Wicked Legends: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Collection Page 5

  And I gave it to her hard.

  Making love opened up too much room for getting hurt. Fucking was safe. Fucking would be enough to keep her around long enough for them to get back to what they had.

  She was on the cusp of orgasm. He could tell from the way her moans had shifted to a more desperate need.

  “Not yet,” he warned her.

  Not this time.

  Julia wasn’t like other women. Other women, it was the orgasms that kept them coming back. With Julia, it was unfinished business, and that was exactly why he wasn’t going to let her finish tonight.

  He sped up his thrusting to send himself over the edge, spilling hit hot fluids into her and smacking her ass again with another hard slap as he pulled out.

  She whimpered, turned back to him with hurt in her eyes, but didn’t have the guts to say anything about it. That’s a Fairweather for you.

  “Next time,” he promised.

  They both knew the mind-blowing orgasms he could deliver. And that’s how he could be sure tonight wouldn’t be the last he saw of her.

  He threw her one of his shirts to put on as a nightdress and climbed into bed next to her. She tucked herself under the blankets with him, and they both fell asleep in the silence. The way it used to be.

  Somehow, he was going to get that back. For good.

  “I need to talk to you.” Her voice pulled him from the most peaceful sleep he had had in over a year.

  When he opened my eyes, Julia was already dressed and standing beside the window with her arms crossed over her chest.

  Roman groaned. “Come back to bed. You have too many clothes on.”

  She turned to glare at him. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “What? Last night?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Hey, I only used magic for the sex—not to make you want it. That’s on you.” He sat up, rubbing the rest of the sleep out of his eyes. “So what’s this really about? I’m guessing it not about how I like my eggs.”

  “I remember how you like your eggs,” she said. “I need you to be serious.”

  She was gorgeous, with the moonlight beaming off her skin, dressed in a short blue dress that hugged her curves just right.

  “Where’d you get the dress?” he asked, throwing his hands behind his head and resting against the headboard. “Last I saw them, your clothes were in less than great condition.”

  He smiled, but she didn’t.

  “I must have left this here last year.” She shuffled. “It was still in the closet.”

  There was a coldness in her voice that hadn’t been there when they’d went to sleep. It was as if they were back on the cliffs, like all that passion never happened at all.

  “You know me. I never throw anything away,” Roman said, trying to sound as indifferent as possible. “You sure that’s the one you want. I’m sure there are other dresses in there, too. If I remember their owners correctly, some of them might even be your size.”

  She blinked, but again didn’t return to the softness of last night.

  “I’m fine,” she answered. “Besides, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “I get it.” Roman scoffed, looking away. “You’re either going to tell me that you can’t live without me but you have to, or that you can’t live with me but you want to. We’ve been through both and, to tell you the truth, I’m not interested in going through it again.”

  But that wasn’t true. Even knowing how it ended, how much it hurt, if he had the chance to start things up with Julia again, he would jump at it.

  Of course, hell would find itself the victim of a very unlikely blizzard before he would ever admit that to her, not when her eyes stared at him so unfeeling and her mouth pursed itself so accusingly.

  “It’s not about that,” she answered. “We both know how this ends, Roman. We’re adults now. We don’t have to pretend we can change our worlds for each other.”

  Roman leaned forward, eyeing her all the way down. “What’s that supposed to mean, Juj-”

  “Don’t!” she said firmly. “My family had a coven meeting last night.”

  “The famous Fairweather get-togethers. Must have been a hell of a party. I’m sorry I missed it,” he said, letting a thin smile drape across his face.

  “I am, too, because you were the subject of one of the more spirited conversations.”

  The levity dropped out of the room. What in seven circles of hell were those has been bastards doing with his name in their mouths? They hated him. They more than proved that last year, and he had the scars to prove it.

  “I don’t know whether to be honored or disgusted.” Roman glanced at the floor and then back up at her.

  “Are you practicing dark magic?” she asked, setting her jaw.

  He pulled the covers back, standing up to confront her.

  She balked a little, probably because he was completely naked. But it wasn’t anything she had seen before.

  She spun away, sharking her head and blinking hard.

  “Oh, hide your blushing eyes,” Roman scoffed. “You’re not exactly virginal.”

  She turned back, awkwardness replaced by anger.

  “Are you practicing dark magic?” she repeated, louder now.

  “Is that your business?” he asked, glaring down at her.

  “It sure as hell is!” Her eyebrows pulled lower over her eyes. “I care about you.”

  “Is that right?” He chuckled harshly. “Don’t you mean you care about my dick? Because I haven’t seen where you’ve had much use for the rest of me.”

  “Don’t be crass,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  “Seems like you’ve got foolproof plan for that.” He crossed his arms over his bare chest. “Because the last time I got hurt, you sure as shit were nowhere to be found.” He traced his back molars with his tongue. “And I’ll be as crass as I fucking want to. This is my house, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Is that what the lease says?” she asked me daringly.

