Page 52 of Assistant to the Villain

Chapter 20

The Villain

The next morning, Blade Gushiken’s voice was laced with earnest amusement. “I think you’re going to wear a hole in the floor, boss.”

Trystan nearly took the man’s head off.

But he halted his pacing of his office floor, not caring for the nervous looks his employees were giving him through the doorway. Or did he care?

He ran a hand through his hair. He couldn’t think properly under these conditions.

Without Sage, he’d had to go back to drinking his cauldron brew black, as Edwin thought he always did. The ogre had been his village’s baker when Trystan was just a boy, and he was one of the only beings in this world Trystan really believed was all goodness. It’s why Sage had to spend her mornings covertly adding sweetness to the brew. If Edwin found out Trystan didn’t like the drink he’d worked so hard to develop, it might wound him.

Caring about other people is very irritating.

He thought of his assistant and began pacing once more. Trystan expected her to fly through the doors of his office that morning, a demure apology on her lips and perhaps a pastry for him in hand.

A sensible explanation for why she had that letter in the first place would follow, and all would go back to how it was.

Trystan had spent the night clearing his head and was prepared to meet Sage’s pleading with logical and fair judgment. After all, he’d been seconds away from telling her a secret that he’d scarcely spoken aloud toanyone.

The worst of it waswantingto trust someone. If you remained indifferent, the fallible could never fail you and you would remain safe. Trystan hadwantedto trust her, and that was not Sage’s fault but his own.

In addition to that problem, the office seemed to be going to shambles.

Rebecka had reported three interns nearly brawling to the death that morning because they’d been placed on the same cleaning crew in the dungeons. He hadn’t been aware Sage knew the interns well enough to avoid skirmishes among them. Clever, but not clever enough to make him rethink her obvious transgressions.

Then there’d been some sob story about one of the men’s betrothed sleeping with his cousin, and Trystan had tuned out his Humans and Magical Creatures Resource Manager before the melodrama rotted his brain.

But that had only been the first issue of the day. It seemed that in the few months Sage had been here, she’d ingrained herself into nearly every moving wheel in his organization, like vines weaving through the foundation of a very old house, becoming a part of it. The Villain had had a fully functioning business before her, hadn’t he? One would have no clue, since the sky seemed to be falling at nearly every point of the morning thus far.

A weapons shipment came in, but only Sage, ever the notetaker in her gold-foiled journal, had any idea which shipment they had been expecting. It had taken twenty employees away from their current tasks to open every crate so they could catalog what was inside.

Their magical filing cabinet, envy of all because of its ability to alphabetize any document that entered the enchanted space, had broken. The A’s were where the X’s should have been, and the L, M, N, O, and P files had simply been…eaten by the wood.

When Trystan had finally brought himself to ask if there was anyone who knew how to fix it, they replied as if they’d rehearsed it for his own torture. “Ms. Sage usually knows.”

He avoided Tatianna when he could, and for good reason, as the woman traded in office gossip. But an hour ago, Trystan had found himself feeling desperate to prove he was right to distrust his assistant, so he’d leaned into the healer’s domain to ask if she’d heard anyone in the office sharing an incriminating secret with her about Sage. The healer had looked at him with such venomous disdain, Trystan thought she must have been poisoning him with her eyes.

He felt like his whole body was burning.

“No,” she’d replied flatly. “I haven’t.”

The Villain had nodded and cleared his throat and then left the healer’s room feeling almost…embarrassed?

What a nightmare this was.

And as if everything wasn’t already ripping apart at the seams, Blade was now occupying Trystan’s attention with something he knew would turn his already sour mood into straight-up rotten.

“Don’t you have a beast to tame?” Trystan barked at Blade, praying to the gods that the dragon trainer would leave him to sulk.

“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about—” Blade turned as Rebecka made her way to The Villain’s desk to set down another chalice of the foul, non-sugared brew. “Good morning, Rebecka.”

“It is, isn’t it?” She nodded happily, a wide smile spreading beneath her thick frames.

Blade frowned at her back as she returned to her new desk—right outside Trystan’s office. The dragon trainer walked over and closed the door behind her before turning to Trystan again. “I don’t care how hard you need to beg—just do it, please. That was terrifying.” He shivered, like Ms. Erring’s happiness was a sign of an apocalyptic end.

“I don’t beg. For anything,” The Villain insisted, crossing his arms and noting his shirt didn’t feel quite as soft as when Sage managed the launderers. Today, his shirts were scratchy and irritating.