The Villain by L.J. Shen

Days dragged like a nail over a blackboard.

I was on edge. Jumpy, cranky, and incapable of taking deep, satisfying breaths.

Ever since I returned from Cillian’s office empty-handed, I couldn’t stomach anything—be it food, coffee, water, or the sight of myself in the mirror.

My mind constantly drifted to a mental video of Byrne and Kaminski throwing my lifeless body into the Charles River. About Cillian’s rejection. The unbearable sting of it.

I’d forgotten the words to all the songs during circle time in class, almost fed Reid, who was lactose intolerant, Dahlia’s mac and cheese, and mixed kinetic sand with the real one, making a huge mess I had to stay late to clean up afterward.

Gray clouds swollen with rain hovered over me as I headed home, jogging from my bike to my entryway, clutching my shoulder bag in a vise grip. I reminded myself I had both pepper spray and a Taser, and that there was zero percent chance Byrne and Kaminski would kill me at my doorstep.

Well, maybe a ten percent chance.

It was probably somewhere around twenty-five but definitely no more than that.

The minute I got into my building, I reached for the switch. To my surprise, the light was already on. A strong hand gripped my wrist, spinning me around to face the person it belonged to.

Fight or flight?my body asked me.

Fight, my brain answered. Always fight.

I threw my bag in the intruder’s face, a growl ripping out of my mouth. He dodged it effortlessly, dumping it to the floor and causing the contents of my bag to roll out. I reached up to claw his eyes. He snatched both my wrists in one palm, locking them in place between us before backing me against the entrance door so we were flush against each other.

“Let me go!” I screamed.

To my shock, the dark, mammoth figure did just that, stepping back and picking up the pepper spray that fell from my bag to examine it flippantly.

“Cillian?”

I resisted the urge to rub my eyes in disbelief. But there he was, wearing a designer trench coat, pointy Italian loafers, and his signature go-fuck-yourself scowl that made my heart loop around like a stripper on a pole.

“You’re here,” I said, more to myself than to him.

Why? How? When? So many questions floated in my foggy brain.

“I sincerely hope our children won’t inherit your tendency to point out the obvious. I find it extremely trivial.” He popped the safety off the pepper spray and screwed it back right, so the next time I tried to use it, it would be ready to go.

“Hmm, what?” I swatted away wisps of hair that flopped over my eyes like stubborn branches in a jungle. The five o’clock shadow veiling the thick column of his throat made me want to press my lips to his neck.

His imperfections made him intimately beautiful. I despised every second of being around him.

“Remember I told you I don’t hand out free favors?” He rolled the pepper spray between his fingers, his eyes on the small canister.

“Kind of hard to forget.”

“Well, it’s your lucky day.”

“Allow me to be skeptical.”

At this point, I wasn’t down on my luck. I was six feet under it. Somewhere between hapless and cursed.

“I figured out what I want from you.”

“You want something from little ole me?” I put my hand to my chest with a mocking gasp while I tried to regulate my racing heartbeat. I couldn’t help it. He never missed a chance to belittle me. “I’m speechless.”

“Don’t get my hopes up, Flower Girl,” he muttered.

My nickname didn’t escape me. The Flower Girl was traditionally the toddler at the wedding, designed to draw coos and positive attention. The naïve kid whose job was to walk a straight line.

He stepped toward me, invading my personal space. His scent of male, dry cedar, and leather seeped into my system, making me drunk.

“For this to work, you mustn’t develop any feelings for me,” he warned darkly.

There was no point in telling him I’d never gotten over him in the first place. Not really. Not in all the ways that mattered.

He removed a lock of damp hair from my temple without touching my skin. The way he stared at me unnerved me. With cold contempt, suggesting he was brought here at gunpoint and not of his own free will.

“I will take care of your money and divorce problems. Make them go away. Not as a loan, but a gift.”

My body sagged with relief.

“Oh, God. Cillian, thank you so—”

“Let me finish,” he hissed, his voice cracking through the air like a whip. “I never let a good crisis go to waste, and yours might be very beneficial for me. You won’t have to pay me because your form of compensation will be on the unconventional side. You are going to be my wife. You will marry me, Persephone Penrose. Smile for the cameras for me. Attend charity events on my behalf. And give me children. As many as needed until I have a son. Be it one, three, or six.”

“Anything!” I cried out, rushing to accept his offer before his words sank in. “I would love to—”

Wait, what?