  “It does now,” he shot back. “Didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “This is beside the point.” She huffed. “You know how dangerous that dark stuff is, Roman. You saw what it did to your grandfather.”

  He bristled. In that moment, he hated that she knew everything about him, even though there’d been a time he’d loved exactly that.

  “What I know is that my family has a rich and storied history with that magic—history that they’ve lost in the last few generations. That’s the only reason a coven like yours would ever have a chance of competing with my family.”

  “This isn’t about my family,” she said, glaring at me.

  “The hell it isn’t. Your family is the only reason we’re not together right now.”

  “My people are not the only ones who would have disapproved of our relationship.”

  “But they’re the only ones who had the power to stop it,” he said, heat rising into his face. “Look around, Julia. I’m gone. I’m not with them anymore. I’m living the life we planned for ourselves. The only difference is that you were too much of a coward to do it with me.”

  “Is that what you think?” She narrowed those eyes at him. “Are you really that short-sighted, or are you just stupid?”

  “You have no idea what my life has been like!”

  “I know enough about it to know that you’ve let your family turn you into some dark magic guinea pig. And it’s dangerous.”

  “Or maybe that was the other way around,” he said, once again being purposefully nasty. “Maybe this is who I am. Maybe it was you who I let turn me into somebody else.”

  “We both know better than that,” she said.

  “The only thing I know is that I can’t trust you,” he spit back. “You came here with ulterior motives. Are you working for your family? Are they afraid of me? Because they should be.”

  For a long moment, she stared at me, breathing he
avy and weighing something between her eyes.

  “What happened to you,” she said, near breathlessly.

  “I grew up,” he said. “Finally started seeing the world for what it was, and the people in it for what they really wanted. You should try it sometime.”

  “Maybe I should,” Julia said. “Because I obviously haven’t been making the best decisions lately.”

  “You and me both, Juju,” he answered.

  “I just wanted—”

  “I know what you wanted,” he said. “You wanted to come in here, after being gone for eighteen fucking months, and tell me what to do with my life. You thought I would be so happy to see you that I would be such a goddamn puppy dog, that I’d leap at the scraps you gave me and do whatever you wanted so long as you promised to drop in every once in a while. Are you even staying here, Julia? Are you back for good, or did you just drop by to send my life into ruin again?”

  “I—I can’t be here,” she said. “It’s not good for me.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he answered disgustedly, looking down at his bare feet. “Get out.”

  “Roman, you need to listen to me. If you don’t—”

  “I said GET OUT!”

  “Roman!” she screamed back, matching my tone. “I will not be ignored! This is too important. If you don’t listen to me, I don’t know what will become of you.”

  “Whatever,” he muttered, opening the dresser drawer and pulling out a bottle of dragon fruit shavings.

  He opened it, letting it fall to the floor and mix with the Himalayan salt and lilac surrounding the room.

  Julia looked down at it, her eyes widening. “Roman, don’t you dare.”

  “Exile,” he said softly.

  Julia’s body lifted from the floor and flew through the open bedroom door.

  As she was deposited out into the hallway, she continued screaming at me.

  “Roman, listen to me!”

  Her body continued out the front door, and then the door shut in her face.

  That was it. He was done. Whatever he thought they had once had was gone.

  5

  Julia

  Julia shuddered as the door slammed shut in her face. Had this really happened?

  The thoughts in her head whipped past. She thought about knocking on the door, or knocking the stupid thing down. But she knew better. That was an exiling spell. Even if she banged so hard it woke the neighbors, Roman wouldn’t hear it. Even if she took a battering ram to that door and splintered it into a thousand tiny shards of wood, she still wouldn’t be able to enter the doorway. Not until Roman decided she could.

  At the moment, that didn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.

  She shook her head and turned toward the stairwell, thankful that she at least hadn’t brought a purse that would be lost within that room. Whether or not another piece of her would be left within those walls was yet to be seen.

  She marched down the stairs with frustrated steps. Nothing between Roman and Julia had ever been simple. How could it be when they came from families who had hated each other since before either of them were even born, and when that hatred ran so deep that it ended things even before they begun?

  But for everything they’d been through, for all the odds against them, she never thought Roman would hate her. Was it all inevitable?

  The heat between them, the sex that was perhaps the best of her life, their romantic and layered history—could it all really be torn apart by one idealistic explosion?

  Julia pushed out into the open air and took a deep breath. The magic he was dabbling in was the baddest of bad news. It might have been his family’s legacy, but she remembered the conversations Roman and she used to have about it, when he would tell her how stupid his ancestors must have been to even consider tapping into something so dark and deadly.

  And here he was, doing it himself. If Cassandra could be believed—and she always could—he was even going as far as competing in those awful black magic competitions.

  Julia bristled, and not just from the cold seeping into her clammy skin. The neighbors across the street whistled at her, and a chemical smell drifted down the street from the corner ahead.

