“You know who I am, don’t you?” he asked without a hint of arrogance in his tone. And yet, the casualness with which he just knew his reputation had preceded him made Evie’s stomach do backflips.
She’d been called many disparaging things in her life. Alarmingly all beginning with the letter F. Flighty, foolish, forgetful, and, by a strange turn of events, she was finally able to add the final F.
Fucked.
She knew. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did.
The Villain, King of Darkness, Haunter of Dreams, had his arms around her. Worse, even, she was not nearly as afraid as she should’ve been. In fact, she wasn’t afraid at all, so much as she—
Oh dear. Was she laughing?
She was. She couldn’t help it, and if she was any louder, those men would be over here in seconds. The Villain seemed to sense this, too, because she blinked and his hand was wrapped around her mouth once more.
“We’re going to slowly crawl behind that tree.” He pulled Evie up so she could see the large oak in question. “And then we’re going to run.”
“We?” she asked as she was suddenly flipped around and shoved in the direction of the tree. There was no room to argue, so, as instructed, she kept low and crawled until she was safely leaning against the other side of the trunk. Breathing heavily and startled to see blood brushing the back of her arm, Evie turned to see if The Villain was still there.
Gone.
“Where in the deadlands did he—”
“Here.”
Evie spun in the direction of his voice, stunned. “How did you get over th—” But her words cut off when she saw him.
In her defense, there was a lot to take in.
Her first thought was the wanted posters had it all wrong. This was not an older, scarred man with a gray beard. In fact, no gray laced through his thick, dark hair, either. He had high cheekbones above the two-day shadow that ran along a very hard jawline. She figured he couldn’t be more than six or seven years older than she was. If she had to guess, she’d put him at no more than…twenty-eight, twenty-nine? That couldn’t be right, though. There had to be a rule somewhere that evil overlords needed to be at least fifty, maybe sixty if they were pushing it.
But not young! And not, even more disastrously, beautiful.
He was, though: beautiful. His skin was tanned and smooth. As if his off time from terrorizing people was spent lying in the grass, perhaps daintily drinking out of a teacup and reading poetry with his pinky raised.
The thought brought a hysterical giggle to Evie’s lips. The Villain lifted one of his perfectly thick brows that framed the darkest eyes she’d ever seen. Eyes that assessed her in pinched confusion. It seemed he didn’t fully put together that she was another living, breathing human being, because he looked at her as if her very existence was a mystery.
“You really shouldn’t look like that,” she said and surprised herself by almost thinking the befuddled look on his face was endearing.
He’s a murderer! Her conscience rebelled, but the rest of her, the part that wasn’t attached to her very wise brain, found him far too pretty to care.
Taking a careful step in his direction, Evie tried to dig inside herself for the fear she knew was there. Any minute now, she’d be paralyzed with fright and run screaming in the other direction, but he was within arm’s length now and she hadn’t turned yet.
Hmm. No fear, but she did feel mild concern—a sound indicator she hadn’t completely lost her good sense. Until, of course, her mild concern was clouded with embarrassing thoughts of what he would smell like if she leaned in close and took a whiff.
“Is there something about my face…that is displeasing to you? Or is it perhaps that I’m bleeding from three different wounds, courtesy of the men in your village?” His voice was quiet, and outwardly he appeared calm, but Evie could see a muted fury behind his dark eyes.
Did he think she was judging him?
“Um, yes— The blood’s not great…but I was referring to the fact that you look like you were carved out of marble, and I just think that as a rule of thumb, inherently evil people should be grotesque-looking.”
The fury winked out as if never there in the first place, his only response to blink.
“You just can’t kill people and be pretty. It’s confusing.” Evie began unwrapping the wool scarf her little sister, Lyssa, had given her on her last birthday, stepping closer to The Villain and holding it up like a signal of peace. “For the blood, Your Evilness.”