Page 74 of Assistant to the Villain

He didn’t feel ruined with Evie, though. He felt reborn.

What a fucking disaster.

Chapter 30

Evie

“It’s crooked,” Becky insisted.

Evie pushed the frame higher onto the wall, nearly stumbling from the ladder she was already precariously close to falling from.

“So is your face,” Evie mumbled under her breath, feeling the burn in her biceps from pinning up the sides of the heavy artwork.

“What was that?” Becky called up. Even a couple of feet below her, she still found a way to look down her nose at Evie.

“Nothing,” Evie muttered. She hated herself for it, but the normalcy of their endless display of cutting words gave her a level of familiar comfort. After all the unpredictable abnormality of the past few weeks, it was nice to have something she could count on.

“Really? I thought you said something about my face being crooked.” From somewhere across the room, Evie heard an intern cough into their hands.

“Evie would never say anything like that.” Tatianna’s teasing face appeared below her. “She’s far too moral.”

“I am not,” Evie said with a frown. “I can be ruthless.” Or at least, her version of ruthless.

Distracted by thoughts of doing evil to Becky to prove her point, Evie felt her foot catch against the ladder rung and slide down a peg.

“Careful!” Becky yelled. “Don’t drop it.”

“And of course, don’t fall,” Tatianna added mildly.

Since Evie’s return to work after quitting, Becky had taken it upon herself to bring rule following to…an obscene level.

Just last week, Becky had issued a memo that all employees must be punctual, well-groomed, and without the odious scent of dragon upon their person. Which of course meant Blade had to spend several minutes in the washroom before entering their offices each day—which he didn’t—or risk being written up—which he did.

If that wasn’t enough, Becky had decided that any free and idle moment must be utilized to increase work productivity. She’d cut the spare fifteen minutes they were all given each shift in addition to ten minutes of their half-hour lunch break and replaced them with an “extras” assignment sheet. Every single task on the list was worse than the last.

But it was futile to resist, for the few who did found their paychecks “misplaced” at the week’s end and their desks suddenly moved to the part of the office the spiders seemed to populate.

Startlingly, at the top of the extras list was Tatianna, who’d been given the horrifically tedious task of refilling their ink vials for their office supplies. At the healer’s protests, especially because of the risk to her gowns, Becky had told her this was a good opportunity to wear more appropriate work attire, since her lavish pink dresses were better suited to a ball than to a respectable organization. Tatianna had thrown a pillow at the woman. A pink one.

“Lift up the corner. It’s still crooked,” Becky advised, as though Evie’s arms weren’t shaking with the effort to hold up the large piece of art.

Sweat beaded her brow, and Evie snapped back, “Please do me a favor…and shut up.” This somehow worked—Becky didn’t reply.

Evie’s palm burned where it slid against the metal, and she pushed the corner of the frame higher before it could cut farther into her skin. The fact that she was even doing this in the first place was a little absurd, but she didn’t trust anyone else to peek under the cloth before she unveiled her precious find.

“I hope whatever you picked from storage to replace the last portrait is worthy of the front wall,” Becky said, and Evie could justhearthat she had one eyebrow raised.

It was no secret that Becky was bitter about what had happened to the last portrait. She apparently had given it to the boss as a gift. It was an ugly art piece Becky had said was an abstract work from an elusive artist, and she never failed to brag about it whenever anyone breathed in the artwork’s direction.

The sudden whipping sounds of flapping wings from the courtyard caused Becky to flinch, and Evie chuckled to herself and reached out to straighten the frame one last time before climbing back down the rungs.

Blade and the dragon had been working together like a finely tuned machine, but they still had some rough edges to smooth. Still, Evie had grown fond of those edges. Seeing as yesterday afternoon the dragon, who was still growing accustomed to free range with his wings, came crashing through one of the stained glass windows. Not Evie’s favorite brew companion in the kitchen, thankfully.

It was just as well; it had been an incredibly boring and unproductive beginning of their week until that point.

After leaving Otto Warsen’s smithy, a sense of finality and closure following the incident, the boss had become distractingly preoccupied with an issue he didn’t seem to need her for.

But Evie contented herself with the sweet bit of joy she’d get with the dangerous stunt she was about to pull with this art display.