Midlife Wish (Blackwell Djinn Book 1) Read online

  Midlife Wish

  A Blackwell Djinn Novel

  Nikki Kardnov

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  Also by Nikki Kardnov

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2019 Nikki Kardnov

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

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  Chapter 1

  ASHLEY

  When Ashley walked into the office on Monday morning, into the maze of cubicles, the whole cavernous space went silent.

  They all knew.

  Of course, they did.

  On Friday afternoon, as Ashley was leaving work, she was served with divorce papers.

  To make matters worse, her husband, who she had been separated from for the last four months, and who was an account executive at the very same office, was now rumored to be dating the receptionist, who happened to be the ex-wife of Ashley’s supervisor.

  This was the kind of twisted debauchery you couldn’t make up. The kind of thing that if you heard the story secondhand, you’d never believe it was true because it sounded like a soap opera.

  But Ashley was living it and it was the absolute worst.

  Over the weekend, her best friend Lola had said, “Do not go to work on Monday. Eat an entire pizza in bed and drink an entire box of wine. But do not, under any circumstances, go to work.”

  Ashley should have heeded that warning. Where was the supposed wisdom of midlife?

  In the trash with her marriage apparently.

  Ashley was buzzing with the need to fix things, set them to rights. Which was why she’d ignored Lola’s warning and headed to work on Monday morning intent on confronting her husband in order to win him back.

  She wound through the cubicle maze and then turned left toward the executive wing. She found James in his office and Isla resting her delicate ass cheek on the edge of his desk.

  A flash of warmth ran through Ashley. Was that anger, embarrassment, or just a heat flash? Last time she’d been to the doctor, she’d been delivered the unfortunate news of being perimenopausal.

  Yay for getting old. Insert eye roll.

  Isla and James looked up at her.

  Ashley froze in the doorway like a rabbit. Instinct told her to run. Her heart told her to stay.

  Isla cleared her throat and straightened. She looked absolutely stunning for a Monday morning. Long, red hair hung over her shoulders in artful waves. Her makeup was perfect, her lips red and her cheeks apricot pink.

  Isla was the kind of woman who made everything look effortless.

  “Ash,” James said. He stood up, buttoning the front of his suit coat. “What are you—can I—”

  “I should go.” Isla swept past Ashley. Her sugary, vanilla perfume assaulted Ashley’s nose. She avoided looking Ashley in the eye as she left.

  With a deep breath, Ashley shut the door and sat down, her hands shaking and her heart racing.

  Please don’t cry. Be strong. FIX THIS.

  “You wouldn’t answer my texts this weekend,” she said. “Or my phone calls.”

  James winced. He sat back down and propped his elbows on his desk. “It felt like it might be too soon and I didn’t want you to say something you might regret.”

  Ashley snorted. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. You know how you are when you’re upset. You say whatever you think and I don’t want you to do or say something crazy.”

  “Crazy? Seriously?” Tears burned in her eyes. Keep it together. “I thought we agreed to take a break and then talk when the time was right and figure out what our next steps were and—”

  “I did figure out my next steps and I took them.”

  “Divorce papers though? At work?”

  James held up a hand. “Now, I had no control over that part, but I’m very sorry that it happened here and—”

  “Everyone knows! They were all looking at me when I came in this morning! And now Isla?” She couldn’t take much more, but she had to know. “Are you sleeping with her?”

  “Ash, really—"

  “Are you?”

  James sighed again and looked away. “Yes.”

  Ashley felt sick.

  Her eyes grew cloudy with tears and then she was sobbing and shaking and she felt like she might vomit. Her heart was racing in her chest and pounding in her ears.

  She couldn’t catch her breath.

  Could a person die of heartbreak?

  “Here,” James said and handed her a tissue. One of the cheap office ones that fell apart in her hands. Like her fucking life.

  “Ash,” James said as he came around the desk and knelt beside her. “I need you to hear me when I say that it’s over between us. I want you to move on. And I’m so sorry it had to happen this way, but I think deep down you know it’s the right thing for both of us.”

  It hit Ashley then that some other woman, unbeknownst to her, had been sharing her husband with her. Isla and James likely had inside jokes now. They likely knew each other’s tender spots. They likely knew each other’s bodies almost as well as Ashley knew James’s, and vice versa.

