Page 11 of Dark & Darker Still (Vane and Roc: Origin)

Ten

Alice

Once Roc and Vane are gone, I pull out my bag from my closet and start chucking clothes into it.

How fucking dare he?

Somehow, I think I always knew this was where we were headed. I shouldn’t be surprised. Half of Darkland wants one of the Madd Brothers for themselves. I was naive to think I’d get one of them, let alone two.

With my bag full, I cross the living room to the front door.

Daylight is already waning and while the moon is entering its next phase, I can still feel the spirits swirling around the apartment.

“Not today,” I mutter to them and slip from the room.

There are technically two ways into our apartment. One through the Joker’s Den and the other through the alley in back.

I’m not sure where Vane and Roc were going but I don’t want to chance running into them in the Den, so I take the alley.

I know where I’m headed.

Less than a half hour later, I’m knocking on the display window of the First-Born Baker.

Kenny spots me through the glass and frowns once she sees my bag. She comes around the counter and unlocks the door for me. Because she’s in the heart of the Umbrage, she keeps late hours and doesn’t open until seven.

“Which one was it?” she asks, her words sharp with all the violence of a knife.

“Vane. Both. I don’t know.”

She lets me in and locks the door behind me.

“Fresh donuts in back,” she tells me.

I push through the swinging door and drop my bag in her office off the kitchen.

Kenny’s shop is one of the oldest buildings on Fortune’s Lane.

The ceiling is exposed red oak planks with horizontal beams running across it.

The wrought iron oven takes up the entire back wall with a few smaller cooktops to the left and a wall of cooking utensils, cookware, and glassware on open shelves to the right.

In the center, running from one end of the room to the other, is a weathered worktable with a marble top and hand-carved corbels holding it up.

On the marble worktop, there are four giant sheet pans with donuts lined up in rows.

Sugar-glazed and chocolate-frosted. Sprinkled and berry crumbled.

I grab one of the sprinkled donuts with the chocolate frosting and drop into the wooden folding chair in the corner.

There’s a matching chair across from me, with a small folding table between.

On the table is a book with a leather bookmark stuck in the center and a half-drunk cup of black coffee beside it.

I pick up the book with my free hand, careful not to get frosting on it. The cover is an oil painting of a battle scene with the title in gold on the top. The Battle Between Witches and Kings , it reads.

Kenny doesn’t drink coffee, she much prefers tea. And even if she did, she wouldn’t take her coffee black. And she sure as hell wouldn’t read a book about war.

“Ken.”

“Hmmm?”

She’s busy dusting the last row of donuts with sugar sprinkles.

“A little light reading?”

She looks up and eyes the book and starts to answer, but her gaze snaps to the left, to the space just beyond me.

“That would be mine.” A hand reaches past me and snatches the book from my grip.

“You could have warned me,” I tell Kenny.

“You just got here. Unannounced, I might add.”

I huff out in frustration.

Nix is one of the wingless fae, his origins unknown. He grew up on Winterland, trained to become an assassin by the secret society, The Ancient Order of Shadows. He’s extremely skilled at casting illusions, one of the best if you ask anyone who knows him.

I met him a few years back when he was passing through Darkland. He stays with Kenny when he’s not on an active job, and occasionally he will make an appearance at the Joker’s Den to harass Vane and Roc with just his presence.

The brothers don’t talk about him much, but I get the distinct impression that Nix is one of the very few men they would never quarrel with if they could help it.

“Hello, Nix,” I say.

“Hello, love.” He sits across from me, positioning the chair so he has a full view of the entire kitchen, his back against the wall.

“What brings you to Darkland?” I ask.

“Oh, you know. A little of this. A little of that.” He smiles at me.

When I first met Nix at the First-Born Baker’s shop, he was wearing round, black framed glasses, a white button-up shirt and black trousers.

His hands had been shoved in his pants pockets, his broad shoulders slightly stooped as if he was uncomfortable with his tallness, his size, uncomfortable with being in the room.

He barely made eye contact with me and spoke in low tones, careful never to raise his voice.

I’d thought he was a librarian or a scholar or something benign.

And then the next morning, one of the councilmembers in the Darkland High Chamber turned up dead and I learned that there is nothing shy, innocent, or benign about Nix. All of it was a mask to hide his true self—that of a competent, efficient killer.

