Stiletto

by Emma Savant

  Stiletto

  A Crimson Daggers Novel #3: The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids

  Emma Savant

  Copyright © 2019 Emma Savant

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Dan Van Oss, Covermint Design

  Editing by Emmy Ellis, Studio ENP

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  www.EmmaSavant.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  A Note from Emma

  Also by Emma Savant

  About the Author

  1

  “Drop your chin,” I barked.

  Adamine lowered her head and lifted an arm to block Kamala’s strike. I observed them for a moment, making sure their stances were strong and their focus sharp, and then moved to the next sparring pair. Across the ballroom, Mom watched me with narrowed eyes.

  With me being the future Stiletto and leader of the coven, the tone of my training had changed. Now, I didn’t just learn combat from Mom and magic from Cardinal Saffron, I had to learn how to teach those things, too. I had to know every corner of the coven and how everything worked. It was overwhelming and everything I had ever hoped for.

  “Remember to breathe,” I said to Maple, whose shoulders were creeping up toward her ears. “A relaxed Dagger is a responsive Dagger.”

  She took a deep breath, shook out her shoulders, and danced around her opponent. She looked a bit like an overexcited squirrel, but, I reasoned, we’d all had to start somewhere.

  Mom gave me a small nod of approval from across the ballroom that served as our training space, and she and I continued circling our charges, Mom coaching the novices, me doing my best to guide the teens. In a far corner of the room, Rowan worked with the youngest members of the coven, the ones who were barely old enough to train. She crouched down to get at Flynn’s eye level. The four-year-old listened intently to whatever Rowan was saying, then nodded and got back into her adorable little fighting stance.

  I remembered being that age and how powerful I had felt when I’d finally been allowed to train with all my older sisters. I remembered Rowan’s freckled round cheeks and Autumn’s high ponytail and the sharp precision of Sienna’s movements, even at that age.

  Autumn, who was now in prison for aiding and abetting the murder of several members of the Wildwood werewolf pack—the pack that now lived on the sanctuary of the coven’s land.

  Sienna, who was still out there somewhere, lying in silent wait and taunting me with her absence.

  Ember hooked a leg behind Sorrel’s knee and jerked, and Sorrel hit the ground with a thud. I jogged over and dropped to a crouch.

  “You okay?” I said.

  She winced and looked up at me. “Tailbone.”

  “Clancy will fix it later,” I said. “Now get up and keep fighting.”

  I could see that she wanted to protest, but I wasn’t just her older coven sister now. I was the future Stiletto, and my word was law.

  To her, anyway.

  The younger girls, at least, saw me the way I saw Mom and Grandma. My older sisters, on the other hand, still seemed torn between accepting me as a coven leader and seeing me as someone whose diapers they’d changed.

  I held out a hand. Sorrel took it, and I pulled her back to her feet.

  “Ow,” she announced. She turned to me. “How am I supposed to beat her when my entire butt is in pain?”

  “Don’t focus on winning,” I said. “Focus on learning. There’s fifteen minutes still on the clock.”

  She sighed sharply, then tucked her chin and got back into position.

  “Sorry,” Ember said to her, and then they were back at it, throwing punches and grappling and honing the skills that would keep them alive someday.

  Finally, the bell rang, signaling the end of the training period. I gave the girls a few last pointers, then waved them off to shower and eat lunch before their next lessons. Mom caught my eye and jerked her chin toward the ballroom door.

  Brendan stood there. My heart jumped, sank, and jumped again all in the course of a second.

  The Wildwoods had gotten a lot more comfortable in the mansion over the past few months, but even now, Brendan seemed a little unsettled within these walls, and he lingered behind the door as if he didn’t know whether he was allowed into our training space. I wasn’t sure whether his unease came from the mansion itself, filled as it was with witches whose sworn mission was to rid the world of rogue werewolves and evil vampires and other things that went bump in the night, or whether he was just skittish around me.

  Up until recently, Brendan had been all confidence and swagger. But ever since we’d combined our forces to take down a violent rival werewolf pack a few weeks ago, he’d been acting strangely.

  I followed him down the hall and outside. The autumn air was sharp with November chill, and the mansion lawn was covered with red leaves from the maple trees that shaded the property. Overhead, the sky threatened rain.

  He turned, looking almost awkward. It was a strange thing to see.

  “Hey, did Alec talk to you?” he asked.

