Don’t tell Edwin the cauldron brew is too strong, Evie.
Her breathing grew labored as she climbed the second story and rounded on the candlelit banisters to the next flight, calves beginning to burn beneath the thick blue skirt that brushed the tops of her ankles.
An echoing scream from the torture chambers in the dungeons below stopped her in her tracks. She blinked for a moment, shaking her head, then quickly continued up the stairs again.
Despite his other obviously nefarious doings, the boss had a strange and confusing set of moral checkpoints that he followed rather diligently—first of which was to never harm innocents, to her relief. His evil was very much the vengeful kind. She also liked that his moral list included treating the women of the world with the same level of respect and esteem as the men. Which, in hindsight, wasn’t much to begin with, but at least the office rules were more consistent than the outside world’s view.
Before she worked for the evil overlord, Evie had spent her days employed by her local village blacksmith, Otto Warsen. Organizing his tools, handing him whatever instruments he required so that he could stay hard at work on the forge. It had been a decent post, one that paid enough for her to support her ailing father and still be home in time to make dinner for him and her younger sister.
Or at least it had been a decent enough position—until it wasn’t.
Evie felt along her shoulder beneath her linen shirt to the raised, jagged scar hidden there. If it had been a normal blade, it would’ve healed properly. But whatever magic had been ingrained into the white dagger was now living beneath her skin like a curse. One so vicious that anytime she felt an ounce of pain anywhere on her body, the scar glowed. A nuisance, since inanimate objects seemed to get in her way at an alarming rate.
If there was something to stumble over, it would surely find her.
Chuckling through another heaving breath, Evie began her climb of the final set of stairs—a lair big enough for a village and he had them working on the top floor? Evil, thy name is villain—but she continued on to the person who had altered the course of her life.
It seemed feeble to merely refer to her boss as a “person.” In so many ways, he was larger than life, but her being responsible for his every want and need had humanized him. The mysterious veil that lay over him when she’d first begun had slipped away, and a far clearer picture was set in her mind.
Still, she had much to learn.
Like what darkness lurked within him that there would be three severed heads hanging from the ever-loving ceiling.
She reached the top step and swiped a hand across her sweaty forehead, despairing over the time she’d spent making herself presentable that morning. A mirror wasn’t necessary to know that her cheeks were flushed and the wispy hairs coming loose from her braid were sticking to her forehead. Moving down the hall, she could feel the slick sweat sliding between her thighs.
A tempting thought of loose trousers danced across her mind.
The boss had made it very clear there were no rules in the way his workers dressed, meaning for the first time in Evie’s employment, she was permitted to wear something other than drab-colored dresses. But she feared wearing something as scandalous as trousers would draw too much attention to herself.
Women? Have legs? Alert the town crier!
No, she already courted enough suspicion in her small village about the “mysterious” job she disappeared to each day. Best to blend in so nobody deigned to take a closer look.
If anyone asked about her work, she told them she’d gotten a position as a maid at a large estate in a neighboring village.
It wasn’t a complete lie. She was always cleaning up messes around The Villain—granted, they usually involved blood.
Reaching the end of the hall, she pulled on the gilded sconce closest to the stained glass window, then stepped back as the brick wall slowly slid open, revealing the hidden ballroom that doubled as their workspace beyond. She hustled into the large room as the wall slid closed behind her and took a deep breath. The fresh smell of parchment and ink permeated the air in a comforting, familiar way that never failed to make her smile.
“Good morning, Evangelina.”
And now her morning was ruined.
Rebecka Erring sat with her pool of administrative professionals to the left, everyone pausing their work to blink up at Evie now. Rebecka’s eyes held Evie’s gaze from behind large, round spectacles, and Evie said, “Good morning, Becky.”
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.