lost patience and banged at the heavy door with such fury that her knuckles ached and her breath came in ragged sobs she couldn’t swallow anymore. When the door finally opened, quite brutally, a pair of midnight black eyes bore into hers.

Amos stood there and for once, he wasn’t in his immaculate CEO attire. In fact, it wasn’t the dark prince in a flawless suit who had answered, but Amos at home: barefoot, wearing black sweatpants, a loose, open dark cashmere shirt and a single silver chain at his neck instead of the many rings usually adorning his fingers. With his hair disheveled like he’d run a hand through it one too many times, and a half-finished glass of wine dangled from his elegant fingers in which a deep-red liquid caught the hall’s light, the German prince looked surprisingly… Human. Silence hovered between the two, only the drip-drop of rain on the marble floor resounded as the businessman’s black, beady eyes took the woman in slowly – ruined makeup, drenched black curls, and trembling mouth, never had he witnessed the exuberant Eva Aramburu in such a pathetic state. Maybe that was the uncommonness of the situation that made his unfazed gaze spark with curiosity for a brief moment.

Eva burst into a broken half-laugh, half sob. “Amos,” she breathed as her voice cracked, “She– she– my mother–” She tried to overcome her stuttering, but the German prince suddenly raised one hand, palm up, in order to keep her from annoying him with tedious, and half-intelligible rambling.

“What did she do this time?” He asked with a cold and sharp tone that asked for straightforwardness.

The fact that Isabel was the source of the young witch’s sorrow didn’t come as a surprise, for she had already vented about her plenty of times during parties and galas. Yet, never in a million years would he have imagined that the outcome of one of her incompetent mother’s antics would end up shattering proud and loud Eva so bad. She swallowed, trembling, watching Amos through her blurry tears. The words tore out raw and painful, making what Isabel did even more real. More cruel.

“She fucked my boyfriend.” A blink. That was the full extent of Amos’ surprise. A slow, unhurried blink.

“And now,” Eva continued, voice wobbling when the truth shattered her, ”She decided to date him. Officially. My mom is with my boyfriend. She– she said it was my fault, that he was too old for me anyway and that I was not ‘woman enough’ to keep him interested.” She brought one trembling hand to her mouth.

For a long moment, Amos just stood there, his shoulder leaning against the doorframe, wine in hand and the sound of the rain hammering loudly against the roof. Only after a few long seconds, he raised an eyebrow and parted his lips, and spoke flatly, as if commenting on a late delivery. “Harsh.” Without saying much more, he opened the door wider.

“Come in.” He said with zero comfort or softness, but rather with the coldness of someone so bored that he’d welcome any kind of distraction for the night. Then he walked away without one single glance in her direction. The pretty Mexican mess staggered inside under the curious eye of a massive black American Bully, König, lying down in front of the warm hearth. “I don’t even know why I came here, y’know.” She hugged herself, teeth chattering. “Because you’ve got nowhere else to go.” The businessman replied from the kitchen island, reaching for the bottle of wine he had opened earlier, “Little heiress with her party tricks doesn’t have any real friends.” His voice, low and naturally soft, carried the same clinical factuality he always used: “Fakeness and high spheres come hand in hand.”

His words made her chest tighten even more. The fucker wasn’t wrong. Amos poured a second glass of something dark and expensive without bothering to ask, then he returned to the living room and handed it to her.

“Drink.”

She obeyed numbly, mostly because the velvet and fruity taste of the Romane Conti managed to soothe her sorrow for a short while. Finally, she raised her chocolate stare and observed him from above her glass, like a zookeeper appraising a tiger five minutes before entering its cage. The question that had burned her tongue finally escaped.

“You still haven't laughed at me, and this is starting to creep me out.”

Amos didn’t look at her as he swirled his wine. Instead, his gaze fixed on the city lights that bled through the glass like the spilled colors of a rainbow. Yeah, he could have laughed. Because, to be perfectly honest, he found the situation quite hilarious in the most cruel way he could mean. But…

“I just don’t think you deserve to be alone tonight.” He replied, turning his head just slightly toward her. His obsidian eyes caught the hearth’s flames

Somehow, those flat and emotionless words were the kindest thing she had heard of all the evening. She took another gulp and, for the first time in years, Eva allowed herself to cry. To be vulnerable here, in the middle of the living room, with König sitting next to her and looking up with an empathic look on his big mutt face.

Amos didn’t hug her or tell her that everything would be okay; it wasn't how he functioned. However, he did give her a box of tissues and remained silent in the background, letting her break safely in the shadows of his place. After a while, the witch's tears finally slowed into uneven breaths, and she slowly realized that she had been standing there awkwardly, drenched and shivering in the middle of the immaculate penthouse of the worst person she knew. Her body jolted when the latter set his glass on the coffee table with a soft click.

“ Ok, you're done? 'Coz you’re dripping on my fucking floor.” He commented now that she had calmed down a bit.

Eva sniffed, “Shut up, Bismarck, who cares? You’ve got a cleaner. I don't need these kinds of comments tonight.”

