Black Lilith: Book One (Black Lilith #1)

by Hazel Jacobs

“The rules—”

  “Fuck the rules,” she says. She crosses her arms over her chest and stares at her feet. “They’re only there because you made them. If you wanted to, you could just go to the others and tell them you made a mistake.”

  Logan shakes his head, frowning. “It’s not that simple—”

  “It is!” she says. “It really is! What am I supposed to think, Logan? We’ve spent more time hiding this relationship than we’ve spent actually being in one, and I’m getting really tired of being made to feel ashamed every time I kiss you.”

  “You’re ashamed.” It’s not a question, just a repetition.

  Mikayla sits on the edge of her mattress. It’s soft and lush, as all of the five-star mattresses are, though the rest of the room is hard lines and bright lamps. She prefers the hotel they stayed in during the London leg of the tour, it had more character. It felt like a home. This just feels like limbo. It seems that no matter what, she can’t shake the feeling of not belonging.

  But Tommy makes her feel like she belongs. Dash and Slate took the shot of beer as well, declaring her their sister without words.

  “Aren’t you?” Mikayla asks. “You act like you are. The amount of effort you put into hiding what we have… that’s shame, right?”

  “I just don’t want to deal with what the others will say,” Logan says, stepping into the room properly and sitting with her on the bed. He tries to reach out and take her hand, but she stuffs both of her hands under her armpits so that he can do nothing but let his own fall limply at his sides. “They’ll never let me hear the end of it, especially Tommy.”

  “Well, after the way you treated him and Danielle, I can imagine why,” she says.

  His shoulders tense again. “That’s… there were circumstances.”

  “Yeah! She messed up a schedule or something,” says Mikayla. She gives him a hard look. “Is that why you’re keeping us a secret? So that when I mess up you can fire me without a second thought?”

  “How can you—” His voice starts to raise, and he forces himself to stop. She watches as he seems to gather himself, taking a long breath in through his nose and out through his mouth. “That’s not what happened with Danielle.”

  “That’s what you told Tommy.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  She feels herself growing tense. There’s something anticipatory in the air now, but different from the usual anticipation she feels in Logan’s presence. What has he been hiding?

  “What have you been hiding?” she asks.

  Logan runs a hand through his hair and sighs heavily. “Mikayla—”

  “Tell me now or leave and never come back,” she says fiercely. He looks at her with surprise, but she holds her ground. “You either trust me enough to tell me the truth, or you don’t. But don’t you dare try to hedge or weasel your way out of making a decision.”

  Logan stares at her for a moment. His soft brown eyes are turned down at the edges as he runs a hand over his forearm, over his tattoos. Finally, he sighs and shakes his head at the ground.

  “Fine,” he says. “Fine. You want to know the truth? I fired Danielle because she was stealing money from us.”

  Mikayla doesn’t know what she was expecting, but it wasn’t that. “You told Tommy—”

  “I know what I told Tommy,” he says, his tone a study in barely controlled frustration. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Sorry, dude, the love of your life is actually a white-collar criminal who’s been scamming us for months?’ You know he’d take it personally.”

  She takes a moment to let that sink in. She imagines Tommy—sweet, kind, open-hearted Tommy—giving his everything to a woman only to find out that she was taking advantage of him. Logan’s right; Tommy would be crushed if he knew the truth. If this even was the truth.

  “How did you find out about it?” she asks. “Why not someone at Bass Note, or one of the others?”

  “It was right after our first big signing deal,” Logan replies. “Money was coming in, but none of us knew what to do with it, so we just sort of put it all in one account. We figured we’d live as we always had, and just use the money for big stuff. But as we were getting bigger I thought, maybe Dash might like to go to college after all.” His breath hitches and Mikayla needs to restrain herself from reaching out to him. “He wouldn’t leave the band, he’s too loyal, but there’re night schools. I thought I could finally give him that, and I knew that Slate and Tommy would let me.” He runs his hand through his hair again. “But when I opened the accounts to see what I had to work with, I saw the figures. Way less than what they should have been. Most of the expenses seemed reasonable… guitars, tour buses, and all that stuff. But the expenses on the statements didn’t match what I knew we had. I didn’t remember buying half that stuff, or getting any of it from Bass Note, so I asked Danielle about it.”

