Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Ever After

  A Dirtshine Novel

  Roxie Noir

  Copyright © 2018 by Roxie Noir

  Cover: Coverlüv

  Photographer: Wander Aguiar

  Model: John DeWall

  Editor: Sennah Tate

  Formatting: Vellum

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  (That means don’t steal things.)

  Join my mailing list and get my novella Dirty Sweet for free!

  Logan and I are friends. That’s it. Just friends.

  Sure, he’s really hot. Yeah, he’s got biceps I’d like to lick and a smile that makes me feel all fluttery inside. And yeah, even though he’s the strong, silent type, he still manages to make me snort-laugh at least once a day.

  Particularly if I’ve had a couple of drinks.

  I did drag him to this Halloween party, and we are getting drunk, but it’s no big deal. Nothing’s gonna happen. Because we’re just friends.

  Best friends. The kind of friend I can’t risk losing over something dumb like a drunken kiss, no matter how bad I want to try it just once.

  There will be no kissing. No bicep licking. No nothing.

  Because we’re just friends.

  Sign up now and Dirty Sweet is yours, free!

  For Mr. Noir, always.

  Prologue

  Liam

  The light’s approaching. It’s slow, but it’s coming.

  All I can do is watch it. Wait for it. There’s something peaceful and soothing about the bright circle moving slowly through the night, the bright cone it casts lighting the tracks and the trees off to the side, crisp bags and cardboard boxes and whatever other shit has made its way down there.

  A breeze pushes at me, gently, cool and damp. It’s October and sodding everything is cool and damp, the feel of wetness never out of my bones, the blue sky a goddamn dream that I’d miss anyway because today I woke up at four-thirty in the evening and the sun was already hovering at the horizon.

  I raise the bottle to my lips again. Not much left. I take a glug anyway, think about throwing the last few drops at the light. The sound it would make, a cymbal crash of glass in the quiet village night.

  I think about throwing myself toward it, the hush and whir and clank of steel rolling on steel growing louder. Take another sip, my stomach twisting, my foot slipping on a stone slick with the damp but I right myself before I fall.

  That was close.

  It didn’t feel close.

  It didn’t feel like anything.

  I sway again. Deliberately this time, and now the cone of light and the deep cloudy sky above and the tracks below all tilt and jerk, the vodka running through my veins at high velocity.

  There’s a delayed prickle and rush of my brain screaming you’re going to fall, but I lean into it because at least it’s something. Because it won’t hurt, not for long. Because the light coming on fast down below feels like all there is. There’s not even my body, just this single dot and beam, all-consuming.

  I understand why moths fly toward flames. I’ve always understood.

  More light, off to my left, the bounce of headlights over cobblestones. I freeze in place, just another of the rocks on this bridge. Whoever’s driving around out here at the very bottom of the night is likely sloshed as well, likely to think I’m a particularly upright and ugly gargoyle standing guard.

  The headlights bounce. The car proceeds, slowly, onto the bridge, the purr of the engine echoing from the stones.

  And it stops. There’s another hum, briefly, and I stay stock-still so I can’t be seen.

  Silence. I wait, gargoyle-like, but I know the quiet’s broken.

  “Hey, are you okay?” a girl’s voice asks. American, loud enough to be heard over the oncoming train below.

  I don’t answer. How the fuck am I to answer if I’m stone?

  “Hello?”

  The train’s coming closer, almost to the bridge. I’m fixated, itching to see what it feels like to finally go, fly, fall. Just to find out. A car door opens and closes behind me.

  “Please don’t jump,” she says, closer now. Maybe five feet behind me.

  I lift one foot from the stones of the bridge’s railing. Just to see.

  “Listen, do it tomorrow night or something instead,” she says. “Or do it later, like when the next train comes, it’s just that now I’m here and I really don’t do blood and gore and if you do jump right now I’ll have to be the one who calls it in, and your body parts will be scattered for a mile because it takes trains a really long time to stop and think of what a huge pain in the ass that is for everyone—”

  “Jesus fucking Christ can a man have some peace?” I finally ask, both feet back on stone. “Even in the dead of night there’s some American slag who’s got to come nosing about in what’s not her fucking business.”

  I turn, bottle in hand, stones slippery beneath my feet. My body jerks as I nearly lose my footing, and the girl gasps, both hands flying to her mouth.

  “Careful!” she shouts, her voice muffled.

  “Safe as milk,” I say, my voice nasty and sharp over the roar of the train below.

  She’s dim, the only light on her the reflected glow of headlights, as the train’s single headlamp rushes beneath us, clattering along the tracks. I raise the bottle to my lips and guzzle the last few sips.

