by Ella Fields
Evil Love
Copyright © 2020 by Ella Fields
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, resold or distributed in any form, or by any electronic or mechanical means, without permission in writing from the author, except for brief quotations within a review.
This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Editor: Jenny Sims, Editing4Indies
Proofreading: Allison Riley
Formatting: Stacey Blake, Champagne Book Design
Cover design: Sarah Hansen, Okay Creations
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
EPILOGUE
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ALSO BY ELLA FIELDS
For those who are still trying to find the balance between night and day.
Darling sin,
why is it, my dear
that I can love you this much
when you bring me to tears
Jude
Seventeen years old
The island exhaled, blowing smoky tendrils of breath along the cobblestone streets in the market district. It was a beast, and we, its occupants, were the prey.
The mist swirled and eddied as my boots cut silently across the street.
Tucked within the shadows, I waited. A minute or two passed, and then my phone vibrated. Peering into the growing night, I fished it from my jacket pocket.
Marnie: Tell me again why you can’t come over?
I was about to put my phone away when another text came through.
Marnie: I’ll do that thing you like with my tongue while you do that thing I like with yours.
A series of suggestive emojis was tacked on the end.
I was hard in a flash, the dull throb taking its time to dissipate after I shoved my phone away and gazed back out at the street.
Marnie and I had been dating since what felt like the dawn of time. Though really, it had been since we’d both left middle school behind and had journeyed into our bodies and high school together. We’d had a lot of fun in figuring them out. So much so, that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked at anyone else.
Her father, an expert in criminal law, was kept on a tight retainer by Nightingale and had been an acquaintance ever since we’d moved here when I was a kid. That is, until they’d sent Ivan to London. I wasn’t sure if he and my dad still stayed in touch, and I didn’t much care.
We could have our own playdates now, and we made sure we had many.
Marnie’s mother remained, sipping martinis at The Ribbon and maxing out Ivan’s credit card in the high-end stores of the market district and sleeping with boys who weren’t much older than her daughter. I doubted Ivan cared, for he hardly returned to the island, and he was not the type of man to go without a female companion for long.
Some years ago, my father had been ready and waiting to rule the London chapter, and from what I remembered, he took great pleasure in knowing his future. But we’d been summoned here when I was eight, and ever since, he’d only grown more distant.
As if he’d never wanted to be placed on Peridot Island at all, let alone rule it.
There was no election, no way to see us or my father coming. Hildebrandt had died in a boating accident with his only heir, leaving behind a mayor-less island and an empty throne.
My younger brother and my mother had struggled with the transition, and my mother never quite smiled the way I remembered her smiling before.
Though I wasn’t sure if it was the transition so much as it was all the ways in which my father had changed since stepping foot upon the ancient, haunted large expanse of land surrounded by pristine sea.
I’d been too young, too absorbed in video games and my books to give a flying shit what we or my father did.
That was then.
Footsteps sounded, sure and swift, upon the damp street.
A puddle of dull light illuminated the dark but not enough to be certain of who it was approaching.
It was the dead of night, though, and the market quarter was vacant. As it should have been.
The only sound to be heard came from the whispering roar of the sea.
I steeled my shoulders, felt my spine lock and stiffen, and hardened my stampeding heart.
Reaching behind me, I pulled the mask from the back of my jeans. Its scales were cool beneath the iron grip of my fingers.
I refused to look at it. I already knew what it looked like, had memorized the glimpse I’d caught of my father’s mask some years ago.
All initiates wore them during their tasks and on some rare occasions, even afterward.
We all did this.
I could do this.
I had to.
Everyone had to, and I was sure as fuck not going to ask for special treatment. I wouldn’t be given it, no matter who my father was.
I was no different.
Stop thinking and go, I inwardly screamed at myself.
Removing the knife from my jacket pocket, I pulled on the provided mask and leaped out from the shadowed alcove.
A scream sliced through the damp air, through the racing organ in my chest, but it didn’t slow my hands as I shoved the woman’s companion to the ground and stabbed him in the side of the arm.
I jumped over him, his thrashing limbs stilling as the blade remained embedded in his forearm. With my teeth gritting so hard I swore I chipped a molar, I removed it, felt the sickening slide of metal through flesh, and plunged it where I’d been instructed.
Right through the center of his palm.
The word was growled, my head bent low to his ear to whisper as he cried out beneath me, “Becuman.” My hand clenched to twist the knife through his tendons, but he screamed like a stuck pig.
The woman joined in. She screamed and screamed beside me, rousing the sleepy crows and gulls from rooftops, their wings pounding above our heads into the star-painted sky.
“Jude,” the woman said, and then I was the one to go still. So still that when I pulled back, I saw the man’s eyes, wet with pain and horror, rattle with recognition.
