Page 10 of Love, Laugh, Lich

“Oh,” I nod, and bite down against a smile. I suppose it is easier to fit through doorways when you have less of a physical form. I can’t imagine him getting on the lift when he’s this size. Perhaps it’s also better for avoiding getting stabbed. It’s strange to think of the office outside this Dark Sanctum, the messages and the stacks of paperwork. All of it seems so mundane compared to the rituals Soven performs in here.

I’ll have to leave him to it, in a little bit, I realize. I have to get dressed and go back out there, and resume my work day. I may have offered up my body to his dark bidding, but that’s not very different from giving him my time and effort, day in and day out.

A quiet lull falls over us. Even as I lay my head on his massive chest, all I can hear is his breath.

“How come I can’t feel a heartbeat?” I ask, tracing circles in the fuzz of his flesh.

“I don’t have a heart. I have a phylactery,” he says simply.

I wrinkle my nose, unsure if I want to know. “A what?”

Soven hesitates, and I wonder if I’ve asked something I shouldn’t have.

“It’s just a type of container,” he shrugs after a moment. “With blood in it. As well as the entirety of my power. Most Liches hide their hearts miles away, at the bottom of impossible dungeons. That way, anyone who attacks you in person cannot kill you.”

He explains it to me in that teacher sort of voice. Sometimes when he does that, I think it’s such a shame he doesn’t have an apprentice. I think it would make him so happy.

“But if they got to the bottom of the dungeon where it’s hidden, they could,” I worry.

“Like I said,” he chuckles. “You want to keep it safe.”

I nodded against him, my hand digging into his chest a little. To me, it sounds like this phylactery thing is basically his heart. I can’t imagine burying my heart or liver or kidneys or anything vital underground in a box.

But he’s buried his heart in some rotten dungeon somewhere, where no one can ever get to it. The thought sort of saddens me.

Insecurity creeps in alongside that thought. He’s the Dark Lord—I can’t have been the first to have stripped in front of him and told him to fuck me into Wednesday.

“Well, um, I should get back to work,” I say, sitting up and looking around for my clothes.

I am still just his secretary, after all.

5

“I just don’t think it’s a healthy workplace dynamic,” Janice from HR says during lunch. We’ve gotten a cafeteria table across from one another.

“I mean, giving away shivers? What if next he needs a quart of sweat, or to pluck all of your left eyelashes out? There’s so much paperwork involved, and the union to work with,” she continues on, waving around a forkful of her salad, losing some of her vinaigrette in the process.

“It was only a shiver,” I shrug, as if it was a one-time thing that I hadn’t drastically escalated since. “Besides, I’m not part of a union.”

“Well, then that’s another side of the problem, isn’t it?” Janice rolls her eyes as she chews through a mouthful. “I mean, gods, that’s why the downstairs security is so heavy. The number of weirdos that used to come in and prostrate themselves before their Dark Lord; it happened at least once a week when the Lich Lord first took over. It was slowing things down, that’s why we had to outsource through other agencies.”

I didn’t know that. Somehow not knowing makes me feel extraordinarily stupid and naïve. I fumble to keep my composure while something like jealousy and despair rises in my throat, and fights to be let out. I swallow a few times, holding my mouth in a firm line.

“And now we have to screen for assassins who’ve infiltrated the agencies and unions and whatever,” I scoff, but a little too much emotion comes out in the words. I need to reel it in or she’s bound to wonder why I care so much about ‘just a shiver’.

But Janice doesn’t seem to notice, taking my derision as annoyance at having my desk obliterated because of said assassins.

It’s been weighing more and more on me these last few days since I was the weirdo to prostrate myself before my Dark Lord and offer up my body to him.

The thought of offering my heart to him as well won’t leave my mind, no matter how I try to shunt it to the side or bury it under a pile of lust, as if that will make those feelings dissolve into mere lust as well.

I want him to know, but more than that I want him to return those feelings. But if I confess my feelings to him, and he either can’t or won’t return them, I don’t know if I’ll be able to continue working here. It might be too awkward to bear, or too painful to continue seeing him every day.

And I really like working here. It’s not just the health benefits. I feel needed and important. I don’t know that anywhere else will give me that kind of satisfaction. I guess that’s kind of one of the pitfalls of working in an evil dominion; there really isn’t anywhere else to work.

Still, the thought preoccupies me almost all day. Every time I have to dip into Soven’s Sanctum, something in my heart pinches when I look at him, and I feel like I need to duck out of the Sanctum again to avoid that feeling.

I step into the Sanctum, walking quickly to his desk to deposit a stack of internal reports. I turn on a dime the moment I put the folders down. I don’t really want to give him the time to hold a conversation, or say anything not work related.

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