  His tone shifts and Mikayla sees a glint of fury behind his eyes.

  “She was too cagey. I did some digging, and I realized what she’d been doing. But I couldn’t tell Tommy. I couldn’t do that to him.”

  She shakes her head at him. “So you’d rather lie to his face and make him hate you?”

  “Better he hates me than hate himself.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Mikayla says. A thought occurs to her. “That’s why you don’t trust me.”

  “I do—”

  “You don’t.” Mikayla stands up then. She needs to be in motion, she needs to be doing something, because sitting still while her mind is a swirling mess of emotions is unbearable. “You never did. That’s why you didn’t let me access Black Lilith’s accounts when we met.”

  “Fool me once,” Logan replies. He’s watching her from the bed with his fists clenched on his thighs. “Then you saved Dash, and I thought—”

  “But you still don’t trust me!” she says. “I’ve seen the way you glare whenever Tommy or Slate sit next to me like you’re expecting me to lift up my skirt at the first chance I get.”

  “It’s not you I don’t trust!” Logan says, standing up now so that he can look her in the eye. “You’ve seen Slate with other women, he can be very convincing—”

  “Slate’s my brother,” she snaps. “Just like Tommy and Dash. Frankly, of all the men in Black Lilith you’re the least trustworthy! You’re the one that’s been sneaking behind their backs with the PA, lying about everything that happens to the band no matter who it hurts.”

  Logan’s lip curls. She’s reminded of the many fights they’d had when they were just beginning to know one another.

  “It takes two to sneak,” he says.

  Mikayla crosses her arms again. “Not anymore,” she says firmly.

  That gets a reaction. Logan’s whole body seems to shiver, as though he felt the words like a physical blow. He doesn’t stagger back or look shocked like they do in the movies, but his shoulders slump like he’s carrying something that’s gotten too heavy.

  “So that’s it?” he asks. “One argument and we’re done?”

  “We’re not done because we’re arguing,” she says. The lump is rising in her throat again, but she squashes it down. She will not cry. “We’re done because you don’t trust me, because you’re a liar, and because I’m tired of being your dirty little secret.”

  The words hang in the air. Logan and Mikayla stare one another down, neither willing to look away first despite both of them clearly wanting to.

  “When this tour is over, I’m leaving,” she says. The words hurt like a knife twisting in her gut, but they need to be said.

  Logan flinches at that. “Mikayla… Tommy and Dash and Slate… you can’t leave them, they all love you.”

  “I love them, too,” she says. “That’s why I’m leaving. Because I don’t want to lie anymore. I don’t want you to make me a liar.” She tries to swallow the lump coming up through her chest and putting pressure behind her eyes. “Besides, I was going to leave at the end of the tour anyway,” she added. “I’m not a PA. I’m not.”


  The moment stretches, each second making it more unbearable.

  Finally, Logan sighs. “Fine,” he says.

  And then he’s gone, leaving through the door and closing it with finality. Mikayla would have liked it better if he’d slammed it. It would have felt more real, and less like a dream or a nightmare that she wanted to wake up from.

  The lump is still rising in her throat. She wants to run to Tommy and Slate’s room—or even Dash’s, since Logan has almost certainly retreated to the pool and wouldn’t be there—but to take comfort in them would mean revealing why she’s sad in the first place. And she can’t do that. No matter what, the rest of Black Lilith can never know what happened here tonight.

  Mikayla wraps her arms around herself, hugging herself in place of someone else, and lets the tears come.

