PROLOGUE
THREE MONTHS AGO
Cursing someone was never part of my breakup plan.
Sincerely, I hadn’t planned on cursing anyone. I planned on consuming a large bottle of wine, having a good cry, and maybe—maybe—letting myself host a pity party, where I could wonder where in the hell my life was going.
Those were all things that had come to mind before I concocted a god-awful zinger of a hex.
Yet here we were. Some things just happened in the heat of the moment, and then there was no going back. And I had hit most of those other classic breakup milestones already.
Goddess, I’d hit nearly all three just tonight after making my way home from another boring party thrown by one of my clients in the hair salon. She liked to keep me in her good graces, which apparently included inviting me to her baby shower.
“It’s honestly a dream,” my client, who had let her roots grow out, had said, rubbing her bulbous baby bump. “We were only just trying—weareonly twenty-seven after all—and it happened! My hubby is so happy too. He cried—he was so overjoyed. Oh! Look at us. We’re a little family now.”
Everyone had oohed and aahed over her and how she positively glowed. Blessed.
After I had left my family behind at twenty-four, I had given up all the toxic lingo and traditions that had come with it. Like my mother, who picked at my clothes and my personality before I walked in the kitchen, let alone out the door. And my father, who deep down still believed a woman, especially one raised with every advantage, as I was, belonged in the house, planning parties and admiring her dear husband. For the longest time, I never wanted any of those classic family things. They felt too close to memories. They felt like traps.
The perfectly decorated houses. The white fence. The dog to complain about.
The babies.
Especially not when the little bundles of joy came with having to watch someone open bundles of pastel-colored gifts for nearly three hours.
Not until one person had come along and screwed everything up by giving me the only thing I’d ever actually wanted out of life.
Love.
The toe-curling, heart-swooning, romantically disgusting sort of love.
Clenching my fists together, I laid them on my lap as I stared down at myBook of Shadowson the floor. The words looked blurrier than I remembered writing them in the dull lamplight, but that was certainly due to the champagne mixed with vodka talking.
The entire endeavor could’ve certainly been reduced to that from the very beginning last June. Drunken insanity.
But that wasn’t it.
I really shouldn’t do this.
That’s right. Don’t be a total screwup. There are consequences for these things.
The entire Rule of Three had been built on the fear of consequences. The lesson was also one of the first things ever ingrained in a young witch. There was power in numbers. From mother, maiden, and crone to the rule that every intent you put out into the world would return to you threefold. It was one of the most important rules. The golden rule, ever since I had first picked up my first book on the occult.
At first, it’d started out as me teaching myself to do tarot as a type of party trick that would piss off my mother and her friends. Only now, well, look where it had gotten me.
I took a deep breath. In the darkness of my tiny apartment, I glanced from the paintings on the walls I had gotten from the antique store to my cluttered altar setup on the windowsill, where a single violet candle burned.
Everything turns out the way the fates intend.
That’s right. I repeat the motto to myself.It did. Fate got me here right now, and so I shouldn’t hesitate.
Anger and feminine rage boiled like thunder inside of me, demanding I do something. Anything. I’d managed to hold myself off this long after he left. I even managed to stop myself once before, before one of my beloved coven sisters took it upon herself to watch me like a hawk. It was as if I was on hex watch.
She didn’t understand what love was at the time.
Then again, maybe neither did I—do I.
Gritting my teeth, I clenched my fists and shut my eyes. My intuition warred with itself under the guidance of my goddess. But right now, I really needed everything to shut up and not only because my inner conscience or goddess—whatever I wanted to call it—was beginning to sound like my mother.