  It doesn’t do a thing. No warm rush, no swirl through my body. I’m just numb, because I guess that’s what happens at the bottom of a fifth of vodka.

  She says something else. Her mouth moves, her face pale with barely reflected light, the damp breeze moving dark curls around it. I can’t hear her over the train, so I just shrug.

  “Please get down,” she repeats, shouting now.

  “Or what?”

  “I just don’t want you to fal
l.”

  I laugh, tossing the bottle in my hand. Somehow, I catch it again by the neck, and look at her, grinning.

  “Then that makes one of us.”

  “You’re drunk,” she starts.

  “Am I?”

  “And I’m sure you wouldn’t be here normally, probably something’s happened that’s really upset you and I know everything feels hopeless right now—”

  I toss the bottle again, the glass reflecting the light as it arcs up, but even though I jerk my hand out I miss it as it falls and it crashes to the cobblestones of the bridge below.

  The bottle shatters. The girl jumps, and even as I start laughing, she glances at me.

  Her eyes are huge, shining. On the brink of tears.

  I hop off the railing to the road and only stumble a little, because even though everything is numb like I’ve taken a dose of novocaine to the soul, I don’t think I can watch this obnoxious American girl cry.

  “Thank you,” she shouts.

  I bow sarcastically, and nearly trip over my own feet and into the shattered bottle as I do, then catch myself.

  “Watch out!” she yelps.

  “You’re welcome to fucking leave now,” I say. “Or do you want to watch me walk off this bridge and away from danger so you can feel like you’ve really done something for tonight?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Imagine the headlines,” I go on, waving an arm through the air. “Heroic American bird valiantly saves life of useless drunken arsehole, to be made honorary dame.”

  “Just go!” she shouts.

  “Maybe they’ll throw you a parade!” I go on, the train still roaring below. I take one unsteady step toward her. She takes one step back, toward the car that’s still running. “You could have a float with a reenactment of the scene, a beauty queen waving from a convertible, the mayor shouting lovely goodwill messages over a loudspeaker.”

  With a whoosh, the last train car passes, clanking off into the night, and sudden silence falls over us like a blanket.

  “Just go somewhere else and don’t jump in front of trains,” she says, her voice hard, brittle, and the tiniest bit wobbly. “You’re bound to ruin someone’s day if you do.”

  “Wouldn’t want that,” I say, bitterly, her pale face wobbling in front of me. “I’d simply hate to inconvenience someone.”

  “Go home,” she says softly. “Go to sleep, things will seem better tomorrow.”

  “They won’t,” I say. “They never do. I seem to keep waking up in the same place staring at the same wreckage of my life and then I seem to end up here night after night.”

  She swallows, her lips pressed together. I’m close enough and it’s quiet enough that I can hear the sound her throat makes, and it drives me onward because despite the numbness I’ve found I like getting a reaction from her, even this.

  “So you’re going to offer me a ride home now, yeah?” I ask, knowing she won’t. “You’ve come to rescue me so now you’re going to see me back, safe and sound, tuck me into bed and make sure there’s no nightmares tonight?”

  The girl glares. Her eyes glitter.

  “I’m beginning to be sorry I stopped,” she whispers.

  I grin, leaning a little closer to her. A nasty, vicious grin.

  “I’ve been sorry this whole time, love,” I snarl.

  Her mouth opens but I turn away, wobble, throw my arms out, and walk. I crunch a few shards of glass beneath my boots and the cold breeze catches me, tendrils coming through my sweater.

  I walk the direction her car’s not pointing, into the dark, and she doesn’t follow. I get myself off the bridge without looking back, onto the road, and even though I want to look back, want to see whether she’s relieved or angry or coming after me, I don’t.

  It’s better. I shouldn’t see people, meet people, know people.

  I should crawl into my hole and sleep and eat and do nothing, be nothing.

  Be nowhere.

  The road is lined with hedgerows and I duck through one because I want her to stop watching me. And I wait. I stand there, body beset by the tiny pricks of cedar spikes, and I wait because I can’t handle feeling her eyes on me anymore, I can’t handle knowing that she’s back there.

  After a moment, the car door shuts. The engine revs. Tires over the cobblestones and then she’s finally driving away, leaving me alone again in the deep blue night.

  I take a deep breath. My head spins, tilts, whirls. I rub my face and it feels like I’m rubbing my face through a blanket, my hand seems so far away.

  My feet turn themselves toward the shitty basement flat I’ve been calling home, and I let them. I walk down the dark road, toward a dark village, the deep black of the northern English country threatening to swallow me from both sides.

  My brain’s nearly muted. There’s nearly nothing, and that’s the point, but I do have one single thought as I stumble back.

  She was pretty.

