Black Lilith: Book One (Black Lilith #1) (2 page)

“But shouldn’t the company already have hired you an assistant?”

“They did,” Slate says. He frowns then. It doesn’t make him any less handsome, but in that moment she decides that she definitely prefers him laughing. “She left. There was some drama… a tragic romance… brother against brother, very Shakespearian, and the company hasn’t replaced her yet.”

Mikayla thinks he’s probably talking out of his ass about the Shakespearian drama, but she’s been with
Bass Note
long enough to see that they’re not very good at taking care of problems when they come up. They probably have ‘Replace
Black Lilith
’s assistant’ written on a post-it somewhere.

“I’m not trained as an assistant,” she says.

“No, but that’s better!” Slate says. His frown is gone, and he looks excited. Excited and pleased—mostly with himself. He has the air of a man who’s baffled by his own brilliance, which is another accessory that he wears better than anyone has the right to. “You’re trained in events, so you’ll be able to go ahead to venues and make sure that everything’s ready for us. You’re organized, too. I’ve only known you a few minutes, and I can tell you’ve got your shit together. And the pay is
awesome
.”

That made Mikayla raise her eyebrows. She wondered what ‘awesome’ was to a musician—probably better than whatever she was being paid to get coffee and make copies. She’s never considered being a personal assistant, but she was sure that she’d be able to figure it out quickly enough.

“Is this a trick to get into my pants?” Mikayla asks, giving Slate the side-eye.

He laughs again. “I can’t stress how much that’s not what’s happening here,” he says. “I don’t need to offer a girl a job to get laid.”

It’s a cocky line, but she has no problem believing that it’s true.

“You said you were going on tour?” she asks cautiously, not wanting to give her interest away.

But Slate must read her anyway because he’s grinning wide enough to show all of his teeth. “For a couple of months,” he says. “The company would give you a contract. Which you could probably re-write for them. Tell you what… why don’t you come to the show tonight? I’ll get you a front row seat, and you can watch us perform. Get a feel for what we do. Then you can come backstage and meet the others. Sound good?”

He extends his massive hand to shake again. She looks at it, then looks down at her pencil skirt and sensible heels. She gazes around the room at the men and women with their artfully shabby clothes in various stages of disarray.

Could she survive these people for a couple of months?
Maybe, she decides. If the pay is good enough.

“Sounds good,” she says, taking Slate’s hand and giving it a firm shake.

Mikayla had the chance to go home and change before returning to the venue for the show. A part of her wanted to dress in her usual business suit, but after all the looks she got at
Bass Note
, she decided that maybe dressing for the job she wanted meant dressing how other people with that job like to dress.

Not that she wants to be a personal assistant. But when she got back to the office she looked up what their last personal assistant had been paid, and her jaw had almost dropped to the floor. For that amount of money, she could survive dressing casually for a few months.

Besides, it’s a rock concert—no one wears business suits to a rock concert.

Now, she’s standing in line outside of the warehouse in a pair of tight jeans and a sparkly top that her college roommate had bought for her last Christmas. She’s gained a little weight on her chest and hips since college, so the top stretches a little, but as she looks around at the other women in line who look like they’ve spray-painted their clothes on, she thinks she looks downright respectable. Her hair is piled up on the top of her head, and she’d added eyeliner on the top of her lashes in a way that she knows makes her eyes look darker and sexier. She hopes that she looks like the personal assistant of a rock band, and not like an under-worked events management graduate.

Mikayla is surprised to see the line of hopeful fans stretching around the block. She’s even more surprised when the bouncer waves her through, and she finds the inside of the warehouse completely packed with people. Men and women in
Black Lilith
T-shirts pressed against the walls and spilled into the aisles between the heavy metal seats that the production company had set up that day. She’s shown to the front row of seats, which are cordoned off from the rest, and given the center seat right in front of the microphone on the raised dais.

The noise is starting to swell, and she already wishes that the band would hurry up and start so that they could get this over with and she could go home. Of course, she reminds herself, if she takes this job then concerts and noise will become a way of life for her.

Is she actually considering this?