  “Not today,” I said.

  A sinking feeling formed in my stomach. I knew what this was about.

  Ever since Brendan and Alec and I had first met, I’d been up to my neck in work. I’d been pushing my way through my Dagger novitiate, helping Grandma run her growing fashion house, and occasionally taking down entire werewolf packs. Brendan had flirted with me plenty during that time—he couldn’t help himself—but there hadn’t been a spare moment for any of us to think about feelings we might have for each other while we were so busy trying to stay alive.

  But now Sienna was lying low. The Wildwoods had finished building the den on Grandma’s property, and I had figured out a delicate balance between my Stiletto training and my fashion design work at Carnelian.

  In short, things had gotten quiet.

  And the quiet had given Alec time to walk up to the mansion a few times and talk to me in a way that felt more like flirting than work.

  Which had given Brendan time to realize Alec was talking to me.

  Which had led to a kind of tension I’d never dealt with before.

  Sure, I’d made out with random dudes at parties and
nursed crushes on guys I met through work. Rowan was still in vague touch with her birth father, and I’d hooked up with her cousin once when I’d gone with her on a visit. I’d met men before. But as a Dagger, living in a mansion full of women, I’d never actually been in a position to form a relationship with a man.

  Now I had two guys living next door, and they both wanted my attention.

  2

  I frowned at Brendan and took off across the lawn as a light rain misted across my skin. He seemed startled, then jogged to catch up with me.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Greenhouse,” I said shortly.

  He followed until I stopped at the greenhouse door. I didn’t know why I’d come here, except that I’d had to start moving before the awkwardness of the moment caught up to me. I pushed the glass door open and stepped inside. Humid warmth engulfed me, along with the scents of damp earth and growing green things.

  “Do you not want to talk to me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, no. I don’t not want to talk to you.”

  He paused while his brain caught up with that train wreck of a sentence, and I marched deeper into the greenhouse and looked for some excuse to be in there. I found it in a spray of flowering fire basil, which had put out new buds. I was planning to make charm bags to help the teens get stronger control on the fire element, and these buds had to be harvested before they opened to do any good in the bags.

  This was a Glimmering herb, unknown to the outside world where witches and big bad wolves and magical plants were nothing more than fairy tales. We had to grow it in the greenhouse, partially because it didn’t like too much water but mostly because we’d get in a lot of trouble if seeds from this plant drifted on the wind toward Humdrum property. Humdrums didn’t know about fire basil, which also meant they didn’t know to watch it for spontaneous combustion.

  I pinched off the tight orange buds while Brendan came up behind me. His hand brushed against the small of my back, and heat bloomed from the spot he had touched. My breath caught in my throat, and I stood frozen until he pulled the hand away.

  “Is that not okay?”

  “It’s not not okay.”

  There I was again, massacring the English language. I stepped away from him. “It’s just—”

  “It’s Alec, isn’t it?”

  It wasn’t not Alec.

  But I didn’t say that aloud. I pressed my lips together and tried, for once in my life, to think before I spoke. Finally, I dropped the handful of fire basil buds into an empty clay pot and turned to face him.

  “I haven’t had time to think about any of this,” I said. “Like, since we met. And now there’s you, and there’s Alec, and you both clearly want something.” I gestured pointlessly at the air between us, like their interest was a physical thing I could shoo away.

  Not that I wanted to shoo it away. But I didn’t want to accept it, either.

  Brendan smiled, just enough that I could tell my getting flustered had amused him. “Of course I want you,” he said. The smiled widened. “Look at what we’ve done together. We’re a hell of a team. You’re a hell of a woman.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. The words were impatient, and it took me a moment to correct them. “Not that I’m a hell of a woman. But we do work well together.”

  “But Alec’s in the way.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “He’d like to be in the way,” Brendan said.

  “I’m becoming aware.”

  He leaned in toward me, and it took everything I had not to close the few inches between our mouths.

  “I’ll fight him for you,” he said. The corner of his lip curled up in a smirk.

  I shoved Brendan away. Getting some distance between us was a relief, not because I didn’t want his closeness, but because I wanted it a little too much.

  “You and Alec were divided for years before you made up,” I said. “I’m not getting in the way of that.”

  “What if I want you to?”

  “Not everything is up to you,” I retorted. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Daggers don’t do relationships.”

