Sinner's Game: Urban Fantasy romance (Black Arcana series Book 1)

  Sinner’s Game

  Terina Adams

  Copyright © 2021 by Terina Adams

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover by Anna-Lena Spies

  Edits by Dayna Hart

  To the one who champions my silent wars, nurses my wounds and sets me on my feet again.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Author Note

  About the Author

  Also by Terina Adams

  Prologue

  I can’t. I stretched my hand toward the light, felt the furnace resist me like a shield. I dared press farther, caught in some mesmeric spell of curiosity. The bright halo warbled and swayed bending away from my palm. The temperature cooled a fraction. Perhaps I could do this. For what? The male voice in my head abandoned me. Still, I felt a tightening in my gut, an excitement notching my breath, an inexplicable need to plunge inside the glow of light. Something waited in there for me, called to me, beyond the voice. Something, something that was in the light but also deeper, deeper…inside of me.

  A hard force propelled me backward, so swiftly I’d left my breath where I’d been standing. No warning, no flash of movement. One minute I was standing there, driven by the mysterious voice inside my head before being consumed by my own desire to touch, take whatever lay concealed below the intense light. The next a violence swept me away, crushed me against the pillar, pressed hard into the front of my body, so I was sandwiched in a suffocating hold, my arms strapped beside me.

  Finally, my breath caught up with me, but the pressure at my chest made it impossible to take more than shallow breaths. The force had contours, the mold of a man, one thigh pressed between my legs, chest heaved up against my own. The intense light turned him into an imposing silhouette looming over me. I squinted up at him, my head half turned, but could make out none of his features.

  My breath hitched with every inch he lowered his head until his breath was on my cheek. The lower he dipped, the higher my pulse fled. Lower and lower to my neck. I wriggled, testing the binds he created with his body, only to feel him tighten the pressure by pressing himself harder against me, his leg inching higher between my thighs. Did I just gasp? I dared not utter a squeak after being assaulted by my punishing voice every time I uttered a sound. He inhaled deep, his nose teasing feather soft along my skin. “I will not forget your scent.”

  A deep voice. A dreamy, romantic bedroom voice if it didn’t have the timbre of a threat. Bad, bad girl. I shouldn’t think this was sexy. Nothing about the way he’d forced me backward, pinioned me in place like I was a life-sized doll and not a human with fragile bits, spoke of a man looking to be friendly. This was my dakeu, not real at all. Then why did I feel the cold, hard pillar at my back, the firm pressure of his body flush along mine and, geez, I didn’t want to focus on it, the anchor of his thigh…down there. Dampen the hell down, pussy cat. Was I this desperate for a shag? Was that all my soul could think about?

  My heart went thump-dee-dump in rapid timing, then bang bang bang when I felt a soft, wet warmth on my neck like a…tongue. Did he have his tongue on my neck? Not licking, just holding it there like he was savoring the spot. Holy crap, this could be dangerous, possibly lethal, weirdly erotic. There weren’t just sparks in my nether region, more like a ton of dynamite thrown into a shipping container worth of fireworks going off.

  “You won’t win. I’ll make sure of that.” He whispered into my neck, his lips brushing my skin. Focus, Laz. And not on those lips, not on him. What did I need to learn? What was my soul telling me beyond the obvious?

  I went to speak, but clammed my mouth shut again as my ears still pricked and smarted from the last time I said something. Why did he get to say everything and not suffer the same effect?

  His fingers gripped my chin, tilted my face up to his, but his features were all shadows and darkness thanks to the intense light behind us. “I’ll see you burn for eternity if you dare take what’s mine. Remember that.” Looming mere inches from me. “Witch.” The tickle of his breath skimmed my lips. Said like he’d already stripped my flesh and was feasting on my vitals.

  “Who are you?” I whispered, unable to stay quiet any longer after all the threats he got to share.

  “I’m the predator you need to fear.”

  “Miss Jennings.”

  My dakeu blinked out in a second. Agatha’s office warbled back into view. First the ceiling rose and then her face, peering down at me with its usual frosty expression. She folded her arms, impatience bleeding from her every pore. I rose halfway from the couch, then had to slow and allow my blood pressure time to catch up. I was on the couch. At what point had I returned to the couch? Had I even left the couch?

  “Wow, that was…intense.” I sniffed at my jacket sleeve and smelt charcoal. I lifted the front of my shirt and sniffed that as well, smelling something very different, something very male. “How real is the dakeu supposed to be?”