  She stood up abruptly, causing James to rock back on his heels. She handed him the moist, torn tissue and stumbled from the office. James called her name behind her.

  Out in the main office, the usual buzz of background noise was decidedly absent. Ashley hurried to the safety of her three cubicle walls and sat at her desk. Her chair squeaked as she settled in and opened the company database, then her email. Her face was hot and her ears full of water.

  She still couldn’t take a deep breath.

  How was she going to get through the rest of today?

  How was she supposed to get through the rest of her life as a divorced woman? A failure?
<
br />   She had saw what divorce did to her mother. It scooped out all of her good parts and left her a hollow, snarling mess. Her parents’ divorce had ruined their lives.

  Ashley clicked through several emails barely registering the details.

  She was just about to close out of the window, resigned to the fact that she would get nothing done today, when a company-wide memo caught her attention.

  Dae Blackwell buys out Com-Kore, the headline read.

  Ashley skimmed the memo. She didn’t really care what the company thought of this new acquisition or how it might benefit them if they landed his account.

  What the memo did, however, was stir up an old conversation she’d had with a temp that had sat in the cubicle next to her just six months ago.

  “The Blackwells have the power to make anything happen,” the temp had said one slow Tuesday afternoon.

  Ashley had heard the gossip, of course. There were urban legends about the Blackwells. That they were demons. Or vampires. There were old, grainy photographs on the Internet that conspiracy theorists pointed to as proof. Pictures that were dated from the 1800s but showed what looked like a Blackwell or two. Ashley had never gone poking in the bowels of the Internet. She’d never had any reason to care.

  But that afternoon, the temp had piqued her interest. Maybe it was out of boredom. Maybe it was just plain curiosity.

  She’d pushed her desk chair out of her cubicle so she could see the temp face-to-face. “Do you know the Blackwells?” she’d asked.

  The temp (she couldn’t remember his name now) shook his head. “Not really. But I did make a deal with one once.”

  “Deal?”

  “Three wishes,” he said. “That’s what I got. Nothing was off limits.”

  “Nothing?” Ashley parroted.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why are you a temp at an ad agency?”

  The guy smirked. “Clearly I didn’t ask for the right wish.”

  She’d quickly forgotten about the conversation, believing that the temp had a penchant for tall tales.

  But now...she stared at the screen, her focus far away.

  An image of Dae sprang to mind. His dark hair, swept back, shorn short on the sides. His puffy lips that always seemed to scowl at the camera when the media spotted him out on the town. The dark line of his brow. The cut of his jaw.

  There was an iconic image of him that had graced the cover of Blackwater Times, along with the headline, Dae Blackwell Takes Over the City and Our Hearts. In the image, he stood shirtless at a large circular window, the sunlight glowing behind him. His back had been to the camera to show off the giant skull tattoo that covered him from shoulder to hip. The skull had fangs.

  Dae had been turned just slightly so he could shoot the photographer his infamous broody scowl over his shoulder, his dark hair hanging in his eyes. For some reason, his hair had been wet. She remembered that detail clearly, the way it gleamed in the sunlight.

  Ashley had bought that issue of Blackwater Times, even though she never, ever read the magazine. It was probably shoved inside some box somewhere at home.

  She had to admit, the Blackwells were extremely attractive—all four of the brothers and their uncle—but it was Dae she’d been most attracted to. Only in an innocent, far-off way like a regular person crushes on a celebrity. Because Dae was the city’s elite and she was...well, not. She had never crossed paths with him in real life. It wasn’t like she frequented the bars or nightclubs that he owned and operated.

  The Blackwells have the power to make anything happen.

  It was probably just a myth. No probably about it.

  And yet… Ashley was in desperate need of a miracle.

  And with nowhere else to turn, what did she stand to lose by going to the Blackwells?

  Nothing. People went and saw fortune tellers all the time. Lola even had a tarot reader practically on retainer.

  Ashley had already lost everything else. Why not her mind, too?

  After logging out of her computer, she grabbed her bag and made a straight line to the elevators. She was doing something crazy, goddamn it, and she knew just where to start.

  Chapter 2

  DAE

  In 1884, Dae’s mother fell in love with a human and burned through her wishes so fast, she was dead within a year. When Dae asked her why, she said, “I love him and he’s dying.”

  Well, the human still died, and his mother died with him, and in any world, Dae thought that was bullshit.