  She blinked and took the hard look around at the neighborhood she must have been blind to before. Roman and she had been so excited to score this place. It was the first step toward what should have been their lives together. But things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to. Walking through this decaying alley that smelled of sewage and smoke, Julia wondered if anything ever did.

  “Hey there, pretty lady.”

  Suddenly aware of just how alone she was, Julia shook her head and hurried her step.

  “I’m talking to you,” the voice said, and this time, it sounded as though it was in front of her.

  She froze. Here she was, a waif of a girl in the middle of a dark alley in a bad neighborhood in the dead of night all by herself. Unsure if she should continue forward or turn back. And what if she did? Where would she go? Not to Roman’s apartment.

  The situation would be cliché if she were just any woman. But Julia wasn’t just any woman. Not by a long shot.

  Grandfather had been right. She had always been a natural with the magic. Back in the day, there wasn’t a single instant where she hadn’t been able to defend herself. But back in the day was a long time ago, and she had spent the last eighteen months pretending she was a normal person. Could she muster enough energy to light a candle, let alone fight off a guy or two?

  Maybe not, but she did have one shot. Her name carried some weight in these parts, and her reputation would have no doubt preceded her. Hopefully that would be enough to send these goons running.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to do this,” she said, setting her jaw. “I’m assuming you don’t recognize my face because, if you did, there’s no way you’d be stupid enough to harass me.” She cleared my throat. Time for the money line. “So let me introduce myself. My name is—”

  “Julia Fairweather,” two voices said in unison. “You’ll fetch quite the price.”

  She shuddered. There was something intrinsically creepy about the way they did that.

  A man appeared in front of her, walking out from the darkness. He was tall, with pale skin and black eyes that matched his hair. There was a strange, strung out air about him. Great. A magical junkie. She knew she smelled something wrong. That meant that not only was he a warlock, but he was a desperate one. She couldn’t think of anything more dangerous.

  Julia sensed a presence behind her and spun around. A second warlock, exactly like the first one.

  “Twins,” she muttered.

  She hated twin warlocks, especially twin warlocks who undoubtedly wanted to dispose of her and sell her power for cheap mystical thrills.

  “If you’re completely still, this will only hurt a lot,” the twins said, again in unison.

  Julia tensed. This wasn’t going to work. Not only was she criminally out of practice, but she was panicking. There was no way she would be able to muster the focus necessary to put these losers in their place.

  She could run, but the truth was, she probably wouldn’t get very far. And, if she did, the only place to go was Roman’s apartment. And even if he was inclined to help her out, he wouldn’t be able to hear her shouts.

  She would have to go all or nothing and hope that if her own personal attributes weren’t enough to get these guys shaking, maybe the rest of her family’s might be.

  “Do you have any idea what the Fairweathers are capable of?” she asked, her hands balled into fists. “We practically run this city. If my family found out that you even considered doing something to me, they’d turn your skin inside out.”

  “Then we’ll have to make sure they never find out,” one of the twins said as they bridged the gap to her on each side. “How will we do that Brother?”

  The other one chimed in now. “I can think of a few different ways. Most of them involve hatchets, though. Do you
have a hatchet?”

  This was it. She was about to become the victims of some very tweaked-out magic junkies. All she could do was hold her ground. If she was going to go down, then she was at least going to keep her pride intact.

  The twins reached for her, their bodies moving in tandem in what had to be the creepiest thing she had ever seen. That was the thing with twin warlocks. They, and their magic, were an endless reflection of one another.

  That’s it!

  She remembered exactly what she needed to do to defeat them. So she braced herself, preparing to dodge their first magical attack. If she could cause them to miss her and hit one another instead, their negative energy would feed into each other until they stopped the spell. That would give her enough time to get away.

  That was if they missed. If they hit each other instead. But she had to try.

  A loud screeching noise filled the air. It wasn’t unsettling, painful, or even necessarily bothersome, but the apparently the twins felt differently about that.

  Their hands shot to their ears as they crumbled to the ground. They screamed, still in unison, as blood poured from their ears.

  Another figure appeared from the dark—a muscular man with burnt auburn hair and blue eyes that popped even in the dark. He could have been dangerous. He was, in essence, also in this dark alley. For all she knew, he was fighting these junkies for the right to kill her himself.

  But somehow, she didn’t sense that. Something about the way he moved put her at ease. Something in his face, in the way his eyes flickered up at her and the concern reflecting in them, told her this guy was different.

  The twins splayed unconscious on the ground, and the noise stopped.

  The man with the red hair looked up at her, a sigh of relief passing his parted lips.

  “Are you all right there, ma’am?” he asked, his voice colored with the deepest, thickest southern accent Julia had ever heard. “I know you might be a little confused about what you just seen. ‘Fraid to say, there are things in this world that simply ain’t what you might—”

  “I had that,” she said, scowling. “I was waiting for them to make a move.”