A subtle annoyance flicked in his expression very briefly at the comment, but Amos still tilted his head on the side and fought the urge to kick her out, his expression unreadable and his dark irises staring at the young heiress in that unsettling way of his.

“No, what you need is heat. And food. Mexican, I assume.” Eva’s lips parted to say something, but she gave up when he walked past her without waiting for her response nor acknowledging her simple presence. The faint fragrances of myrrh, spiced vanilla and tonka tickled her nostrils. Her eyes simply followed him, puzzled as she saw him tapping quickly on his phone. His voice raised again in a flat tone, bored almost:

“Bathroom on your left. Pick some clothes in the guest room’s wardrobe. Chilaquiles arriving in fifteen minutes.”

Chilaquiles? Her throat went dry and her eyes widened in bewilderment.

“You remember my–” 

“Of course,” he interrupted her without looking up, thumb moving over his phone screen,  “I’m a manipulator.” Not a dash of shame or irony in his words, just pure fact. He paused and then, as if remembering he was supposed to pretend to function somewhat normally, he finally glanced and flashed a charming, polished grin at the drop-dead gorgeous heiress. The exact same kind of smile, perfect and surgically precise, he used at charity galas, networking events, or whenever he needed to wrap someone around his finger. A smile that meant absolutely nothing, and yet still managed to fool almost everyone.

“And don’t touch anything else.”

“Hey, I’m not some kind of gremlin,” Eva replied, raising an eyebrow.

“Debatable.” He purred.

And despite herself, a broken laugh escaped her — because that Devil was unintentionally, annoyingly funny.

The warm bubble bath has been revitalizing, at least. As soon as she had sunk into the tube, Eva had allowed herself to relax: the sensation of the hot water swallowing her and washing the grime of the night away from her skin was all she needed to retrieve a bit of her composure. When later she emerged from the bathroom in one of Amos' oversized Slayer t-shirts, her long hair wavy, damp ,and her face scrubbed clean of her runny mascara, the penthouse smelled like warm tortillas, tacos, cheesy beef nachos, and chilaquiles. 

Amos was sprawled on the couch– such a rare sight, he who always had an elegant posture –, reading It by Stephen King. The food containers in front of him sat untouched on the coffee table, hot and mouthwatering.

The Mexican heiress sat down slowly on a sofa and wrapped herself up with the black plaid she had found on it. “Aren’t you having any?” She asked. “Nein.” He said, turning a page. “You ordered it online for me?” She asked, dumbfounded and still not entirely trusting this uncharacteristically generous version of him. His gaze glanced at her, “You came to my door in a state of acute emotional distress. I thought food would help with that. Eat it alone, I didn’t bother poisoning it.”

Eva stared at the spread on the table: there was enough food to feed an entire family, plus rice, beans, salsa, guacamole… Way more than one person could ever finish. Still thrown off by the fact he hadn’t lunged for her throat yet, she blinked. Then she rolled her eyes, pouting.

“No way. In my culture, we share food. Even with clinically deranged Germans.”

“I don’t want any.” He retorted, putting his book away.

“Tough shit.” She shot back, her chocolate eyes glaring before she slid a container toward him, “You ordered enough to supply a village, so you’re going to eat with me, or I’ll hex every car you try to build for the next decade.”

Annoyed, Amos exhaled through his nose loudly, not a sigh per se but something like resignation at her insufferable stubbornness. “Fine,” he said, grabbing a fork, because being compliant was the best way to spare himself from a headache.

Eva nodded, satisfied. “Gracias.”

The Prince didn’t truly smile back, but the slight unclenching of his jaw and the faint drop of his shoulders betrayed that he didn’t find the situation entirely unpleasant, even though he’d rather gouge his own eyes out than admit it.

At one point during the dinner, the sad heiress stabbed a piece of chilaquiles with unnecessary violence, probably picturing her mother’s face instead.

“You could have laughed at me. Told me I deserved it. I wouldn’t have been surprised. You’ve said worse things.”

He shrugged lightly. “It crossed my mind.” Eva looked at him sharply. His cruel nature was always hard to deal with, but at least he had the decency of being honest with her. “Why didn’t you, then?”

“Because your pain is not that entertaining when I’m not the one causing it,” he said finally. “And mocking you while you’re down is uninteresting. You’re way more fun when you fight back.”

She snorted sarcastically, “So you’re being nice?”

“No,” he answered while taking a bite out of a nacho with a load of guacamole on it, “It’s not being nice.”

“So enlighten me, then. How the hell do you function, Amos Von Bismarck? Just once, drop the mask. Because I swear I’m a prayer away from calling the Pope on your ass and have you exorcized. "

Surprisingly, this comment made him laugh genuinely and, for a second, something in Amos’s whole being loosened. It was barely noticeable, but the observant witch could see it in the way his shoulders eased, and his breath went quieter, working in a less measured pattern. The Prince closed his eyes for a few seconds, savoring the rare comfort of not having to perform humanity because, for once, someone outside his family didn't need sugarcoating.

“I experience people as patterns,” he said, reaching for the nachos again, “Behaviors, triggers, responses. Predictable systems with predictable outputs that are often led by emotions. Then I adjust my actions and personality to get what I want from them. Most people run on habit, fear, love, desire, acceptance and ego. And most of them are far easier to read than they think.”