The woman shoved me, and I shrugged her off. I knocked her away even as every instinct, as my fucking heart howled in protest to do the opposite. “Jude? Oh my fucking god, Jude.”
She sang my name repeatedly, a pain-soaked whine that slithered inside my ears, softened and burned my heart, and reduced it to black ash.
How she’d known it was me, unless she’d known more about Nightingale than she’d ever let on, wasn’t something I had the time to figure out.
Pulling the knife from Park’s hand, I stood on trembling legs and wobbled back a few steps toward the ever-awaiting shadows.
She was leaning over him now, covered in blood, choking on her tears, her hands pressing at his wounds.
I felt my head twitch, felt ice encrust every cell in my body, as the darkness enveloped me like a fres
h layer of suffocating skin.
Turning away to dial the number I needed to, I slid the bloodied knife into the sleeve of my jacket. I’d reached the end of the alleyway when Park yelled, “Help! Jude, please.” I froze at the urgency in his voice. “I’m begging you, come—oh, fuck.”
Something skittered up my neck, something that made me race back to find the woman almost convulsing on the cobblestones beside Park, who was struggling to sit up and reach for her.
“Jude,” he wheezed. “If it’s you, please,” he said, coughing, “help.”
I stepped back out onto the street. Muted light battled the dark and failed while I fumbled with my phone and stumbled through my empty brain for the emergency number.
Not entirely sure I was breathing, I stabbed it in and rambled off the address as soon as the receiver’s voice came through.
“Sir, can you tell us what condition the woman is in…” She kept on fucking pressing.
Moving closer, I stared at said woman’s shaking form, my heart collapsing, my hand slackening. Rage colored my vision, dotting it with red. “Just fucking come already.”
Then I hung up and dialed my dad.
He inhaled, loud, and held it. “The paramedics aren’t coming. Get to the warehouse.”
The woman gazed up at me with wide eyes, her hands slick with blood, saliva trailing from her mouth.
No… I shouldn’t have called them. I wasn’t thinking. But we couldn’t just leave her.
“Then you need to get over here,” I said, glancing around the fogged street at the half-shrouded businesses; a shoe store, dry cleaner, and butcher. My eyes held firm on the swaying wooden sign.
Butcher.
“We both know I cannot do that.”
“Then send someone else.” My teeth chattered. I ground them together. “Now.”
I stormed into the warehouse, my hands, my entire body, wracked with shaking fury. “You fucking cunts.”
The mask was too tight on my face. I yanked it off, uncaring of the snap of thick elastic at my ear, and tore around crates and boxes loaded with nothing. Fluorescent lights flickered outside the office, the door already open.
January tilted her head, her arms crossed over her white blouse. “Such vulgarity will get you nowhere, Jude.”
I barged into the room. The tattoo artist was there, drinking coffee as he prepared his supplies beneath the bright haze of a lone industrial lamp. “Where is he?” I growled. My eyes were so dry that it hurt to blink. I spun back when the sound of my father’s loafers echoed through the warehouse.
“You left the door open,” he said, toneless.
“I left the…” I gave my head a vicious shake. “What the fuck? Did you not—”
“Jude.” He swallowed, throat bobbing. Otherwise, he appeared wholly unaffected.
I knew, though. I knew that façade of his, as well as all that surrounded us, was a carefully veiled lie.
January, my father’s second, owner of The Ribbon, one of two luxury hotels on the island, the distillery, and the brothel masquerading as a men’s shed by the docks, said primly, “You were warned of the cost of initiation.”
Time and time again, especially over the past twelve months.
Every day for the past year, the words had been practically tattooed onto my back whenever I’d left a room—exactly where the bearded guy readying his tattoo gun in the corner of the dank warehouse office would tattoo me.
Supreme benefits at supreme costs.
“Dad,” I said, the word croaked. I didn’t care.
I hadn’t done it. I’d destroyed something, I knew that much, but I hadn’t destroyed the infamous painter’s hand as I’d been instructed.
He stepped forward, clapping a hand upon my shoulder, and looked beyond me to the insignia on the wall. The very same one that was about to be forever etched into my skin. “White cannot exist without black, and all that is gray must follow the fucking rules.”
The sound of gloves snapping over skin cracked through my skull, and then I was shoved onto the awaiting stool.
Fern
“You should totally keep reading,” Cory said with a dramatic groan, fanning her face with her book. “I’m telling you, it’s worth it for this scene.”
I capped my nail polish and glimpsed the cover of her book again. “I just skipped to that part and yeah”—I blew on my nails—“hot.”
Cory made a sound of outrage, but I threw my hand up before she could talk. “You hear that?”