  All djinn die, of course. They only got 3000 wishes to grant, 1000 deals to make, and then they were ash in the ground. Dae had always been taught that when you go out, you go out with a bang.

  Trying to save the life of one human? That wasn’t worth shit.

  It had been over a century since his mother died and he was still angry with her.

  Dae entered Blackwell House and slammed the front door behind him. The double arched doors were twelve feet tall and had been hand carved out of mahogany. The house had been built some two centuries earlier back when the Blackwells ran the town that would later become a burgeoning city named after them.

  Blackwater was now a bustling port city that sat on the edge of the Rine River and sprawled southwest to meet the Atlantic Ocean. When the Blackwells had built their house back in 1782, the town had had a population of 312. Now it was north of 600,000.

  Dae could still picture High Water Street as it had been in the 1700s when it’d been nothing but dirt and an outpost station. He was not one to reminisce, but even he had to admit, sometimes less was more. Back then the citizens of Blackwater knew there was something other about him, something that should be respected and revered. He’d been a god among men.

  Of course, now in the 21st century rich bachelor was pretty much the same as god so he was still respected and revered. It was just a little harder to get away with things.

  As Dae went left down a hallway past the front parlor and through the dining room, the giant built-in grandfather clock struck four. He could hear most of his family in the back parlor.

  There was Poe, the second eldest brother, and loudest of them all. He was bitching about his mark from the week before who’d wished for a Ferrari and then cried when he realized it was missing the engine. Actually cried!

  Then Mad jumped in, the eldest Blackwell, his laughter deep and infectious. Mad tried topping that story with his from the night before where he’d had to fuck a human who was seventy years old and had a pussy as dry as the dead.

  Their youngest brother, Thorin, voice quieter, said, “You’re all a bunch of idiots.”

  Dae sauntered into the room. “You’re wrong, Thorin. They aren’t idiots, they’re assholes. There is a difference.” Which made the whole lot of them burst out laughing.

  “Idiotic assholes then,” Thorin said.

  Thorin was the only one out of the family who could pass as American. He’d been born in northern Scotland, but he’d spent the majority of his life in America and liked to steep himself in American culture. “If we’re to live here,” he’d said once, “then I’d like to understand the people as best I can.”

  Though he had an American accent, sometimes when he was irritated he would revert to the old ways and sound more like the others.

  The older Blackwells had the old country accent, which sounded to most Americans like British Received Pronunciation or better known as the King’s English.

  Though Thorin was the youngest, Dae, for one reason or the other, looked the youngest. In most scenarios, he could pass as a human in his mid-twenties or thirties. Thorin had the gift of height and facial hair and often passed as thirties. Mad told people he was in his thirties, though he really did look closer to forty. Poe was the leanest brother out of the bunch and the biggest asshole if there was a stick to measure it on.

  People often pegged Poe for late twenties/early thirties.

  “Where’s Red?” Dae asked.

  Poe looked at Thorin who looked at Mad.
/>   Mad said, “He’s not feeling well. Said he’d rather stay in tonight.”

  Dae pushed off the doorway and doubled back to the staircase. He took them two at a time, his hand trailing along the winding banister as he cursed the slowness of his uninvoked body. When a djinn was in the midst of a deal with a mortal, they were flush with power. An invoked djinn had the ability to transmute—to leave one place and appear in another with nothing more than a thought.

  On the second-floor landing, he went left toward the east wing of the house where Red’s personal rooms were located.

  At the closed door, Dae knocked and held his breath.

  “Come in,” Red called and Dae pushed the door open.

  The room was hot and stuffy. The heavy velvet drapes were tugged shut, the windows closed and latched. Sweat started to bead at Dae’s neck as he crossed the giant room. In the far corner lay his grandfather, in a four-poster bed that had been carved by a bull of a man in 17th century Bulgaria.

  Everything about this house was ancient and storied. Red being the oldest and most storied of all.

  “Hey,” Dae said as he pulled up a chair by the bedside. Red was drowning in a sea of wolf pelts. Dae hated it when he was like this, when he seemed breakable like a human. Though Red was their grandfather, and now somewhere north of nine hundred years old (he was vague about his exact age) he almost looked the same age as Dae. People thought he was their uncle—their very young uncle—but if you were to sit down with Red for any length of time you’d know the truth.