He was a man of wealth and taste. This couldn't be happening to him. He must be slipping in his old age. That was the only explanation.

"You can't do this," he stammered. He couldn't believe the pathetic sound of the words emanating from his mouth.

Ms. Trinket straightened her well-tailored skirt suit and flashed her client a sweet but ultimately ruthless smile. She was used to this treatment on Wall Street. They thought she was young, they thought they knew better, they underestimated her skill, knowledge and cunning. She might look girlish at 25, but she had graduated first in her class at Yale Law and she had an unexpected talent for reading her clients and one-upping them on their own turf.

"Well," responded Ms. Trinket slowly throwing her long blond hair over her shoulder. "If you read page fifty-six of the contract, paragraph three, line 7, you can see that indeed I can, sir." She sat back in her chair, slightly lower than than the one her client sat in behind his massive polished black oak desk. His whole office was arranged to impress, intimidate, and overthrow. It had quite the opposite affect on Ms. Trinket. She relished the pain that flickered across her client's face. 'Oh how the mighty they fall,' she thought.

Ms. Trinket's victim, if you have any sympathy for him at all, sat stroking his beard, usually a practice that bolstered his evil presence and brought him pleasure. He wracked his brain trying to think of a way out. He could simply just kill her there on the spot. But despite his nefarious reputation, he was a gentleman, one with his own set of principles that he abided by religiously if you can even associate the sordid deals of his career to that word. No he had standards and ethics. He was no heathen. She'd screwed him fair and square.

He'd been careless, thinking he knew the Wall Street type. He should have known better. He assumed she was a wolf in sheep's clothing. His mistake was in assuming she wanted the same things as every other Wall Street wolf. Money, power, more money, more money, more money. They would give their soul for more money. They were so predictable.

He had taken them down over the years one by one, it almost became boring, routine, monotonous. Perhaps that is why he had neglected to read the fine print on her counter offer. He assumed it had just asked for more money.

"So this takes affect..." his voice trailed off.

"Immediately," chirped Ms. Trinket.

Lucifer reluctantly pulled the keys to the gates of hell out of the pocket of his flowing robes and slid them across the desk to Ms. Trinket. It was a lot of work running hell. He had tried to subcontract some of the work over the years, but it never went well. Maybe Ms. Trinket would do a better job keeping all the souls in line. Based on the pleasure she was clearly deriving from one-upping the devil, she would do a great job torturing souls. It didn't matter she had promised him hers, Ms. Trinket was in charge now. For eternity.