Oh, he’d been talking, hadn’t he? She’d been too busy ogling him as if he were the last piece of pie.
“Oh yes, I…agree.” She nodded emphatically, rocking back and forth, doing her best to mask her confusion with a false confidence.
“Is that so?” He whistled low and raised a hand to rub the perfectly maintained stubble at his chin. “Well, with your agreement in mind, I’ll begin the arrangements to have you married off to one of the river gremlins to allow us safe passage for our shipments from the southern kingdoms.”
“What?” Evie gasped “Sir, I— No, I wasn’t— You can’t be serious!” But he could be. Evie had seen him do far worse to other employees who weren’t cooperating, and she’d arranged most of them. Her heart was pounding, blood rushing through her ears, making everything sound muffled.
Without realizing it, she’d brought herself closer to him, searching for any ounce of humanity in his black eyes. Anything that might take pity on this magicless human with a terrible attention span.
But instead of humanity, she saw his eyes squint and crinkle at the corners. Evie took a large step backward to better observe the picture. His lips were curled up at the sides, and when Evie caught sight of them, she yelped.
“Was that a joke?” She almost cringed at the blatant shock in her voice, but her reaction to something so unpredictable could not be contained.
His smile widened further than Evie had ever seen it, and a single dimple on his left cheek poked free.
“And you have dimples?”
He rolled his eyes, and the dimple disappeared. “Just the one. Now that I have your full attention—”
“Was that your first?” Evie interrupted, unable to process all this new information in an efficient manner.
The boss’s head knocked back in surprise. “My first what, you little tornado?”
“Your first joke.”
He grunted and opened his mouth to speak, looking quite outraged, if she were being honest. “Of all the—” He paused to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Sage, do you honestly think me incapable of humor?”
“Of course I don’t think that,” she said earnestly. “You hired me.”
Letting loose a long-suffering sigh, he pushed a strand of dark hair meticulously back into place. “I speak to you for less than three minutes, and I’m more turned around than the interns during my favorite day of the week.”
“Metaphorically speaking, of course, as I am not shooting arrows at you.” Evie gave him a pointed look to reiterate how she disapproved of his “self-defense” training for the poor souls who came here on “internships.” Cast-off noblemen’s children, people who owed gambling debts, and other general reprobates alike applied for the entry position all the time.
Massacre Manor was a far cry from the kingdom’s capital, the Gleaming City, where most of the interns had stumbled in from. The decadence and abundance so different than the squalor of their new place of employ, for most of them their first place of employ. Evie had been to the city once as a child. It had been an entire day’s ride north from her village, when the forest was still considered safe to travel. She had been too little to remember much, but she recalled the contagious energy of it vibrating the air. Remembered vaguely meeting a magical specialist with her parents, and, just like the stories children in her village had told her, he had been kind and helpful with seemingly endless knowledge to share.
It was nice that quite a few interns had magic, as many of them accomplished their tasks quicker.
That sure must be useful for cleaning the toilets. Evie snickered inwardly.
But they kept applying, coming back, despite the harshness of the job.
The proof was in the pile of letters laden with words of woe and how a down-on-his-luck son of a noble found himself in deep debt to a very expensive brothel. It was always someone in desperate need of a second chance, and though the danger of the job was well-known in less-desirable parts of the kingdom, so was the pay.
Evie was quite certain the interns made only slightly less than she did. Which in any other circumstance might cause her some level of outrage, but she was working for The Villain. She would be grateful she held one of the only job positions that didn’t call for her Scatter Day participation.
The event took place at the end of every work week, unless of course the boss was having a bad day. Then it could be the beginning of the week, the middle of the week, in the morning, during her lunch hour, or… Well, she could go on. It was, at the very least, consistent in that every Scatter Day consisted of the boss sending the interns outside and having them run from something. So far, she’d watched them try to escape a crossbow and countless magical beasts. But Evie’s personal favorite was the day the boss was so fed up with their antics that he began chasing them himself across the back courtyard.
It was the fastest she’d ever seen them run.
“I’ll remind you that, at your bequest, I haven’t actually killed an intern in several months.”
Evie shook her head hopelessly. “Sir, I hate to belittle your successes, but there are people who go their entire lives without killing anyone.”
His face remained serious. “How dull.”
“You also can’t even really say months, can you? You pushed Joshua Lightenston off this very parapet last week, and he broke his neck.”
“Well, he deserved it.”
She threw her hands up in defeat. “Why?”
The boss rubbed his chin and grimaced like an unpleasant memory had resurfaced. “He said something I didn’t like.”
“If I had that luxury, Becky would’ve gone over this thing several times already.” Evie took a contemplative pause. “Actually, sir—”
“No.”
“But what if I make a very official and organized pro/con list?” she pleaded.
“Give me one con to Rebecka Erring as an employee.” The breeze picked up, tossing that rebellious dark lock against his forehead.
“She’s determined to be my enemy.”
His face was suddenly closed again, so suddenly that Evie heard the sharp intake of her breath. “Always keep your enemies close, Sage. Life’s more interesting that way.” The smile he was giving her now held no joy, only cruel promises.
Evie swallowed hard, disappointed in herself for needing to take a slow step backward. Out of his sphere and back to her senses.
“Speaking of enemies. May we get to what I brought you out here to discuss before the other employees begin to believe that I’m throwing you over the edge?” he asked.
Evie rolled her eyes and motioned her hand forward. “Go on.”
His mouth turned down in a frown as he spun away from her, back to the forest view. “Another shipment has been compromised.”
Evie tried not to groan, but the frustration was palpable. It had taken her weeks to organize that shipment trade-off and plan the perfect undetectable checkpoints between here and the Gleaming City. The office was run on illegal cargo coming in and out, selling it, trading it, stealing it from King Benedict directly most of the time.
“I suspected as much, since I saw the extra…” Evie tapped the top of her head lightly with her pointer finger.
“They were Valiant Guards.”
King Benedict’s personal guards? They never involved themselves in The Villain’s business. It was a point of strangeness to her, in fact, that in all the times The Villain had struck Benedict by lifting his resources, stealing cargo of all kinds, he’d never struck back.
“So I assume we didn’t make it out with any of the borrowed goods?” This trade deal was going to bring in at least four large crates filled with weapons from King Benedict’s personal collection. Depleting them of not only the swords and firearms themselves but the value of the weapons would no doubt be an enormous loss to their esteemed ruler.
Or it would’ve been if the whole thing hadn’t been blown to bits.