Page 12 of Empire of Dark

“Haven’t you ever wanted to leave the area, live a different life?”

Her brow wrinkled, the look in her eyes telling me I was crazy. “Why would I want to do that? Everything that I could ever need is here at the castle.”

She handed me a cup of tea and I held onto it for one moment before setting it by the books stacked on the coffee table. Josie looked innocent enough, but one could never be too careful. I wasn’t stupid enough to be drugged my first day in the castle.

“How many generations of your family have worked here?”

Her fingers met her thumb as she started counting. “Eight, that I can think of off the top of my head.”

“That is?—”

My words cut off as the door to the drawing room opened.

A malefic stepped in—I could tell, for how the hairs on the back of my neck spiked. If there was one thing I was good at, it was identifying any malefic within twenty feet of my body. Especially one with a dangerous presence like this.

I hated the feeling and this year was going to wear me to the bone, living amongst them.

I turned around on the sofa to face the doorway.

Mother fucking hell.

The suit from the tavern last night.

“Maude.”

I glanced from the man at the doorway to Josie, my forehead wrinkled. Did I get her name that wrong? I was pretty sure she said her name was Josie.

“Maude.” He said it again, annoyance in his voice as he stepped farther into the room.

The maid quickly nodded her head to the man and left the room without a word, closing the door behind her.

“Maude.”

I looked around. There was no one else in the room.

He moved around the sofa to stop in front of me and my lips parted with a silent gasp of air into my chest. I was sitting, but the man, he was tall. I didn’t get a great look at him in that tavern, but now, standing in front of me, I was seriously questioning my decision-making abilities in the heat of battle.

What had I been thinking?

The man was devastatingly tall and strong. The black button-down shirt he wore stretched tight across his shoulders, a shirt almost too small—right on the border of being fashionably tight, but tailored exactly to his frame.

The exact type of body that sent a tingle of excitement across my core that I didn’t care for. I refused to acknowledge the traitorous tingle. Especially knowing it was attached to a malefic.

Dark hair thick across his head, several strands hung roguish along his forehead, refusing to follow the rest of his hair that brushed back from his brow. Impeccable bone structure, a jawline walnuts could be cracked upon, with stark cheekbones and amber brown eyes. Brown eyes that were bogged down, holding the weight of what? The world? Evil? Deciding the dinner menu?

It was hard to tell. But his eyes were definitely troubled. Weary.

Eyes that sank a little too deeply into me and I fidgeted.

His gaze locked onto me, searing me. “Maude, are you hard of hearing? I wasn’t told a word about that. I was told by Triaten you were an impeccable specimen of your kind. That was our agreement.”

So this was Damen Folotto. His imposing presence alone told me that. For all the research I’d done on the Folotto family, Damen—the youngest of the Folotto brothers and head of the family—had manage to scrub away any online images of himself.

I don’t know what exactly I was expecting in the man, but it wasn’t this.

My eyebrows lifted at him. “Maude? No, I’m sorry, do you have me confused for someone else?” I looked toward the open door, trying to remember if we’d passed any other drawing rooms when I was led into here. Either I was in the wrong one or he was. “Is there another female you are hoping to mate with in another drawing room?”

He drew in a deep breath—almost seething, but not quite. “Your name isn’t Maude?”

---