Assistant to the Villain

The caricature was amusing.

But what truly caught his attention, making him do a slight double take, was the look on his assistant’s face. There was a mischievous tilt to her mouth, a maniacal satisfaction gleaming in her eyes.

He had a wild thought of getting a hundred more of those hideous depictions of him hung around the room, just to keep seeing that look on her face.

Sage gasped, her eyes going wide as she finally took in his appearance. “What happened to you?”

Ah yes, he’d forgotten to clean up the blood.

“I had a small run-in with a guvre,” he admitted.

Wiping at the oozing burn on his forehead, Trystan flinched away from his own hand. Catching a guvre was not easy work, but it needed to be done.

Thinking of the guvre reminded him of the blacksmith…and the way Trystan had carelessly missed how discomfited Sage was in the man’s presence.

Finding small marks of her throughout the smithy’s workplace had disarmed him. The carvings on her old desk were clumsy but sweet. The paper butterflies that had been left stuck to the windows, identical to the ones Sage had cut up and put all over the walls on her first day of work. They had driven him mad.

But he’d been oddly bereft when she’d taken them down.

Seeing the little touches of her everywhere in the blacksmith’s shop gave him a jittery sort of joy, which was oddly distracting. Thus Trystan had missed her flinches until it was almost too late. And he found that he hated himself for that quite a bit.

That was a problem.

He could tell his assistant was fighting the urge to rush to his side and look more closely at his wound…which was not necessary. “May I speak with you a moment, Tatianna?” he said and moved to a more discreet area of the office. Far from his assistant’s reach—and ears.

Glowing dark-brown hands appeared before his face, but he waved them away. “Thank you, Tatianna, but it will heal quickly enough.”

He coughed, his gaze darting to his assistant, who was holding a very lengthy conversation with Kingsley, if the rapid flashing of one-word signs was anything to go by. He turned back to Tatianna and said in a low voice, “There’s a dagger for you in my office.”

The healer lifted a brow. “Who am I stabbing?”

“What?” But he quickly recognized the same sardonic twinkle in her dark eyes from when they were children. “It’s a magical one. It, um— Ask Sage about it.”

“Is this about the magic-ingrained scar in her shoulder?” Tatianna whispered, her eyes narrowing with concern.

“She told you?” Trystan asked, one eyebrow raised.

“I felt it every time I healed her. But I never asked, and she never told me.” Tatianna looked to Sage, who was currently holding up her thumb in answer to a sign from the frog that Trystan couldn’t make out from here. He shuddered as he imagined what Kingsley could be convincing her to do now.

“It pains her more when she’s near it, the dagger,” Trystan said, feeling oddly small, unable to fix this for his assistant on his own. “Can you do anything?”

A calm fierceness lit Tatianna’s expression. “I will do whatever I can…to help her.”

It gave him comfort, however insignificant or ridiculous, that Tatianna looked as if she would take on the whole world before allowing it to touch Evie Sage.

“Thank you.” Two words he didn’t say often, but if anyone deserved them, it was Tatianna.

She nodded, patting his shoulder in a friendly, familial way before she strode off toward his office, the pink train attached to her dress gliding behind her.

Trystan wandered back over toward Sage, who was looking satisfied as she angled her thumb back and forth at the painting, Kingsley ribbiting beside her. A rusty chuckle nearly escaped the back of his throat before he caught himself. Instead, he leaned down and put his head alongside hers above the crook of her shoulder. He pretended that he didn’t hear her breath hitch, pretended his wasn’t an echo.

“It’s crooked, left side,” he whispered, quickly stepping back from the vanilla smell of her that was making it difficult to form full sentences.

“Ugh, Kingsley, you were right,” she said and reached out to adjust the frame.

Trystan felt his palms itch with the need to touch her, which was absolutely unacceptable.

He spun toward his office, and the scuff of his boots moving farther away caused his assistant to sprint forward until she was walking beside him. “I’m sorry. You’ve been out of commission basically all week, and then you just casually say that you were playing with a guvre!”

