When his underlings were getting particularly aggravating, Crowley liked to check on his investments. At the moment the demons were past aggravating and moving him more into the 'If you speak with me again about Satan this and apocalypse that I am going to kick you in the essence so hard your bones shake' mood. In other words, it was a good time to get out of the office. Satan might be a little... lax when it came to caring how demons treated each other but if he went on a tantrum and slaughtered everyone in reach it wouldn't really bode well for his reputation.

Always the business man, Crowley had eggs in a number of baskets. Most of his deals were the mundane stuff; musicians who thought finding the right chords to make them famous was worth damnation, politicians who thought the same of the right poll numbers. The normal, routine stuff.

But there was one person he was particularly interested to check on and he saved her for last.

When he appeared in her room, she jumped. There was a book in her hand and it clattered to the floor as she scrambled to her feet. Crowley had his back to her but he knew exactly what was going on. Slowly, more for dramatic effect than anything else, he turned.

She hadn't changed that much. The black hair was still drawn around her face and the eyes were still an eerie green. The orange suit she had on was baggy but he doubted her frame had changed that much either. His lips twitched into a smile as she got her breathing under control and sat back down, the book left where it was.

"It's after visiting hours," she said. Her voice was pleasant. A lot more expressive than it had been when she was making the deal.

Crowley didn't answer her at first, instead he looked around the room. It was pretty bare and there were bars on the window. It didn't take a genius to figure out where she ended up. Funny, he would have thought better of here. If asked he would have thought she, more than any of his other contracts, could have turned into something grand. Then again, it had only been four years since he'd seen her last. So she was seventeen then. That gave her another six years to make him proud.

"Does the view not please your highness?" When Crowley turned to look at Saffie he saw her watching him, delighted. How she got amusement out of baiting the King of Hell was beyond him. Did she think that he wouldn't kill her early; contract be damned? … Er, she was probably right by that but not for the reason she might think. If nothing else she was interesting, a change on the morons he had to deal with normally.

"You're more expressive than I recall."

She looked down and began to dig the dirt out from under her nails. "I've gotten better at faking it. Emotions that is. Caring. Surprise, anger, the works" Saffie grinned but there was no humor in it. "I'm good at faking a lot of things."

He thought about her words for a moment. "So, what? You're a... psychopath?" His hand waved as he tried to think of the correct term.

She looked up from her nails. "Anti-social personality disorder," she corrected. Then she added, "But it's my own diagnosis. I could be wrong." Saffie jabbed a just-cleaned nail towards the door in her room. "They say it's psychopathy but that's not right. But, I found out that if that's what I was diagnosed with, they'd let me go at eighteen. Well, assuming I can lie well enough." Another grin. "I'd like to think I can, seeing as how they've got me all wrong."

Crowley looked around the room again. No sharp edges on anything, nothing string like or something in any color but white or gray except for Saffie. "So this is a psychiatric ward then. I'm glad to see that you had such grand dreams in exchange for your soul." He flashed her a smile at the not so subtle reminder of their contract. She didn't flinch.

He continued. "You know, I could have done the deed for you. It wouldn't have been traced back to you, you would have spent the last four years a free woman."

Saffie refused to look at him, her gaze instead on the book still on the floor. She reached down to pick it up and unfurl the wrinkles before speaking. "That wasn't what I wanted."

"And what did you want? I mean, besides knowing who killed your mother."

She looked up from the book. Her answer was simple and one he could appreciate. "I wanted to kill the son of a bitch myself."