To pass the time, she pulls out her phone and scrolls through Job ads. There are a couple of events management positions that she stars for later, but none of them pay as well for a year that the personal assistant job will pay for a couple of months. She runs her finger over her lip as she reads—a habit she picked up from pulling all-nighters in college when her lips would get so chapped that they would crack and bleed.

Then the lights dim, and the crowd starts to scream.

Mikayla looks up from her phone to see the lights shining down on the dais, illuminating four men grinning out at the crowd. The people around her have stood up to applaud the band but she’s still in her seat, and now she thinks it might look awkward if she gets up. She slips her phone into her pocket and crosses her legs as though she completely meant to remain seated, hoping that bravado will cover up the faux-pas.

Her eyes find Slate first, standing to the side and twirling his drumsticks, winking and smirking and tossing his hair with his leather jacket gleaming in the lights. She can tell that he knows exactly what effect he’s having on the women in the crowd, and when his gaze falls on her in the front row, she makes sure that he can see her rolling her eyes at him. Next to him is a curly-haired man in flannel with a bass guitar swinging across his chest. His smile is almost shy, though he does start grinning and waving when Slate gives him a nudge. On his other side is a younger man with a guitar slung across his back and a Captain America T-shirt, practically vibrating with excitement as he waves to the crowd.

But it’s the man at the end of the group who draws Mikayla’s full attention within moments. He has short, messy dark hair that curls around his ears. His lean, athletic body looks strong and sturdy, and his short-sleeved white T-shirt reveals intricate tattoos covering his forearm. She stares at his face, taking in the high cheekbones and eyes that seem to carry something that she can’t put into words. It’s as though he’s coiled up—a spring ready to strike at the right moment.

Then their eyes meet. She feels pinned down by his gaze, unable to move or even think beyond wondering what color his eyes are when they’re not under harsh fluorescent lights. He seems to be staring her down from his position behind the mic.

“Evening!” he says, dipping his head in the direction of the audience. His voice is low and husky and does strange things to Mikayla’s insides. “Ladies, gentlemen and non-binaries… we’re
Black Lilith
, and we’re about to blow your minds!”

The noise from the crowd reaches a new intensity. She can see Slate sauntering over to the drum kit out of the corner of her eye, but all of her attention is focused on the man at the mic. He reaches up slowly to grip the mic stand, the muscles in his forearm bulging slightly and making his tattoos ripple. Mikayla can’t make out the pattern from where she’s sitting, but she can see the bright colors wrapping lovingly around his skin.

“Slate, count us in.”

Slate smacks his drumsticks together in a hard rhythm. The man with the guitar thrums his fingers along the neck of the instrument in a shrill buzz of movement while the bassist stands unassumingly beside the drum kit and dips his head so that he can look at the strings. Then they begin to play.

Within moments, she can understand why
Black Lilith
has so many fans. Their music seems to hum through the air and bleed into her, consuming her, making her want to move her hips along with it. The rhythm is catchy, but it’s more than that—it feels full, as though there are layers to the song that she could never comprehend, but which speak instinctively to her body.

And then there are the lyrics, which the singer pours into the mic in his husky, smoky voice.

Blue lines, dipping and curling,

black lines on either side, hemming the blue in.

Warring with red beneath the skin,

casting it in deeper clarity—

Forgotten in a sea of color screaming out,

fingers in a latex glove brush away stray ink.

Mikayla doesn’t get up and throw herself around like the people on either side of her, but she does tap her foot in time with Slate’s drumming. She scans the room briefly, taking in the crowd as they enjoy
Black Lilith’s
words, chords, and rhythms, before turning back to the stage only to find that the singer is looking at her again, watching her with those intense dark eyes.

Stain the blue with copper, dark lines,

bold lines, curving around the shoulder—

She had almost convinced herself that their eye contact before had been an accident—

a random meeting of irises while a musician scanned the crowd for his fans. But now there’s no mistaking it. He’s staring her down and running his hands over the mic, giving her a look of intent that makes her squirm in her seat. His body shifts with the music, his hips rolling as though he were halfway into his plans for the evening, and the longer he looks at Mikayla, the more that she wants to get out of her chair and switch places with his microphone.

She shakes her head to clear it and deliberately takes her phone out of her pocket, pretending to check her emails so she can take a break from his gaze. But she can still feel those eyes burning into her. She stands up and moves through the squirming, writhing bodies to get to the backstage area.