  “It’s a journey within your mind, tapping into your imagination.”

  I liked my imagination very much.

  “I hope you learned something valuable, Miss Jennings. It will guide you on your path.” She turned and strode back toward her desk with short steps to accommodate her pencil skirt. I learned a lot, like I needed some fun. But the dark, threatening stranger was a puzzle as was my draw to the intense light and what lay within. And who belonged to the voice?

  “Your journey must begin.” Agatha glided into her seat and glared at me, still slouched on her couch. “Whether you’re ready or not.”

  Chapter 1

  “Powerful factions rule this city. Just remember that. Don’t go taking unnecessary risks. Keep y’self to y’self, learn what ya can, and return. Y’hear me?” Auntie Bea yelled from the kitchen.

  “Got it,” I yelled back.

  “And don’t talk to anyone. Guaranteed most won’t be human. I better add some angelica to the mix.” She grunted and huffed as she moved around the kitchen, retrieving what she needed to add to the foul concoction she expected me to either wear, gargle, swallow, or burn. Most of what she gave me rarely worked because Aunt Bea was a rummy. Plus, her understanding of herbal magick sucked.

  She grew agitated in the days leading up to a retrieval, forcing me to sift through her gathered information a few times over, ticking off the details from a checklist of must-dos, meticulously penned on pieces of paper then left to sprawl haphazardly across the table—Auntie Bea had yet to go digital despite being adept at internet searches. Tonight was purely a reconnoiter: scope out the playing field and learn the contenders in the game. But the way Auntie Bea was acting, you’d think tonight was the retrieval. She’d never been this wound. This artifact must have particular importance. Why else would she be on the verge of pinging off the walls of our cramped, crappy apartment? Of course, any artifact of particular importance attracted powerful and dangerous people.

  Her back was to me when I entered the kitchen. The loose skin at the back of her arms jiggled in rhythm to the clink of the pestle on the side of the mortar as she vigorously blended the herbs.

  “It smells awful. What have you put in it this time?” I asked from over her shoulder, then blinked a couple of times to clear the swirl of her cigarette smoke from my eyes.

  “That’s dinner. Give it a stir, will ya?”

  “I’m not hungry.” I never was, pre-event.

  She did a double take at me. “Ya not going like that?”

  I glanced down at my leather jacket and denims, looking for rips or stains. “They’re clean.”

  “Smithson and Row. Look it up,” she grunted, jerking her head toward the table and her phone. A line of ash broke away from the tip of the cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth and disintegrated to the floor. “You won’t make it through the door looking like that.”

  I pulled my phone from my back pocket and turned to lean against the chipped melamine cupboard. The side strip was peeling off and caught on the zipper of my back pocket. The rental was a dive, but Auntie Bea had paid the bond and signed the paperwork before I’d even seen the place. “Who said I was going through the front door?”

  “Forget it, girlie. Ya ain’t getting in unless it’s through the front door. Don’t play cute. Not tonight. This ain’t no back-alley deal. You’re not talking rich old men out of their prized possessions or fooling young wealthy men out of money.” Her grinding grew more vigorous as she spoke. A thin film of
sweat had broken out on her forehead and beaded in the corner of her nose.

  She dropped the pestle in the bowl with a tink and spun to face me. A jab of her finger in my direction flung more ash from her cigarette. “We’re talking seriously dangerous people. Fucking powerful people.”

  “Hmm…I see your point.” I dismissed her scaremongering and stared at the page opening on my phone. Slowly, because we had sketchy internet in Dim Bazaar. “It’s very ritzy.”

  “The best auction house on both sides of the equator, in West Tuzet, which means fucking rich.” She stabbed her cigarette back inside her mouth but continued to talk around it. “Millions…billions of dollars pass through its door every year.”

  “And how exactly do you propose I do this? It won’t be easy to break into.”

  “Oh, blessed mother.” She flung her arms into the air, taking a deep drag of her cigarette, flaring the tip a brilliant red. “Use ya head, girl. Alcatraz is a playground compared to what will be there tonight. I don’t want ya causing a shit storm. You need to look like one of them potted plants they got all over the corridors.” Her smokey exhale flowed around the words as she pointed at the image on my phone.

  “Since when has an artifact been so valuable?”

  “Since the skull surfaced.”

  “Skull?”

  “It’s made of stone.”