  When Mikayla wakes up the next morning, her eyes are still red and puffy. She sluggishly turns her alarm off, almost throwing the phone across the room when she sees the time. She can’t believe it’s been over eight hours since she finally dropped off. She feels like she could sleep for another twenty-four hours, another twenty-four days, even. Her head is pounding, and her lungs feel like wrung out sponges.

  It takes Mikayla a moment to remember why she’s feeling this way. Then the night before comes rushing back to her.

  “Oh my God,” she breathes.

  So she did it. She broke things off with Logan, after weeks of trying desperately to make it work. She feels freer but heavier at the same time. Freer because she doesn’t need to carry the secret of their affair anymore, and heavier because she knows that she’ll be feeling the loss for a while. Logan may have lied, he may not have trusted her, but he still knows her better than most of her ex-boyfriends ever did. He still knows her deepest insecurities and fondest hopes.

  And she knows his. Or, at least, she does now. Now that they’ve had their big fight which got everything out into the open. She almost feels bad for calling him out on the Danielle thing, but she stands by it. Logan handled that situation terribly, hurting Tommy and the rest of the band for no reason. Mikayla is just grateful that he didn’t try to fire her when ended it with him.

  But why would he bother? She would resign at the end of the tour.

  Mikayla laid back on the plush hotel pillow and let her declaration from the night before sink in. A part of her had known that her job with Black Lilith would be temporary. She couldn’t be a PA with her degree—at least not forever. The gig with Black Lilith was just a job she took to cover herself for a few months while she sorted her life out.

  But then she’d gotten to know the band. She knows that Tommy likes his hair played with when he’s high, that Dash will crawl out of his deathbed for ice-cream if necessary, and that Slate can see to the heart of people without even trying. She knows that Logan would give his skin and honor for the people he loves. Mikayla had stopped scrolling for events management jobs after she found Tommy high in a hotel hallway in London because she had started to feel comfortable with them. So comfortable that she wanted to postpone her decision to leave for as long as possible. Some nights she would lie in bed and hope that the tour with Black Lilith would never end. That she, Slate, Dash, Tommy and Logan would keep traveling and laughing forever. But she knows that was never an option. She can’t remain their PA forever. She can’t.

  Ending things with Logan doesn’t change that.

  Mikayla drags herself out of bed and into the shower, washing her hair even though it doesn’t need it—she just needs to feel clean today. She even shaves her legs, armpits, and bikini line. Not that anyone’s going to be seeing her naked for a while. When she’s out of the shower, she does her hair in a braid down her back and puts on makeup to cover the awful night’s sleep she’d endured. She even does her nails.

  “It’s a new day, I’m gonna pretend tomorrow never hurt me,” she finds herself singing as she waits for the lacquer to dry. It was one of Black Lilith’s early tracks. It’s more pop song than rock song, but Tommy had loved the lyrics so much that the rest of the band had decided to include it in their first iTunes album. “Don’t be surprised if I start singing. I’m proving that I’m better even if it fucking kills me.”

  Even though she’s only ever heard Logan singing it, she doesn’t associate the song with him so it doesn’t hurt to sing it. It’s Tommy’s song, really.

  Mikayla is interrupted by her phone ringing on the mattress. She uses her foot to move the pillow so that she doesn’t hurt the lacquer still drying on her nails. When she sees the name on the screen, her heart sinks into her knees.

  “Yes, good, that’s just what I need,” she says to herself as her thumb hovers over the green button.

  Finally, hesitantly, she answers.

  “Hi Mama,” she says.

  “Hi,” her mother’s smoky voice comes through the speaker. It has been weeks since their last conversation, but she sounds almost exactly the same. Except for the slur—the slur is gone. She’s sober, at least.

  Mikayla waits a beat, but there’s nothing. Nothing but the sound of her mother breathing on the end of the line.

  “Is everything all right?” she asks.

  Her mother sighs. “I don’t just call you when I want something, you know,” she replies.

