Assistant to the Villain (Assistant to the Villain, #1) (9)
She smoothed a palm down the front of her high-collared dress that was two sizes too large for her. “We’ll see,” she said, followed by six sets of eyes returning to their parchments as they realized there would be no bloodshed today.
In all honesty, Becky was quite pretty. She was a mere two years older than Evie, but those two years must have added ten in Becky’s head by ways of superiority.
Her light-brown skin was flawless, and her tight-lipped smile did nothing to take away from her striking features. Her cheekbones and jaw sat at the same width, drawing your eye to every high point of her face. If her personality reflected even an ounce of her physical beauty, Becky might be the best person Evie knew.
But alas, she was heinous.
Evie smiled sweetly, tucking a stray hair behind her ear. “Hard at work this morning?”
The other woman smiled back, laying it on so thick that they could have repaved the walkway up to the castle with it. “I was the first one here this morning, so I got a jump on things.” In Becky-speak, that translated to, I was here before you, therefore I am better than you. Behold my fearsome attendance record.
Keeping her eyes glued forward so she wouldn’t roll them, Evie pushed through the throngs of people bustling around the room at breakneck paces. The boss demanded efficiency from every person he employed, and every person here desperately wanted to prove themselves indispensable.
The hidden room was large and open, desks and tables laden throughout. Stained glass windows, depicting various scenes of evil and torture, were evenly spaced along the beige brick walls, bringing in a warm array of light over the space. The cobwebbed chandelier above them glinted as the light hit it, reminding Evie of the severed heads still hanging from the rafters below. She really hoped that scream from the torture chambers wasn’t another head about to be displayed as well.
She’d only been to the dungeons a few times, but never long enough to accurately assess the room of horrors. But a few of the interns had. It was the highlight of their squeamish conversations near the kitchens.
“It smells like rotted flesh and despair,” one of them had said.
Evie had promptly asked what despair smelled like, but the other girls just returned to their whispering.
She had never been very good at making friends.
For one thing, ever since her mother’s disappearance when she was a child, Evie’d become far too good at letting serious matters roll through her like a tide so they never landed close enough to hurt.
She briefly thought this job might give her a more somber air. That people would look at her and see someone with sophistication and world experience. But despite every reason she had to become a dark and menacing character, Evie had remained exactly who she always was—an optimist—a terrible thing to be in a villain’s office, mind you. Granted, she didn’t want to become evil, but when you spend most of your life trying to see the sun, you begin to wish for rain.
In her most private moments, she wondered what it would be like to never smile again, to be feared the way her boss was. But Evie Sage was not a villain, and anyone who suggested she was would get laughed at in their face.
Of course, was it any wonder everyone still saw her as the same when she continued to grin and bear it all? Like with the rest of her village, Evie had told her father a lie and kept him and Lyssa in the dark about where she went every day. It was for their own good, really. Her father already worried so much because of the burdens he was placing on his daughters, being ill and unable to work since he’d caught the Mystic Illness—a sickness that had plagued the kingdom for the last ten years.
The disease attacked without any rhyme or reason, seemingly selecting its victims at random. Some died quickly from the illness—the lucky ones. Others were left too weak to get out of bed as it slowly stole their lives, like the worst sort of thief.
Her father had had it long enough that the healer assured her and Lyssa it wouldn’t kill him, for now. But he was weak too much of the time to continue in the profession he’d done before.
Thankfully, he’d been a butcher, which was a boon for Evie, since she’d grown up around blood and corpses, and now that very trade was her profession. Although seeing animal corpses was very different than seeing the corpses of human men.
As she sat down at her desk and began her daily chore of balancing their ledgers, she reminded herself that at least today, her desk was clean. She’d only been working an hour when something crashed against the wall behind her—and made her jump right out of her chair, her rear hitting the floor with an embarrassing thud. Her arms had hit the papers as she fell, too, two hours’ work organizing invoices falling around her like paper snowflakes.
Amateur move, Evie.
She knew she always had to be on alert with her desk so close to the boss’s office.
She watched as the last paper drifted down onto her chest, not bothering to pick herself or the work up yet. Something or someone had most certainly been slammed against the wall… Another crash, followed by two softer thuds and glass shattering.
And there goes the framed picture I just rehung last week.
Still on the floor, feeling ridiculous, Evie turned over and went to her knees to pick up the papers strewn about. “Ouch,” she muttered softly, rubbing at her backside.
But she might as well have yelled, given the way the black door of The Villain’s office jerked open, shaking the walls and making the rest of the workers freeze. Evie slowly looked up from the papers in her hands, her vision catching first on the tip of a shiny black boot and then moving upward. Dark pants intended to be loose but instead hugged muscular thighs that were attached to an impressive torso.