“For how long?”
“Long… longer than I should’ve been.” She finally turned away, a note of regret echoing behind the admission.
Again, her scent drifted to him. Lingered.
Gabriel backed off, retreating to the other side of the room. This wasn’t going according to plan at all. He needed answers from her—answers that would lead him to the traitor Duchanes. Answers that would usher in the brutal end to a rivalry that’d stretched on for far too many decades.
More than answers, though, he needed her help.
Thanks to one of his late father’s many indiscretions, the Redthorne line had been cursed centuries ago, damning the royal family and any new vampires they sired. Gabriel had only recently begun to feel the effects, but they were already excruciating. Extreme light sensitivity, an inability to properly synthesize blood, a fog of the body and mind that—left unmitigated—would certainly destroy him.
Along with the few vampires left on this earth he gave a single fuck about.
A dark witch had bound the curse. Only a dark witch could unbind it.
“In your capacity as the Duchanes witch,” Gabriel said, forcing himself to stay focused, “you performed certain services. Correct?”
She nodded and glanced at his forearms, his sleeves rolled up past the evidence of his own witch-provided services—the spelled tattoos that enabled vampires to walk in daylight, to eat human food with the blood that sustained them, to drink good liquor and charm beautiful women and fool the world into believing they weren’t immortal monsters.
Tattoos that—thanks to the family curse—were losing their potency.
“Spells, charms, minor hexes,” she said with a shrug. “Sometimes he wanted his Tarot cards read.”
“And the attempted murder of the vampire king?” he asked, cool tone recapturing her gaze. “Whose idea was that?”
“Not mine.”
“Yet you crafted the poison, did you not?”
She closed her eyes and sighed. “Yes.”
They said it couldn’t be done, poisoning a vampire. Especially a royal vampire. Yet Duchanes and his witch had found a way to bring down Dorian Redthorne with the very herbs she’d collected at Ravenswood.
On her knees in the moonlight, skirt hiked up to mid-thigh, slender fingers digging in the dirt, luscious hair spilling down her back in waves…
The image snuck into Gabriel’s mind, sending a pulse of heat to his balls. Had he known she was already plotting his eldest brother’s murder that night, he might not have let his fantasies take root.
But he didn’t, and they had, and nothing short of his demise would dislodge them now.
Bloody fucking witches.
“If not for some quick thinking on the part of Dorian’s woman,” Gabriel said now, “my brother would be ash in the wind, and you and I would be having a verydifferentsort of conversation.”
“It was the demon’s doing. Chernikov and Duchanes made a plan, I got an assignment.”
“What assignment, exactly?”
After a long pause, she finally opened her eyes, gaze flickering with genuine sorrow. “Devise a poison strong enough to kill a vampire, slow enough to make him suffer.”
“Anyvampire? Or a specific vampire?”
“I didn’t ask questions.” A shiver followed, a fresh shot of adrenaline coursing through her blood. “Nikolai Chernikov kills witches who ask questions. Hell, he’ll probably kill me for talking to you.”
Gabriel could’ve eased that particular worry for her; thanks to Dorian’s newly forged alliances with the Rogozin demons, Chernikov and his hellspawn crew would be dead by sunset.
“Tell me something,” he said instead. “How desperate does a witch need to be before she gets into bed with the head of the demonic Russian syndicate?”
He pictured her signing the contract. Pictured Chernikov’s greasy smile, his black demon-eyes roving her body, a sheen of lust gleaming on his brow.