For a long moment, I simply stared at him. I was trying to decide whether he was making some elaborate joke on my behalf.

Somehow, I didn’t think he was. For one thing, Cillian Fitzpatrick did not possess a sense of humor. If humor met him in a dark alley, it would shrivel into itself and explode into a cloud of squeaking bats. For another, more than he was cruel, Kill was terrifyingly pragmatic. He wouldn’t waste his precious time on pranking me.

“You want me to marry you?” I repeated dumbly.

His face was resigned and solemn. He offered me a curt nod.

Holy hell, he wasn’t kidding. The man of my dreams wanted to wed me. To take me as a wife.

There was only one possible answer for that.

“No.” I pushed him away. “Not in a million years. No, nope, nien, niet.” I was rummaging through my memory for other languages to refuse him in. “No,” I said again. “The last one was in Spanish, not English.”

“Elaborate,” he demanded.

“We can’t marry. We don’t love each other.” I tilted my chin up defiantly. “And yes, I know love is so very working class.”

“Middle class,” he corrected. “The happy, dumb medium is comfortable enough not to care, and stupid enough not to aim higher. Working and upper classes always take financial matters into consideration. May I remind you the last time you married for love,” he said the word as you would say herpes, “it ended with a massive debt, a runaway husband, and death threats? Love is overrated, not to mention fickle. It comes and goes. You can’t build a foundation on it. Mutual interests and alliance are a different story.”

But here was the really pathetic part—I didn’t want to marry him precisely because a part of me did love him.

Putting my happiness in his hands was the dumbest idea I’d ever have.

No matter how much I tried to ignore it, Kill was my first real crush. My first obsession. My unfulfilled wish. He would always hold a piece of my heart, and I didn’t want to think of all the ways he was going to abuse it if we were together.

Plus, marrying Boston’s most notorious villain was a bad idea, and I was pretty sure I’d filled my quota of asshole husbands for this century.

“Look, how about a compromise?” I smiled brightly. “I can date you. Be your girlfriend. Hang on your arm and take a good picture. We’ll have a little arrangement.”

He stared at me with open amusement.

“You think your company is worth a hundred thousand dollars?”

“You’re offering me a hundred grand to become your live-in escort and bear your children. Plural. If I were a surrogate, I’d get that same amount of money for one baby,” I burst out.

“Go be a surrogate.” He shrugged.

“It’s a long procedure. I don’t have enough time.”

“You don’t seem to have enough brain, either.” He tapped my temple, frowning as if wondering how much was inside that head of mine. “Take my offer. It’s your only way out.”

I pushed him away.

“You’re a bastard.”

He smiled impatiently. “You knew that when you offered yourself to me very willingly all those years ago.”

He remembered.

He remembered, and for some reason, that completely defused me.

Auntie Tilda, what the hell have you done?

“Look.” I shook my head, trying to think straight. “How about we start dating and I—”

“No,” he cut me off dryly. “Marriage or nothing.”

“You don’t even like me!”

Cillian glanced at that chunky watch of his, losing patience.

“What does liking you have to do with marrying you?”

“Everything! It has everything to do with it! How do you expect us to get along?”

“I don’t,” he said flatly. “You’ll have your house. I’ll have mine. You will be stunningly rich, live on Billionaires’ Row, and become one of New England’s most envied socialites. You’ll be far enough away from me to do whatever the hell you’d like. I am sensible, fair, and realistic. As long as you give me heirs, give me exclusivity throughout our child-producing years, and stay out of tabloids, you shouldn’t see much of me beyond the first few years of our marriage. But no divorce,” he warned, raising a finger. “It’s tacky, bad for business, and shows you’re a quitter. I’m no quitter.”

I wanted to burst. With laughter or tears, I wasn’t sure.

This is not what I asked for, Auntie,I inwardly screamed. You missed the best part of my having him.

“You realize I’m a person and not an air fryer, right?” I parked a hand over my hip, losing patience myself. “Because to me it sounds a lot like you’re trying to buy me.”

“That’s because I am.” He looked at me as though I was crazy. Like I was the one with the problem. “People who vilify money have one thing in common—they don’t have it. You have a chance to change your fate, Persephone. Don’t mess it up.”

“Sorry if I sound ungrateful, but your proposition sounds like a very sad existence to me. I want to be loved. To be cherished. To grow old with the man I choose and who chooses me.”

