Accomplice to the Villain (Assistant and the Villain Book 3)

Evie

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” Evie said as they took long strides down to the office kitchens, where the apparent “ghost” was residing.

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“I don’t,” her boss grumbled.

“Then why are you coming with me?” she asked, eyeing him suspiciously as they rounded the corner, a flash of an open window gifting them wisps of warm breeze and the sweet smell of green grass.

“Because on the off chance there is a spirit haunting my kitchen, I hardly want you to be its first impression of the living. You’ll scare it.”

Evie huffed and shoved at his shoulder. His magic aided her and formed a line around his feet until he was stumbling headlong into the wall. “Sage!”

She shrugged innocently, spinning around and walking backward through the kitchen entryway, addressing him with wide eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I scare you?”

When Evie turned, however, she did in fact scream—in surprise. “Gods! Mama, what are you doing?”

Nura Sage stood before them, moaning over the kitchen sink with a cloth wrapped around her finger, buried in one of Edwin’s giant aprons. The garment was so overlong on her that she did appear spirit-like—haunting the oven, apparently. Her mother brushed her curls back behind her ears with one hand, her golden skin glistening with sweat. “I heard your office chef was taking a day off, so I thought I’d make one of your favorite desserts. But I think I was overly ambitious. I haven’t used an oven since Gideon’s fifteenth birthday.” Her mother smiled sheepishly. “I burned myself, and I’m afraid my moaning and hunching over may have frightened a few of your workers. I’d forgotten how clumsy I am in the kitchen.”

“That’s just as well, Mistress Sage,” her boss said dryly beside her. “Your daughter appears to be clumsy everywhere else.”

Evie glared at him, outraged. “I’m not the one who just tripped over my own magic.”

“Oh my,” Nura said quietly. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble. Shall I excuse myself?”

“No!” they both yelled, proceeding to glare at each other again. Ironically, as much as she loved them both, there were two people in the world Evie would not want to be alone with, and both of them stood before her. At least not right now, when there were too many feelings tied up in every direction. She wanted to retain her calm claim to power, and she could not do that with Trystan when she felt a little like she might strangle him.

And Evie’s mother, well… Her mother’s presence felt a bit like it was strangling her.

“All right,” Nura said carefully, stepping away from the counter, a serene look upon her face. The calm woman before Evie was a stranger. She’d hoped that the past weeks would reacclimatize her to her mother’s presence as she’d done with Gideon, but this was different than her brother’s return. Granted, it had hurt to have her brother willfully stay away all these years, but it hadn’t started that way. He didn’t always have a choice.

Nura Sage, however, had a choice, and no matter what happy feelings surged at reuniting with her—and as much pain as Evie knew her mother had suffered—she couldn’t help but resent her for forcing Evie to suffer all those years, too. Alone.

Nura smiled at her; it was motherly and nostalgic. It upset Evie’s stomach to look upon it, but she smiled back anyway, praying her mother still couldn’t tell the difference between her sincere one and the false one. “Perhaps you could stay, then, Evie? If Trystan must return to work? We could attempt to salvage this dough together.”

Nura was so hopeful, and every inch of Evie’s soul was screaming at her to comply, to be agreeable, because surely she’d avoided this long enough. The past two weeks, she’d only seen Nura when she was also with Gideon or on the very rare occasion that Lyssa spoke with their mother. It wasn’t that Evie wasn’t grateful for her mother’s safety or the newness of Nura’s emotional stability. It was that she couldn’t trust it.

She wasn’t sure if she’d even know how.

When a childhood was ruled by the patterns of others, that child learned as an adult to heed them. And as was her pattern, anytime Evie’s mother had a good day, it was always followed by several bad ones.noveldrama

“I would love to, Mama,” Evie started, feeling a little like a rabbit caught in a snare. “But I’m working. Perhaps another day? The week’s end, maybe?”

