“In light of this evening’s events,” he said firmly, “I’m adding an addendum to our arrangement.” He brushed his lips against her temple once more, whispering his final warning. “Disobey me again, little moonflower, and you won’t have to worry about the bloody demons. I’ll send you to hell myself.”
Chapter Fifteen
Hell was a complicated clusterfuck of a place.
Born and raised in its fires, forced to fight through its deadly realms for the first eighteen years of her life, Jaci knew it all too well. And while lots of people liked to toss it around as a curse or a threat, when it came down to it, sending someone there wasn’t all that easy.
Lucky for her.
Unlucky for her, that fact didn’t stop Gabriel from making her life a hell on earth.
Fucking vampire.
After “her little stunt” on opening night, as he’d taken to calling it, the dickhead had her working back-to-back shifts at Obsidian for the past ten days, keeping her in his sights at all times. Even when the club wasn’t open for business, she was still expected to show up. The one time she’d tried to blow him off, he’d shown up at her apartment, scooped her into his arms, and carried her there, dressed in nothing but a short bathrobe and slippers, a towel wrapped around her head.
Every day since, she’d arrived as expected, trying to keep their interactions to a minimum. By day, she was helping with inventory and supplies, polishing bottles, rearranging bottles, polishing them again. By night she was slinging her addictive concoctions, flirting shamelessly, always keeping one ear to the ground for the scoop on Renault Duchanes—an endeavor that had so far proven useless. It was as if the asshole had literally dropped off the face of the earth.
The only time she could find any peace was in the bathroom, and even then, if she took just a little too long, Gabriel would barge in and bang on the stall door, demanding to know if she was okay.
To make everything shit-suckingly worse, he still expected her to work on breaking his curse, and she was still searching for the spell to bind Viansa. The two challenges were intimately connected—that much was certain. Viansa had bound the Redthorne curse, which meant the solution to both problems likely existed in the same magic—a variation on the same spell, perhaps.
Jaci had performed bindings before—Renault was constantly cursing witches and demons he’d thought wronged him in some way, using Jaci to carry out his revenge. She knew the basics of the spells, but when it came to Viansa, she also knew the basics weren’t going to cut it.
That meant dragging her grimoire, research books, and Tarot cards to the bar every day, and squeezing in time between Gabriel’s ridiculous bouts of busywork to make her notes and theories.
She was working on another one of those theories today, books spread out on one of the cocktail tables, grimoire open in her lap. Every few minutes, she’d find a reference to some arcane spell, some curse, and make a few notes in her grimoire. But after an hour of skimming through an old tome on demonic possession clearly written by a drunk priest in the fifteenth century, Jaci was done with third-hand accounts. She needed a different sort of guidance.
Setting aside the library books, she pulled out her Tarot deck, shuffling as she concentrated on the problem.
Viansa’s power. The blood curse. The key to binding her. The missing ingredient. The magic. All of it.
She fanned out the cards across the table, selected three that spoke to her, and turned them face up.
A silver-haired girl sitting in a snow-covered cemetery stared up at her from the Three of Knives. She clutched a dagger in one hand, a blood-drenched white rose lying in the snow before her. The look on the girl’s face was one of sadness and vengeance, like a scorned lover who’d just carved out a man’s heart.
The Death card appeared next, a white corpse lying in repose, black serpent coiled around her body, a crown of dead roses circling her head. Something about her wasn’t entirely lifeless, though—it was almost as if she were resting, preparing to rise once more.
Fighting off an inexplicable shiver, Jaci turned her attention to the final card—the Ten of Knives. A raven-haired woman lay on white silk bedding embroidered with black roses, a dagger shoved through her chest, blood spilling from the wound as the life leaked from her eyes.
Betrayal.
Jaci studied the cards, trying to piece together the messages.
Roses and snow. Daggers and blood. Death and betrayal. What was she missing here? She felt as if the answers were right within her grasp, but hidden with veils and cobwebs. Every time she swiped one clear, another appeared in her mind.
Roses and snow. Daggers and blood. Death and betrayal.
If she could just see past that damned veil…
“Jacinda. What are you doing, woman?”
The icy tone broke Jaci out of her trance, her gaze snapping up to find Gabriel looming over her, brooding as always.
The sight was nothing new. The tie, however, was. White silk, embroidered with black roses.
She shot up from the chair so fast, she knocked the cards from the table.
“Bloody hell.” Gabriel crouched down to pick them up. “We open the doors in ten minutes. You need to put this stuff away and get behind the bar.”