“Are you here to kill someone?” I ask him.

He rests his head back against the wall and looks at me.

His silence is punctuated by a smile.

Living with the Madd brothers, I like to think I’ve grown immune to the disarming nature of extremely handsome men, but Nix is an exception.

His black hair is on the longer side, but he usually keeps it tied back in a bun. His darker complexion reminds me of a desert at sunrise on a hazy morning. His eyes, too, remind me of the earth, too light to be brown, but too brown to be orange.

He has just one distinguishing mark—one vertical bar tattooed on the inside of his left arm. The mark of the Ancient Order of Shadows. And the mark, when passed beneath a special light, will glow with a wisp of shadow inside of it.

“Who are you here to kill?” I ask him when the silence finally gets to me. “Is it me?”

“If it is, you’ll find out soon enough.”

“Don’t be a dick, Nix,” Kenny says as she dusts off her hands, pink sugar glittering as it rains down to the worktable.

I take a bite of my donut. “If you are here to kill me,” I say, mouth full, “at least let me finish my treat.”

His smile grows larger and a laugh huffs out his nose. “Oh Alice, I could never kill you.”

“Now you’re just trying to flatter me.”

From behind me, I hear the whisper of a spirit.

Death follows him everywhere.

Nix narrows his eyes. “What just happened?”

“Huh?”

“You just checked out.” He sits forward, arms folded on the table. “Like you heard something.”

Something else I find incredibly hot about Nix is how fucking perceptive he is. Which is also frustratingly annoying. Because I can’t hide anything from him when half of who I am is meant to remain hidden. I can’t tell him or Kenny that I can talk to spirits or raise the dead.

“I thought I heard someone at the window.” I pick at my donut, letting my face fall. “I was hoping…actually, no. Never mind. I’m not going to tell you all of my embarrassing shortcomings.”

“You were hoping it was a Madd brother,” he guesses, and I let him think he’s right.

I sigh and rock back against the chair. “Yeah. Vane. It’s stupid.

” I put emphasis on stupid like I’m a vapid, dumb girl.

Nix will read through it, but he also knows how deeply entwined I am with Vane and how I feel about him.

So, it’s not necessarily out of the question that I would be acting like a vapid, dumb girl.

“What about Vane?”

“He broke things off with me because he’s engaged.”

Nix lets out a whistle and sits back. “Brutal.”

“I know.”

“Who’s he engaged to?”

“Lady Genevieve.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Kenny says. “She’s been trying to get him for months. Years. She probably begged Daddy to make it happen.”

“You have to admire the work,” Nix says. “It’s not every day one of the nobility chases one of the Umbrage bosses.”

“Vane may have been stripped of all his societal standings, but he’s still a Maddred.”

“True.” Nix takes a drink of his coffee. “And I assume he does not have your blessing?”

“Of course not.” I wrinkle my nose and tear off another piece of donut. “Gen doesn’t deserve him. I’m the one who’s been by their side the last four years.”

“So, what do you plan to do about it?”

“I don’t know. This is step one of my plan. Hide at Kenny’s.” I might as well test Lainey’s three-step process. I have nothing to lose at this point.

“And step two?” Nix asks.

“Make Vane jealous.”

“Spite. Nice.”

An idea occurs to me. “You could help me.”

He wraps his hand around his coffee mug. “I’m listening.”

“Come with me to the Joke’s Den. Pretend we’re hooking up.”

“Oh, darling. When I’m on a job, I don’t pretend.”

Heat rises up my throat. I glance across the table, meeting his eyes, and with a blink, Kenny’s kitchen is gone. We’re in a dark bedroom, a king’s bed draped in silk sheets. And we’re fucking like we’re racing death’s ticking clock.

I lurch away from the table.

The illusion breaks.

Nix laughs, the sound rumbling in his throat.

“What did you do?” Kenny chides.

“Just showed her the possibilities.”

The appeal is hard to deny. There is nothing I want more than to get beneath Vane’s skin the way he always gets beneath mine. And if I get to hook up with Nix in the process? A bonus.

“Are you serious?” I ask.

Nix shrugs. “I have some time to kill.”

“How much will it cost me?”

“To antagonize the Madd Brothers? Consider this one on the house.”

I don’t go home that night.

Instead, I spend it in Nix’s bed.

