Payback's a Witch (The Witches of Thistle Grove #1)(15)

“And you’d been gone so long,” Linden added, shoulders hunching, hopefully at the utter feebleness of this excuse. “I didn’t think it would even matter to you that much if he and I wound up together.”

“And you seriously believed that you might get a happy ever after with him, Lin?” I demanded, struggling to believe that even my relentless optimist of a best friend could be so astoundingly na?ve. Or that she would do something like this to me. “Gareth Blackmoore, of all people? After the way he treated me?”

“He was a dumb asshole of a kid, yeah,” she said, sucking her lower lip through her teeth. “And he hurt you horribly, I know that. But he’s an adult now, and okay, maybe it’s still a weird and screwed-up thing for me to believe, but for a while it felt like we had a real connection. And I swear I didn’t think you’d be that upset about it, not after all this time. If you ever even came back at all.”

She was partly right; I had written Thistle Grove off as definitively as I could, had even begun resigning myself to the prospect of an eventual, inevitable drifting away from Linden herself. I didn’t have any legitimate right to feel betrayed by her choice, not after the ones I’d made.

But it hurt anyway, with the visceral intensity of a full-fledged betrayal.

“We both thought it would be a good idea to keep it quiet, at least for a while,” she continued. “Just give ourselves some space. You know how the families like to talk.”

“And that way he could also continue fucking me on the side,” Talia chimed in, very helpfully. Linden fisted a hand against her belly at the phrasing, her face scrunching up. “We were keeping our thing under wraps, too, since it was mostly casual. So you can see how this was all working out swimmingly for him—until my sister saw him with Lin, on a cozy dinner date in Carbondale. Bastard’s lucky I managed to talk Isidora down, or he’d still have baby spiders hatching out of his ears.”

“Gareth Blackmoore, two-timing my best friend and Talia Avramov,” I murmured, pinching the bridge of my nose hard as I tried to wrap my head around the span of this mental abomination. “Wow, wow, wow.”

“I don’t know that I’d call it two-timing per se,” Talia said, tapping a finger to her chin.

“I would,” Linden said grimly.

“Of course you would, sunshine,” Talia replied, giving Linden’s arm a brisk rub. “He hurt you much worse than he hurt me. He and I were just having fun—though, yes, I was under the distinct impression that it was exclusive fun. Whereas you were in full-throttle love with the shithead.”

“I was not in love with him!” Linden protested.

Talia waved away the semantics with an irritable swat. “Passionate and emotionally invested lust, then. Whatever you want to call it, you can’t pretend he didn’t break your heart.”

Linden sucked in a shaky breath and pressed her lips together, then allowed herself a clipped nod. Another spike of pain lanced through me at the thought of my childhood best friend and my most detestable ex not only together, but involved enough that it had left Lin this gutted. Whatever had happened between them, it had clearly run much deeper than a fling.

“He tried to give me that ‘so sorry, it didn’t mean anything’ crap, too,” Linden added tightly. “As if that ever flies.”

“I call bullshit, too. I have it on good authority that I’m an extremely meaningful lay,” Talia quipped. But her eyes flashed with restrained anger, simmering close beneath her flippant facade; she was clearly still smarting from the heedless way Gareth had treated her.

“And then there’s me, the one who kicked off Gareth’s streak. We really are the coven of the scorned, aren’t we?” I murmured, dragging a dismal hand down my face. “Maybe a new age has dawned—and it’s terrible.”

“Or maybe it has, and it’s fucking fantastic,” Talia countered, a dangerous smile playing on her lips, “because it’s a time of comeuppance for cocky dipshits who think they’re larger than life. Starting with Gareth Blackmoore, Prince of Bastards.”





5





The Witches’ Vengeance Pact


So, what exactly are you proposing?” I asked, taking a sip of lukewarm coffee to jolt my lagging brain back into life.

“Sweet revenge, of course,” Talia replied, crossing her arms and leaning back against the booth. “When I found out what was up, I reached out to Lin to see if she was interested in some payback. Because obviously this level of abject fuckery could not be allowed to stand.”

I glanced dubiously over at Linden, who’d never been much of an eye-for-an-eye person, preferring instead to trust karma with the meting out of just deserts in due time—only to find her nodding along with Talia, steely-eyed, her shoulders squared with unusual resolve. Gareth really had left scorched and salted earth behind him yet again. For a moment, I found myself marveling over the way he managed to continuously one-up himself when it came to reprehensible behavior, like a constant and perplexing self-own.

From a certain angle, that much skullduggery was almost impressive.

“First I thought, maybe Issa had a point,” Talia continued, “and we could look into some suitable hexes. You know, a lifetime of erectile dysfunction, uncontrollable overgrowth of pubic hair, that type of shit. However, Angelcake McSparklepony over here would ‘not be privy to causing harm.’?”