  He folded his arms and propped himself against one of the raised beds lined in stone and filled with thriving herbs. He raised an eyebrow. “How’d you come to exist, then?”

  It took me a second to realize what he was implying, and my cheeks flushed like I was twelve years old and barely apprised of the facts of life.

  “They have sex,” I said. “We have to keep the Dagger lines going somehow.”

  “So Little Red Riding Hood can continue to have great-granddaughters who kill monsters?”

  “You can take that snark out of your voice right now,” I said severely.

  He looked appropriately chastised, or at least as if he was trying to pretend to be.

  “It’s just—you and Alec just made up. You and my coven are barely into what I think could pass for a real truce. The last thing we need to do is complicate things by throwing our feelings into the situation.”

  “The feelings are already there.”

  “Yeah, well, pretend they’re not.”

  I picked up the pot of fire basil buds and held it in front of my chest like a shield.

  I liked him. I wanted him.

  I liked Alec, too.

  And I didn’t want either of them fighting about it. That was the kind of thing Sienna would have loved. Not me.

  “I have work to do,” I said. “And you should go to work or get home to your pack. Go somewhere you’re needed.”

  He leaned in again, and when he spoke, his breath was fresh and sharp with the minty scent of toothpaste.

  “You don’t need me?” He ran a fingertip along my collarbone, and I grabbed his hand and pulled it away.

  “Down, boy,” I said.

  He smirked, and I fought to keep a smile off my face.

  “I don’t need anyone,” I said. “Go home.”

  3

  Rowan slammed into me as I rounded the corner and yelped in surprise. I managed to grip the pot before it could slip from my hand, but a few of the bright-orange buds landed on the carpet and exploded like firework poppers. I stomped on the buds before they could ignite the carpet. One of the mansion cats down the hallway stared at us with concern and darted through the nearest doorway.

  “Sorry!” Rowan massaged her shoulder. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

  I lifted my boot. The black ashes of the buds had curled into dust.

  “I didn’t hear you either,” I said. “You’re the third person I’ve run into since Grandma put the hall runners in.”

  The new crimson carpets, part of Grandma’s ongoing attempts to keep the mansion’s renovation up to date, were thick and soft and a nightmare for those of us who had grown accustomed to always knowing where other people were thanks to their footfalls.

  “I was looking for you.” Rowan scanned the floor and stomped on one of the buds I’d missed. “Are you busy tonight?”

  I gave her a sideways look. “Depends.”

  “It’s just that I’m supposed to be dealing with a will-o’-the-wisp tonight,” she said. “It’d be so much easier with two people. You know how slippery they are.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, of course I can help. I was supposed to catch up on revising the teens’ training schedule tonight, but—” I searched for a legitimate excuse, then gave up. “I don’t want to.”

  “I can work on it with you when we get back,” she said.

  “You help me deal with stupid training logistics, and I’ll even buy you a boba tea on the way home,” I said. “Where’s your gig?”

  She was interrupted by another figure coming around the corner, whose face was obscured by a high armload of wood and bone. Rowan turned and pursed her lips to one side.

  “How come you didn’t run into anyone?” she said.

  Alec’s beautiful hazel eyes appeared over the load in his arms. “I could smell you guys around the corner. And Scarlett i
s loud.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said.

  “Didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

  “The fact that you could smell us or that I have a voice like a foghorn?”

  I had meant to keep my tone light and joking, but he immediately lowered the stuff in his arms and gaped at me like I’d just punched him.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “You smell great. It’s just, you know. Wolf nose.”

  “No, I get it, I—”

  “And there’s nothing wrong with having a loud voice,” he said. “You’re passionate and decisive. I like that about you.”

  A sinking weight formed in my stomach, the same one I’d felt ten minutes ago when Brendan had approached me. In my hand, the flower pot of basil buds smoked lightly. I had to get them on ice, soon.

  “You guys need a minute?” Rowan asked.

  I shot her a dirty look, and she bit back a smirk. Alec flushed so badly that his russet hair clashed with his bright-pink face.

  “What’s the stuff?” I asked, giving us all something else to focus on.

  He shifted the load in his arms.

  “Sandalwood and dragon bone, mostly,” he said. “Ms. Hunter told me to come pick it up on my way to my studio.”

  “You’re doing carvings for the next collection?” I asked.

  He nodded, which was hard to see through the materials.