  Mikayla isn’t sure how to react to that. Is her mother trying to offer an olive branch with this phone call? If that’s the case, then she’s doing a piss-poor job of it by getting on the defensive right away. Mikayla wonders if it’s even worth listening to the woman. If she has the right to just hang up and never answer the phone when she sees her mother’s name on the screen again.

  “Okay,” Mikayla says finally. “So how are you? What have you been up to?” she asks.

  “Theodore is taking me skiing next month,” replies her mother. So obviously the divorce isn’t going through after all. Mikayla is almost impressed. Her mother has stuck with this latest husband for three years, which is easily her longest relationship since Mikayla’s father. “You should come if you’re in America,” she adds.

  “I’ll think about it.” The tour will be over in a month. Mikayla will probably be out of a job by then.

  “How is the tour?” her mother asks. There’s a sound of someone sipping from a glass and Mikayla hopes desperately that her mother is drinking orange juice.

  “The band is doing really well,” Mikayla replies. She wonders if she should tell her mother about what happened between her and Logan. Would her mother have any advice? But as soon as she thinks it, Mikayla dismisses the thought.

  It’s a little sad that her first thought is, I can’t give her that ammunition. What does it say about her relationship with her mother, that she’s constantly self-censoring because she’s worried that whatever she says will come back to hurt her?

  “They’re a bit disorganized, but they’re good men.”

  “Well, they’re lucky to have you. You’re so overqualified, their next PA will never live up to it.”

  Mikayla finds herself smiling at the words. “Thanks, Mama.”

  There’s a pause. Her mother is clearly considering her next words. “I’ve been thinking about that, actually. What you’re doing. Being a personal assistant to that band of yours.”

  Mikayla feels dread building up in her chest. “Okay.”

  “Have you considered… just staying with them?”

  If Mikayla weren’t still aching from her fight with Logan last night, she would have laughed. That’s such a complete one-eighty from her mother’s previous position on the matter that Mikayla actually double-checks the name on the phone. Surely, she can’t be talking to the same woman?

  “What do you mean, Mama?”

  “I just think you’ve sounded a lot happier on the phone these past few months. Less stressed.”

  “I’m under plenty of stress.”

  “You might be, but you’re enjoying it. I can tell. You think you’ll like to go back to events when you’re done touring with them?”


  Mikayla takes a deep breath, preparing to explain that she got a degree in events management, so that is the career she should pursue, but she can’t seem to get the words out. Of course, she’s going to move back into events management. How could she not?

  But her mother is right. The fact that Mikayla would often fantasize about the tour never ending is just proof of how much she’s enjoying being Black Lilith’s PA. Would she really like to switch over to events, where she will be dealing with different people every day and never get to know anyone as well as she knows Black Lilith? And could she even trust anyone else with her band? What if they got another Danielle for their next PA? What if they got someone who wouldn’t throw themselves in front of a knife meant for one of them?

  Mikayla shakes her head at herself, angry that she’s even considering it when she’s already given her notice to the band’s lead singer. Now that she’s made the decision to leave them, she can’t just turn around and stay. It would be too awkward with Logan anyway.

  “I’m not sure that’s going to work out, Mama,” she says.

  Her mother sighs. “Of course not,” she says. “That would be too easy. I know how much you like your work.”

  That stings. She doesn’t know if it’s the memory of her last phone call with the woman, or if it’s the knowledge that remaining with Black Lilith would actually be an ideal situation if she hadn’t fucked it up by sleeping with the band’s lead singer. Her mother’s words are a knife in her gut, bringing her back to the night when Logan had comforted her—coming to her hotel room expecting a tryst and finding her in tears. He had been so understanding that night, holding her while she cried and tucking her into bed afterward. He will never do that again. He will never comfort Mikayla, or make love to her, or kiss her forehead the moment he knows that none of the others can see. It makes Mikayla want to curl up and cry again.

  It also makes her angry. That one line from her mother can make her crumble. A few words and Mikayla is back to being a little girl getting scolded for putting work over family, even though it’s what she saw her father do her whole life.