Even after what happened with Paxton, and even though I still had strong feelings toward Cillian, I believed in fairy tales. I simply accepted mine was written eccentrically with too much foreword and scenes I was happy to cut.

He produced a pair of leather gloves from his breast pocket, slapping them over his muscular thigh before sliding his big hands into them.

“You can have all those things in time, just not with me. Find yourself a lover. Lead a quiet life with him—provided he signs all the necessary paperwork. You’ll do you; I’ll do me. What I do, in case you have any lingering romantic ideas about us, includes an insatiable amount of high-end escorts and questionable sexual practices.”

The only thing keeping me standing upright at this point was the thought this was probably a hallucination, due to the fact I hadn’t been sleeping or eating well recently.

Carbs. I need carbs.

“You want me to cheat on you?” I rubbed at my forehead.

“After you give me legitimate children, you can do whatever you want.”

“You need a hug.” I frowned. “And a shrink. Not in that order.”

“What I need is siring heirs. At least one male. A couple of others for appearance and backup.”

Backup.

Were we talking about children or phone chargers?

My head spun. I reached to the wall for support.

I always knew Cillian Fitzpatrick was messed up, but this was a level of crazy that could easily secure him a place in a mental institution.

“Why male? In case you haven’t noticed, this is the twenty-first century. There are women like Irene Rosenfeld, Mary Barra, Corie Barry…” I began listing female CEOs. He cut me off.

“Spare me the supermarket list. The truth of the matter is, some things haven’t changed. Women born into obscene privilege—aka my future daughters—rarely opt for hectic careers, which is what running Royal Pipelines demands.”

“That is the most sexist thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Shockingly, I agree with you on that point.” He began to button his coat, signaling his departure. “Nonetheless, I’m not the one making the rules. Traditionally, the firstborn’s son inherits most of the shares and the role of CEO in Royal Pipelines. That’s how my father got the gig. That’s how I got it.”

“What if the kid wants to be something else?”

He stared at me as though I just asked him if I should pierce my eyebrow using a semi-automatic weapon. Like I was truly beyond help.

“Who doesn’t want to be the head of one of the richest companies in the world?”

“Anyone who knows what a role like that entails,” I shot back. “No offense, but you’re not the happiest man I know, Kill.”

“My first son will continue my legacy,” he said matter-of-factly. “If you’re worried about his mental health, I suggest you send him to therapy from infancy.”

“Sounds like you’re going to be a wonderful father.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“They’ll have a soft mother. Least I can do is give them the hard facts of life.”

“You’re awful.”

“You’re stalling,” he quipped.

The nervous knot of hysteria forming in my throat grew. Not because I found the idea of marrying Cillian so terrible, but because I didn’t, and that made me deranged. What kind of woman jumped headfirst into marriage with the wickedest man in Boston while still married to the most unreliable one?

Me.

That was who.

I entertained this insane idea for many reasons, all of them wrong:

No more money problems.

A sure divorce from Paxton.

Having Cillian’s company, and undivided attention, even if just for a few short years.

Who knew? Maybe Auntie Tilda was going to deliver after all. We could start off as an arrangement and end up as a real couple.

No. I couldn’t board his train to Crazy Town. The last stop was Heartbreak, and I’d had enough of that in my life. Paxton had already crushed me. But my infatuation with Pax was sweet and comfortable. Cillian always stirred in me something raw and wild that could enrapture me.

I needed to think about it clearly without him getting in my face with his drugging scent and square jaw and cold flawlessness.

I stepped sideways, toward the stairway. “Look, can I think about it?”

“Of course. You have plenty of time. It’s not like the mob is after you,” his rich-boy diction mocked me.

I knew exactly how bad my situation was. Still, if I was going to officially sign the rest of my life over to the man who crushed me, I needed to at least give myself a few days to process it.

“Give me a week.”

“Twenty-four hours,” he fired back.

“Four days. You’re talking about the rest of my life here.”

“You’re not going to have a life if you don’t accept. Forty-eight hours. That’s my final offer, and it’s a generous one. You know where to find me.”

He turned around, making his way to the door.

“Wait,” I yelped.

He paused, not turning around.

A flashback of myself watching him leave and asking him to stay at Sailor and Hunter’s wedding slammed into me. I knew, with certainty that scorched my soul, that it was going to be our norm if I accepted his offer.