He fucks like he kills. With precision. With skill. His eye always on the objective: to make me come.

I don’t feel bad about it. In fact, after my second orgasm, lying next to him in the spare room in Kenny’s apartment, I wonder why it took me so long.

“You’re really good at this,” I tell him, my breathing still labored.

It’s somewhere after three in the morning and moonlight is spilling in through the bedroom windows. He expended as much energy as I did and yet he isn’t sweating, his breathing even.

“I know,” he says, dead serious. There is no underlying tone of ego in his answer. It’s just a fact.

“I feel like I should be paying you.”

“I don’t take money for sex.” He turns into me, hooking me around the waist. A second later, I’m straddling his hips, nothing but the sheets between us.

His hair is still tied back, but several strands have come loose, trailing down his neck.

In the moonlight, he looks every bit the assassin he is, impossible to read, tempting to know, quietly dangerous.

All around me, spirits whisper in my ear.

If I could bat them away, I would.

“Where will you go after this?”

His fingers trail down from my waist over the outside of my thigh. Goosebumps follow his touch.

“I have a job on Lostland.”

“Seriously? How do you get there when no one knows the way?”

“I know the way.”

The tips of his fingers follow the curve of my thigh, down to the sensitive inner flesh.

“Can I go with you?”

I’m not sure where the question comes from, but it’s out before I can stop it.

“You want to go on vacation with an assassin?”

“Why not?”

He grazes the seam between my thigh and my pussy and a hiss escapes me. I’m still sensitive to his touch, adrenaline still thumping through my veins.

“You can’t run from your problems.”

I roll my eyes and slide off of him, annoyed.

Men are always telling me what I can and cannot do.

“I don’t have problems.”

Nix shoves me over to my belly and climbs on top of me, covering my body with his. His cock is half hard, pushing between my thighs.

“We all have problems, love.”

I don’t want to think about my problems. I don’t want to think about how the one man I loved the hardest left me to fend for myself. How afterward, I went looking for his replacement and somehow found myself entangled with his nephews, two men who are equally unavailable.

I don’t just have problems, I have a nest of poisonous snakes.

Nix rocks his hips and his cock thickens, pressing closer to my center.

I arch my ass up, meeting him.

“For once, I wish someone would let me run,” I hear myself saying.

“If you want my advice, the further you run, the quicker your problems catch you.”

His hand comes around, fingers wrapping around my throat.

I am distantly aware that he could kill me in a thousand creative ways.

Nix’s mouth comes to the soft curve of my ear, his voice confident, sure. “Spread your legs for me.”

I wiggle beneath him, opening up more.

He slides in easily. I’m still wet and messy from our last session.

The whisper of spirits increases and a chill rolls down my spine despite the heat of the room and the heat of Nix pressed against me.

He rocks his hips forward, filling me up and I moan out into the pillow as his fingers press harder at my throat.

“Fucking you feels like how I imagine dying is,” he answers.

And for some reason, that gets me wetter.

Because I know what he means even if he doesn’t entirely understand the connection.

I’ve always been a gateway to the other side, the key that neatly fits into the lock of the dead.

And who better than an assassin to know what the edge of death feels like?

I am as close as he will come to experiencing what he does best.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself as he shoves into me.

Someone like Nix, like Roc and Vane, can have anyone they want. And there is power in being the chosen one, if only for a night.

Nix finds the right angle, thrusting inside of me, hitting just the right spot.

The pressure builds quickly like a storm building over open water.

Suddenly I’m coming, loud and high-pitched, and Nix increases his tempo, chasing the pleasure with me.

“I love hearing you moan,” he says, his words husky and urgent as his hand clamps over my mouth, “but Kenny will absolutely kick us out.”

His hand drowns out any noise and my breath huffs out around his fingers as he sinks in deeper, his own groan huffing into my ear.

“Three loads, two holes, in less than twelve hours.” He pulls out slightly, then rocks back in slowly. “They’re going to smell me all over you.”

The illicit thrill of it dances through my lower abdomen.

He’s right. Jabberwockies have heightened senses. And I’d be lying if I hadn’t already thought of this.

His hand slips away from my mouth, and I breathe out against the pillow. “Just to be sure, I could take a few more.”

He laughs and rolls off of me. “We do have plenty of time for it.”

“Challenge accepted.”