Pushing the door to his office open, he was glad to see Tatianna had already retrieved the blade and left. He grabbed the chair closest to his desk and angled it slightly toward the window. Only because it looked nicer that way; it had nothing to do with the sun hitting it at just the right angle, causing sparks of light to glint in Sage’s long black hair.

He just liked the chair there.

“I wasn’t playing with it, Sage.” He winced as he sank into the comfort of the other chair, not bothering to go around his desk to his own. He resisted a deep sigh as his assistant sat down and the sun fell over her cheeks.

It was just a good spot for the chair.

“Oh, were you two discussing tax reform with the creature, then?” she muttered dryly, fingers brushing lightly over the notebook she never seemed to be without.

“I need the guvre because King Benedict wants him,” he admitted. It was just simpler that way.

“What need does he have for that thing?” Evie asked curiously.

“I don’t know. I just know that if there is something the king wants, it’s imperative he doesn’t get it.”

“Because of the stepping-on-your-foot thing?” Sage asked rhetorically and leaned over his desk to grab the quill out of the inkpot, giving him a perfect view of a light freckle on her exposed collarbone.

He poured what was left of his water canteen down his throat to stanch the dryness.

“You really caught a guvre?” Sage began writing something furiously in her little book. “Should I research how to maintain one?”

“No time.” That of course would’ve been the prudent course of action, had Trystan not spent the last decade preparing for this.

They’d caught it.

Finally.

It was truly the look in the creature’s eyes when he’d faced him that had affirmed his fears, an emotion he so rarely felt. But when a creature of that size peered into your soul, it was chilling. He’d locked the beast away in the cell, one large enough for him to move around freely, with a keen understanding between them.

They both had someone to protect—the creature understood that.

Or he was slowly losing his mind, and the dark clouds that swept in from distant skies, dimming the light around Sage’s face, were a metaphor for how he blackened everything he touched.

“That’s odd,” Sage noted, tilting her head at the darkness cast from the window and then jumping slightly when thunder shook the walls.

“No, unfortunately that’s to be expected when you keep a guvre against their will.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, clenching his fist with his other hand.

“A storm?”

“They’re called ‘fate’s vengeful creatures’ for a reason. Holding one always has some sort of natural consequence that becomes worse the longer you keep them.”

“So the natural consequence for holding this guvre is a storm?” On cue, lightning lit up the sky, followed quickly by another echoing boom of thunder. Her small hand came up and gripped his forearm, her eyes wide in alarm.

Her touch burned.

Shaking her arm off, he stood up and slinked closer to the wall, trying to bring about a distance that allowed him the space to think properly.

She narrowed her eyes at his sudden withdrawal.

“It would appear that way, yes.” The skies chose that moment to split open and deluge the manor in pounding rainfall.

She had to raise her voice slightly to be heard over the torrential downpour. “And are you planning on releasing the creature by the day’s end?”

“No, I cannot.” He needed him at least long enough for the cogs of his plan to roll together. For the traitor to inform the king.

Sage sighed, moving toward the door, a sense of purpose in her gait. “I’ll send the interns for some bedrolls from the laundry room, then.”

“Why on earth would you do that?” Trystan asked, an uneasiness beginning to creep around him like a stealthy predator.

“Because if the storm keeps up like this, there’s no way anyone can leave here safely at the end of the day.” Her gaze was pointed as another crack of lightning lit up the room around them. She paused as if she needed to carefully choose her next words. She needn’t have bothered. Waves of doom were already roiling in his stomach.

Finally, she said, “We’re trapped here for the night. Together.”

Lightning lit up the sky once more, flickering over Sage’s lips, slightly turned up at the corners. He leaned hard against his desk when the door closed behind her.

Squeezing his eyes tight, he tried to organize his thoughts.

But as lightning flashed yet again, he couldn’t help worrying that his plan for vengeance had given him more than he bargained for.