I would always seek him out, and he would always retreat to the shadows. A dusky, heady smoke of a man I could feel and see but never catch.

“Give me your home address. I don’t want to go to your office again. It makes me feel like we’re conducting business.”

“We are conducting business.”

“Your PA is horrible. She almost stabbed me that day I visited you.”

“Almost is the operative word here.” Producing a business card, he flipped it over and scribbled down his address. “I wouldn’t have covered her legal fees, and she knows it.”

He handed the card to me.

“Forty-eight hours,” he reminded me. “If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you declined my offer or were offed prematurely, and move on to the next candidate on my list.”

“There’s a list.” My jaw dropped.

Of coursethere was a list. I was just one of many women who ticked all the boxes for the mighty Cillian Fitzpatrick.

I wondered what said boxes included.

Naïve?

Desperate?

Stupid?

Pretty?

I swallowed, but the ball in my throat didn’t budge. I felt about as disposable as a diaper and just as desirable.

Cillian shot me an icy look.

“Go browse through your mail-order brides catalog, Cillian.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’ll let you know my answer.”

I watched him go, carrying my freedom, hopes, and choices in his designer pocket.

Knowing it didn’t matter whether I refused or accepted his offer—either choice would be a mistake.

The next day, I showed up at work in a coffee-stained dress and with bloodshot eyes. I’d called Sailor, swallowing my pride and doing what I promised not to do—ask her for a loan. But before I could even utter out the request, she told me she’d been feeling suspicious cramps in her abdomen, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

I spent my lunch break calling every cash loaner in Boston. Most hung up on me, some laughed, and a handful expressed their regret, but said they’d have to pass on my business.

I even tried calling Sam Brennan. I was met with an electronic message asking for a code to get through to him.

I didn’t have access to the most mysterious man in Boston.

Though I grew up as his younger sister’s best friend, I was as invisible to him as the rest of my friends.

Belle was at work when I got home. I was glad she was because a box waited outside her apartment door. The parcel was addressed to me, so I opened it. There were two pieces of lingerie inside.

I picked up a black lace thong, realizing inside the lingerie waited a bullet.

Byrne.

I ran to the bathroom, throwing up the very little I’d eaten.

Shoving a sleeve of crackers into my mouth, I swallowed a small chunk of cheese, and washed them down with orange juice.

I crawled into Belle’s bed, still in my work dress. It was cold and empty. The rain knocking on the window reminded me of how alone I was.

Mom and Dad had moved to the suburbs a couple of years ago. Moving in with them now would invite trouble to their doorstep—deadly trouble—and I couldn’t do it to them.

Sailor was married and having a baby, running a successful food blog and training young archers as a part of a charity foundation she started. Her life was full, complete, and good.

Ash was busy coming up with schemes to win Sam Brennan over, going to med school, and blossoming into one of the most fantastic women I’d ever met.

And Belle was making a career for herself.

Lying still in the darkness, I watched through the window as Lady Night went through all her outfits. The sky turned from midnight to neon blue, then finally, orange and pink. When the sun climbed up Boston’s high-rise skyline, inch by inch like a queen rising from her throne, I knew I had to make a decision.

The sky was cloudless.

Auntie Tilda wasn’t going to help me get out of this one. It was my decision to make. My responsibility.

Silence buzzed through the apartment. Belle hadn’t returned home last night. She was probably inside a handsome man’s bed, splaying her curves like a work of art for him to worship.

Scurrying out of bed, I padded barefoot into the kitchenette, then flicked on the coffee machine and Belle’s vintage radio. The same eighties station that never failed to lift my spirits belted out the last few notes of “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston, followed by a weather forecast, warning about an impending storm.

There was a vase full of fresh roses on the counter, courtesy of one of the many admirers who frequented Madame Mayhem in hopes to capture my sister’s interest.

Flower Girl.

I plucked one of the white roses. Its thorn pierced my thumb. A heart-shaped blood droplet perched between the petals.

“To marry or not to marry Boston’s favorite villain?”

I plucked the first petal.

Marry him.

The second one.

Don’t marry him.

Then the third.

The fourth.

The fifth…

By the time I reached the last petal, my fingers quivered, my heart drummed fast, and every inch of my body was covered in goose bumps. I pulled the last petal, the snowy color of a wedding gown.

Fate said the last word.

Not that it mattered as my heart already knew the answer.

A decision had been made.

Now I had to face the consequences.