“Woah!” a security guard says when he sees her coming, holding his hands up to block her path. “Where do you think you’re going, miss?”

“My name’s Mikayla Strong,” she replies. She has to shout to make herself heard. “Slate said I was supposed to wait for the band backstage?”

The security guard gives her a once-over and raises an eyebrow, but he lets her through. She escapes through the curtained-off ‘backstage’ she’d seen earlier that day to the small green room at the very back of the warehouse. Earlier, she had made the mistake of asking why the green room wasn’t painted green, and Trixie had rolled her eyes so hard that Mikayla thought she might have done permanent damage. Inside, the walls still pump with music, but it’s dimmed and easier to bear. There are soft gray couches, an icebox full of beer, and a half-eaten box of fried chicken on the coffee table in the center of the room.

She takes a seat and starts scrolling through job searches, pushing thoughts of how the lead singer had moved against his mic and the way his dark eyes had fixated on her. If she’s going to work for these men, then she can’t afford to let herself be attracted to one of them.

“You just need to go on a date,” she tells herself firmly. “You’ve been out of the game too long, Mik.”

She scrolls through her phone, becoming so engrossed in her web searches and job descriptions that she doesn’t notice when the walls stop throbbing with
Black Lilith
’s beats. It isn’t until someone clears their throat from the doorway that she flinches and looks up.

The lead singer is there, leaning in the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest, showing off his tattoos. His dark hair is damp with sweat, and he wears a lazy smile as he looks at her from across the room.

“I was hoping you’d show up,” he says.

Mikayla’s stomach swoops at his suggestive tone, but then she frowns. Was this how they treated all of their employees? No wonder the last girl had left—Mikayla would put up with a lot for the right pay, but she draws the line at sexual harassment.

“What do you mean by that?” she asks slowly, dangerously, hoping that her tone implies that he’d better think good and hard about his answer because he’d only have one chance.

But he grins at her. So maybe he isn’t very good at reading vocal tones?

“Well, when you left I thought you were giving me the brush-off.”

“Maybe I was,” she replies.

“Then what are you doing back here?” he asked, pushing off of the doorframe and stepping into the room, closing the door with a gentle thud behind him. “Got lost?”

Ordinarily, she would have been halfway out the door by now. This sort of situation was just too dangerous. But now that she can see him in the bright, fluorescent light, she realizes that his dark, smoldering eyes are actually a soft brown. And the way he steps toward her, arms uncrossed, held down with the palms out, is about as non-threatening as a man could be in this situation. He doesn’t lock the door, and that makes Mikayla feel safer—though she still sticks her hand in her pocket and curls her fingers around her keys.

“Slate wanted me to come back here to meet the band,” Mikayla says.

That makes the singer raise both his eyebrows. “The
whole
band?” he asks incredulously.

She doesn’t think that’s so strange. “Of course,” she replies.

She notices the way that his pants cling to every curve below his waist, and needs to all but drag her eyes up to look him in the face. She wishes that she didn’t. He’s even more handsome without the outlandish stage lights. Out there he was ethereal, almost other-worldly, but in the regular light of the green room, she can see a healthy glow in his skin that isn’t covered in tattoos. His high cheekbones, which were sharp as knives on stage, frame his eyes and make them shine brighter.

“Slate’s always had a way with the ladies,” he replies, shaking his head slowly and looking at Mikayla in an entirely different way—almost like he’s impressed. “But I don’t think Tommy’s gonna be down for a
ménage à
five
.”

“
Ménage
à
…
wait!” She cuts herself off. She’s starting to catch up to the conversation. “You think I’m a groupie?”

“Nothing wrong with that,” he replies, and Mikayla is reminded sharply of the conversation she had with Slate earlier that day. “We’re all sex-positive feminists here.”

“I’m
not
a groupie!”

“Oh, come on.” He gives her a knowing look like they’re sharing a joke. “The way you were looking at me while I was on stage? Why do you think I was so quick to finish the set?”

She opens her mouth to retort but finds that she can’t. She’s lost the words. It’s as if her indignation has bled her voice out of her so that all she can do is gape at him.