Nura’s smile faltered, a sadness Evie recognized behind her warm brown eyes. “Oh. Of course, how silly. I shouldn’t have assumed—”

“I have no work to do,” Trystan said, folding his hands in front of him expectantly.

Evie and her mother stared at him, awaiting an explanation. “Are you bragging?” Evie angled her head as she took him in. Had the two weeks apart completely undone her ability to read him? What on earth was he doing?

He raised a brow at her before turning to address her mother. “I’m attempting to say that I would be happy to help you bake if you need a steady set of hands.”

Oh.

No cause for alarm.

He was merely attempting to turn her heart inside out.

That terribly warm feeling spreading through her chest only worsened when her mother’s face brightened and her eyes softened, hopeful. “Oh, Trystan, dear, I could not ask you to do that. I’m sure there’s much business you need to attend to.”

Her boss began rolling up his sleeves until they were tucked neatly at his elbows. Forearms—which she was sure weren’t meant to be a sensual part of the body, but at which Evie found herself staring anyway—were revealed, and she felt her face flush.

“No business,” Trystan said, sauntering toward the dough and looking at it like it might detonate. “The boon of being the boss is deciding my own schedule without complaint from my subordinates.”

Evie grumbled, “I wasn’t going to complain.”

The Villain gave her a pointed look as he pulled a significantly shorter apron from the small closet and handed it wordlessly to Nura, who smiled, busying herself with it in the corner of the room. “‘Subordinate’ implies I have some sort of control over you, Sage,” he said quietly, turning away to cinch the ties of his own apron at his back. “And I would say, by all accounts, you’re hardly below me.”

“Even if he’d really like you to be.” Blade grinned, appearing at Evie’s shoulder. At her eye roll, he slung a muscular arm around her, his green sleeves billowing from his copper vest all the way to his wrists.

A metal spoon soared through the air and knocked Blade square between the eyes. “Ow!” the dragon trainer yelped, releasing Evie as he rubbed at the spot with an accusatory look in his amber eyes.

“Evie’s mother is present, you disrespectful lout.” The Villain took a threatening step toward the dragon trainer.

Blade rubbed his forehead, glaring. “I’m not the one undressing her daughter with my eyes.”

The Villain’s nostrils flared, and Evie was between the two before her boss could take another step, holding a hand out, halting him. “I’m almost certain my mother would find violent murder more offensive than innuendo.”

“It doesn’t have to be violent,” her boss said dryly before turning to attend to the bowl of mangled dough. “Although this…”

Nura stepped forward, her bemused grin at the display fading into a wince when she looked upon her creation. “I know it’s hopeless. I thought it would help if I added that strange pink flour, but it seemed to only make the texture worse.”

“You used my pink flour?”

Lyssa stood in the doorway, her black hair now in two braids adorned with red ribbons, her dark eyes round and glistening with unshed tears and her fingers clenched into tight fists. “That was for my and Edwin’s tea scones.”

Their mother seemed to be unsure of what to do with her hands as she tried to grasp for something to say to the daughter who had been ignoring her almost entirely since her return. Lyssa had refused nearly every attempt at Nura’s attention, and Nura, for all her faults, had taken it in stride.

Until now.

“Lyssa.” Nura reached out for her youngest daughter and flinched when Lyssa stepped farther into Evie’s side. “I—I’m so sorry; I had no idea. Can you forgive me?”

Lyssa’s dark brows turned to a downward slant, and Evie felt her sister’s hands shaking against her waist. “No. That was mine, and you ruined it. You ruined everything.”

“Lyssa,” Evie said carefully, reaching for her little sister but catching only air when Lyssa stepped away and bolted from the room.

A long pause settled over the kitchen, no one moving an inch until Gideon poked his head in, his sandy-brown hair slicked back away from his face. “Everything okay in here? I ran into Lyssa, and she seemed upset.”

When Evie finally found the courage to look upon her mother’s face, she knew with a certainty that Nura’s good day was over.

And Evie braced herself.

For a bad one.