Eva sipped on her wine. “There it is. The truth. You make us sound boring.”

“Because y’all are.” He smirked, only for the sake of being an annoying bastard.

The Mexican beauty rolled her eyes but her expression had softened a little. In fact, this was the closest thing to vulnerable honesty she’d ever seen from him. So different from his usual offensive sarcasm and smugness.

“And emotions?” she asked. “Do you just… not feel them?” She asked, wondering if it was a curse or a blessing. To her, a hypersensitive hurricane of a woman, the idea of emptiness felt alien. Terrifying. How can he live in silence while she drowned daily in her own chaos?

He shrugged again. “I feel some. Not the way you do. They’re like… Flickers.” Amos said after a moment of thought. “And some I don’t. At all.”

Silence settled – the void again. Painful in its boredom, relentless in its hunger, the same emptiness that had shadowed him since birth. His eyes moved toward the storm outside without really seeing it.

“It’s like hearing echoes of something everyone else gets to experience first-hand,” he continued quietly. “You understand the concept. You can imitate it. But it never reaches the places it’s supposed to. It’s all… surface-level noise...”

As Eva listened to him, a quiet ache formed in her chest. Not pity – Amos would have despised that – just a sad, human heaviness for someone who could describe warmth so precisely… and never feel it himself. To understand love, joy, and sadness only as concepts felt… heartbreakingly tragic. After all, emotions were part of the universal human experience, weren’t they? She lowered her gaze to the abyss of her Romane Conti, thinking of how Amos always seemed so composed. So capable. So terribly alone. And though she could never experience the world as he did, she understood what it was to be alone.

A bitter, almost amused exhale left him, shaking the witch out of her thoughts.

“You get used to the emptiness,” he said. “Eventually, it becomes the most honest thing about you.”

When it comes to Eva, she felt everything — too much, too fast, too brightly. Where his inner world was still and frozen, hers was a storm of color and noise. He lived in a void; she lived in a flood. He was a black hole, she was a typhoon. To sit across from him now, she felt that difference like a crevice splitting the room.

“For me,” she murmured, almost to herself, “it’s the overflowing that feels honest.”

She didn’t look up, but she felt his eyes on her as she spoke, and he didn't interrupt her nor diminish her feelings. They were two creatures built in opposite directions, one carved hollow, the other bursting at the seams, caught in a quiet, delicate moment of understanding.

“And do you care for people?” She asked, trying for sarcasm but failing to hide the genuine question beneath. “Well, yes. In a way. When I choose to care about some of them.” Amos replied calmly, not in the mood to mock her this time. “When it aligns with my interests, when they bring stability or structure, or simply when I’ve decided they matter and the cost of their absence feels… wrong.”

Eva laughed under her breath, though it sounded thin. “Okay. So where do I fall in all that?”

“You belong to the ‘economic interest’ category. " he said without hesitation. "You’re useful, and you’re consistent.” A small pause. “Plus, you don’t bore me.”

The witch stared at him. “Is that your way of saying you care?”

“No,” Amos said. “It’s my way of saying you occupy a place in my system, I guess.”

Eva let out a shaky, half-laugh. “You Devil, that’s the coldest sweet thing I’ve ever heard.”

“You asked. I complied. Don’t make a habit of it." He smirked very briefly. 

A gentle, unexpected silence stretched between the witch and the killer, warm in its own strange way. Eva sniffed, brushed the tears from her cheeks, and lifted her chin: her old fire glinted back to life in her eyes.

“You know what? When I’m done being a disaster, I’m reading your tarot cards.” 

Amos gave her a flat stare. “Absolutely not.”

“Oh, absolutely yes!” She wagged a finger at him, “Don’t be such a killjoy. Take it as my thank-you gift. A little entertainment. I’m fairly sure your future will surprise you.”

Amos raised a brow, trying to hide his curiosity. “Is that so?”

Eva held his gaze, something ancient and knowing flickering in her brown eyes for a few seconds. The same look she got when her clairvoyant abilities manifested.

“You know what? I’m gonna spoil you a little.” Eva leaned back with a sly smile. “I don’t need a tarot deck to tell you that you’re going to meet a woman who’ll finally outplay you,” she said lightly , even if something in her tone made Amos pause, a shiver skimming down his spine. “Someone who won’t slip into your system, but shatter it. A woman who’ll match your madness beat for beat. And your heart won’t merely warm for her, Amos…” Her eyes darkened with quiet certainty. “It’ll ignite.”

He scoffed. “Highly unlikely.” But Eva caught the tiny, involuntary twitch in his jaw. The living proof her words had landed deeper than he meant to show.

Eva only smiled.

“Keep thinking that, Devil.”

She reached for another bite of chilaquiles, calmer now, grounding herself in the warmth of food and the unexpected steadiness of his presence. The storm still hissed against the windows, but inside, Eva felt lighter. Slowly back to her old, annoying, overconfident self. In a strange twist tonight, it was his frost, not fire, that had kept her from collapsing.