  Then, black.

  Chapter One

  Frankie

  A Year Later

  I pause on the landing, between a painting of a stern gentleman in a cloak and some sort of heavily sculptured potted bush, and I take a deep breath. I can already hear the voices drifting up to me from the drawing room at the bottom of the stairwell, the clinking of glass and china, the soft tinkle of polite laughter.

  It’s fine, I tell myself. Drink slowly, keep your voice down, act polite and interested and for the love of all that’s holy don’t call anyone by their first name.

  I take another deep breath, then wobble a little. The carpet here is deceptively deep and these heels are thinner and higher than I’m used to wearing — vintage, from the 70s, I found them two weeks ago in the basement of a resale store in the Village that was going out of business.

  They’re black leather with tasteful gold trim, peep toe, to go with the little black dress I’m wearing tonight. The Winsteads have company and right now, after Monday night, I’m a little bit terrified of the whole wardrobe I brought.

  “Miss Strauss, would you care to borrow a shawl?” a voice says behind me.

  I jump about a mile in the air, wobble, recover, grab the plant by accident, let it go, smile.

  “Apologies, Miss Strauss, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you,” says Eunice, the assistant housekeeper.

  “Not a problem,” I say, trying to regain some composure. “I was a little lost in thought.”

  “Would you like to borrow that shawl?”

  I consider Eunice for a moment. Everything in Downhamshire-on-Kyne has layers of meaning, and worse, every question has a right answer. Even if it’s ‘what’s your favorite animal,’ there’s a right and a wrong and I somehow have gotten even single question thus far wrong.

  Eunice knits her hands in front of herself. I bite my lip, looking over my shoulder toward the staircase leading to the drawing room.

  Shawl pro: covers self, and self is probably inappropriate.

  Shawl con: very easy to dip into soup; could probably trip over shawl.

  “Eunice,” I finally sigh. “I need you to level with me.”

  Poor Eunice tries to hide a smile, and it doesn’t really work, but I’m just glad the staff finds me entertaining.

  “Do I want a shawl? Does this outfit need a shawl? If I go down there sans shawl will I be inviting scandal?” I ask bluntly.

  Alistair, my fiancé who brought me into this mess, did warn me a month ago that we’d be expected to dress for dinner nightly while we visited his family estate and ancestral home of Downhamshire-on-Kyne. After I spent a good hour questioning him, I managed to learn:

  1. Dressing for dinner does, in fact, mean I need to wear a dress;

  2. It would be in poor taste to wear the same dress twice during a visit;

  3. ‘Demure,’ ‘modest,’ and ‘tasteful’ should be guiding principles; and

  4. Yes, seriously, a different dress every night for two whole weeks, more dresses than I owned at the time of the conversation
.

  I dress-shopped with a zeal I’d never felt before. No secondhand store, Goodwill, vintage shop, estate sale, or costume shop throwaway bin in the city of New York was safe, because I needed dresses and by God, I had a budget.

  And I found them. When they didn’t fit or needed work, I fixed them, staying up late at night in my tiny Brooklyn studio with my trusty sewing machine and an iPod full of 80’s hits. By the end of the month I had fifteen dinner-appropriate dresses.

  Fifteen. I had an extra.

  At least, I thought they were appropriate. Turns out that what I think is a ‘dinner dress’ — red, A-line, pleated skirt, scoop neck, sleeveless, just above the knee — is ‘better suited to a tarted-up streetwalker on Tynesbury Alley than my son’s future wife.’

  Lady Winstead didn’t say it to me. She said it to her daughter Elizabeth, but even though I don’t know her that well, I’m about 90% sure I was supposed to overhear her.

  Only ten more days in Downhamshire-on-Kyne, and I still don’t know whether to take the shawl.

  “I only ask because the drawing room can be a bit drafty, and it was quite cool already today,” Eunice says, just barely smiling. “In any case, if you’d like one, you need only ask a bit later.”

  I consider this. I was fine earlier, and there are cocktails being served, so I’m only going to get warmer.

  “I think I’ll skip it for now, thank you,” I tell Eunice, who just nods her head politely and walks away. I can only hope it’s the right answer, though I’ve got a feeling it wasn’t.

  I shake my head to clear it a little. I pat my mass of curls, hoping that none have gone rogue since the last time I looked in the mirror, straighten my dress, wish it were an inch longer, and descend the stairs, holding onto the banister carefully.

  “My God, have you heard the plan to put another ring road ‘round Leeds and bring all the London weekender traffic our way?” Lady Catherine, my future mother-in-law is saying. “It’ll be frightful. We won’t even be able to visit the house in Saltburn any more, it’ll be overrun with hoodlums and vandals.”