Page 8 of Villains Never Die

“I’m a business man,” I interrupted. “I can make a deal with anyone, even Rook. I am working late tonight. See you in the morning?”

“Goodnight,” Gray said, then turned to head home to the upscale apartment I provided him with for his services. I hoped he would get some rest. One of us had to.

When the door closed, I lifted a hand and turned the lock with a quick bit of magic before I slid my laptop toward me on the desk and turned it on. The screen made my desk glow in the dim light as I navigated through a series of folders to one buried deep, protected by a password.

Project Mori

I opened it and brought up photos and documents. Humans had the dark web, a seedy place of unsavory online dealings, but magicians had our own version, deep in the recesses of the internet, sealed in spells and dark magic. I logged on to what was known as The Looking Glass and navigated to a bookmarked page I hadn’t finished reading weeks ago.

It was a long-winded explanation of necromancy, which was illegal among magicians, if it was even possible. This information was theoretical, but it was a starting point. I wasn’t interested in raising the dead, only in studying what happened when they died. I’d exhausted every resource I had to learn about death rites and beliefs about the afterlife. Heaven and Hell and ghosts and spirits. The saved and the damned. The ones who think we just turn to energy and float about in space.

And not a damn thing mentionedher.

Not exactly.

Grim Reaper came closest, or maybe the Angel of Death.

I didn’t care what they called her.

I only cared about how I could kill her.

Chapter Four

Two weeks passed—slow, sleepless, and numbingly dull. The buyer I’d met with over the gem declined, and I got twice the price for it at auction. I had no time for men who hesitate. I’d stopped doing it a long time ago.

And as I startled from a dream of warm lips refusing to go cold as they turned blue, my first thought was that I should have hesitated. I should have backed away and let Rook die.

I sighed and blinked at the light of my computer screen, my laptop sitting across my legs on top of rumpled sheets. My neck was stiff from falling asleep sitting against the headboard. A rhythmic hum sounded somewhere to my right.

My phone on the nightstand. That must be what woke me. I grasped it.

Unknown number.

Fucking hell. This was the third time this week, and there were three times the week before. Whoever this prick was wouldn’t leave a goddamn voicemail.

I flipped my phone open and jammed my finger against the answer button.

“Austin here,” I snapped into the speaker.

“Jesus. Do you always answer the phone like that?”

I swallowed hard, my tongue paralyzed in my mouth. My phone number wasn’t a secret, but one had to know the right people to get it. No one—no one—would dare give it to him.

“Still with me, England?”

My hand tightened around the back of the phone.

“Hellooooo…”

“How the fuck did you get this number?” I finally ground out.

Rook chuckled on the other end of the line. “You’re not exactly a hard person to track down. That’s the problem with owningallof the city. You said something like that, right? It’s hard to remember. I was dying and everything. It’s hard to think clearly when you can’t breathe.”

“What do you want?”

“An apology would be nice. Rope burn on the neck is kind of a bitch.”

I pushed my laptop and the messy sheets aside and stood to pace the length of my bedroom. I was seconds away from hanging up on him when my sleep-addled brain conjured an image of him sitting with a phone to his ear, his blue eyes laughing as he provoked me. That’s what he wanted—to wind me up.