Her brows knitted. “Hear what?” Then her eyes popped at the sound of a shout. “Is that Marnie?”
I scrambled off the bed and dumped my emerald nail polish onto my desk, hurrying to the sliding glass doors.
They were fighting. Again. I was sure of it.
“It’s happening.” Glee filled my voice, my heart. “This is not a drill.”
Cory laughed. “We’ve never done a drill for this.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Okay, then.” Coraline’s book smacked closed. “They’re always fighting lately, so whatever. I need to get back.”
Coraline Ericson was my best friend, my only friend, and it’d been that way since she’d arrived on Peridot Academy’s doorstep our freshman year.
A farmer’s daughter, she was there on scholarship and had looked comically shell-shocked. I’d shown her the ropes as best I could, being that it was my first year in high school too, but I was no stranger to dealing with the island’s elite.
Technically, I was one of them, but they just acted like I wasn’t. Which was fine. All the better to snoop and daydream without prying eyes.
Cory boarded at school with at least thirty-some other students in our year, a few of which had also been offered scholarships. Most were just tossed out of their parents’ homes under the guise of royal status and stellar education.
Sure, if you counted learning how to bleed and somehow still survive while swimming amongst sharks.
I swatted at her behind my back. “Yeah, yeah. Just wait.” I clutched at my soft black curtains, peering through to the balcony and the French doors that sat across the hedge from my room. That wasn’t his bedroom, but they were in there. A crash sounded, shadows flitting, followed by a scream.
“Fern?”
“Did you hear that? Something smashed.” I couldn’t suck in enough air, and my voice rose higher. “Shit, I think it’s really happening. They’re really over.”
It had to be them arguing in such a this-is-the-end type of way. Jude’s father was hardly ever home, his brother was still in elementary school, and I hadn’t seen their mother in months.
“Don’t sound too upset,” Cory drawled. “It’s not like they’ve dated all through high school or anything.” She paused. “Middle school, too?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
She scoffed. “I think it matters a whole lot. To them.”
I dropped the curtain when the shadows disappeared but reached around them to open the door a smidge.
“Fern?” Cory said again, my name an exasperated nudge.
“What?” I snapped, then froze, hoping like hell no one heard.
They didn’t, and the yelling was coming from outside now.
“Shh, they’re outside.”
“Look, I’m going to call Silas…”
“Yeah, okay.” I peeled the curtain back but growled when I couldn’t see anything. “Bye.”
“I’ll catch up on, ah, all this at school tomorrow.”
I waved her off, almost hissing for her to be quiet.
“… doing this anymore. You’re insane.”
“Oh, I’m insane?” My chest tightened at the sound of his voice. His deep, slightly accented—thanks to hailing from London—voice. Typically, Jude Delouxe sounded aloof. Eternally bored. Always sexy.
Now, well, he sounded angry and maybe even a little panicked.
I hadn’t realized he cared so much. Jude didn’t seem to care about anything except football, his ego, and mayb
e his little brother, Henry.
“…for real done.”
“You’ll be back.” There he was. That confidence had returned. “How long this time? A few days? A week?”
A scream, throaty with frustration, reached me. “You’re the worst. Like actually evil or something.”
He laughed, low and hypnotic, until a car started. The sound of it leaving, crunching over the pebbles of his long drive followed, and then… silence.
I let the curtain fall and closed the door as quietly as I could.
This was it. Yes, they’d broken up occasionally before, but this felt different.
And what mattered most was that I was different.
I’d had my braces removed five months ago. I officially had boobs. I was no longer stick thin but rather, filling out in the ass and hips.
Most importantly, I still had the dream. The dream of us that still burned bright.
I was ready.
I marched to my walk-in closet and flung open the door, switching on the light.
Behind my black school skirts and white blouses, his face, his facts, his accomplishments, and everything him gave life to my wall.
I’d waited what felt like forever for this day. In reality, it was probably more like a few years. Ever since Jude had nonchalantly handed me a pen I’d dropped in chemistry, the seed had been planted.
He hadn’t even looked at me, but when I’d stammered out a thank you, he’d smirked down at his tablet.
That smirk had followed me to sleep and had visited almost every one of my dreams since.
We had mere months left of senior year, and if their history was anything to go by, he and Marnie just might get back together again.
I couldn’t let that happen.
He was mine.
He just didn’t know it yet.
Fern
The black castle appeared in glittering portions through the dense woods before it.
European cars parked behind the wrought-iron fencing, marring the black and green grounds like shimmering metal beetles between the trees.
Add the white rose bushes lining the walkways and circular drive and the wisteria crawling across the towering four-story slab of onyx stone, and you had yourself something right out of a storybook.