  “And the skull is special because…?” Typical Auntie Bea. She left the most important bits of information ‘til last, sometimes withholding them altogether. Given most of the artifacts she’d hunted until now were little more than party trick trinkets, it mattered little what their magical properties were.

  “What does it matter?”

  “I’m about to enter a room full of powerful and deadly people, more than half of them likely not human, so I think that earns me extra intel.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she glared at me through her trail of smoke. The glare continued for minutes. I folded my arms across my chest and slumped back against the cupboard, ready to do this all night.

  One grunt, and she snatched her cigarette out of her mouth and headed for the table. Another grunt eased her down into the closest seat, the stub of her cigarette disappearing into the dregs of her lukewarm coffee. It hissed as it went out, sending up a final swirl of smoke.

  Years of herbal tinctures, odd concoctions, and spells, from magical and non-magical people alike, had failed. Nothing halted the slow but steady increase in her weight, which had, according to her, nothing to do with her diet of alcohol and excessive dairy consumption.

  She shoved the coffee cup away, exposing a coffee ring left on the table. None of the furniture was ours, which meant everything would need a good scrub to remove the residue of Auntie Bea when our rental term ended. Cup out the way, she sifted through the loose paper sprawled across the table. I slid into the plastic chair beside her and waited until she found what she was looking for.

  Gathering background was her part of the job. She was too old and too…generously proportioned to be of much use on the active side of the job. Besides, there were too many debt collectors after her head for her to wander out much these days.

  Auntie Bea had a gambling problem. I didn’t want to be traveling around the country with my aunt acquiring magical artifacts, but she was a disaster at looking after herself. And to be honest, I’d grown used to the easy cash this line of work provided. Better than getting up every morning and heading to a dead-end job that sucked all joy from your life. We split the proceeds from the sales of the magical artifacts. After four years, I’d grown a nice stash for my future, but it was fast dwindling because various debt collectors turned up in the early hours of the morning. My money got us to Davenport. Bea’s money—in accordance with our deal—paid for our accommodation, which was the reason we found ourselves in this dump in Dim Bazaar, the seediest part of the city.

  Mugshots passed before my eyes. She grew increasingly agitated. I snatched up a sheet of paper. A man in his fifties with receded hairline, bulldog cheeks, and a mustache trimmed into a neat line above his top lip looked back.

  “Mr Hugo Mendale. CEO of Yarra Industries. Dabbles in the property market and imports luxury boats. Net worth …seven hundred and forty-six million. Human?”

  Auntie Bea stopped her search and pointed to a bullet point toward the bottom of the dossier. Alongside species, she’d written: human.

  “Where’s your map of Davenport?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see where Spard Cross is.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s where Mr Hugo Mendale lives. It’s likely the ritziest district. I bet his house doesn’t constantly smell of Korean takeout.”

  “Never mind that.” She snapped another piece of paper on top of Mr Mendale, stabbing at the image of a bright blue skull.

  “That’s what a man worth seven-hundred something million dollars is hoping to buy?”

  “You haven’t reached the seriously rich ones yet.”

  “Are you going to tell me what’s special about the skull?” I lifted the Smithson and Row pamphlet to have a closer read.

  “It’s a seeker.”

  I glanced across at her. “A what?”

  “It finds things.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Auntie Bea’s expression remained pencil ruled.

  “That’s all? I expected invincibility, enhanced magical powers, immortality.”

  “The most powerful paranormals already have those abilities.”

  “True. What’s the point in living forever if you keep losing your socks and underwear?”

  “What if ya wish to find oil or gold? Or any rich, untapped deposit anywhere in the world? What if ya wish to hunt down your greatest enemy, who has the means of becoming a ghost? What if ya wish to find really powerful artifacts?”

  “That’s why you want it so bad.”

  “Good by peanuts. We’d make serious money. Hello Spard Cross. Better still, hello world.”

  “According to this, it’s an Aztec artifact.”

  “They dunno what they’re fucking on about. No one knows its true origins. Only what it can do.”

  Auntie Bea stretched across the table and dragged a tattered file toward her. Photocopied images pulled from various grimoires were stuffed inside, and some of them flew free when she wrenched the file open. This was Auntie Bea’s own grimoire, comprised of photocopies of pages she’d gathered in secret with the help of myself and some sympathetic witches. Being a rummy with no real magical talent, the coven denied Auntie Bea entrance to their library. Worst still, they’d banished her from the coven.

  Stealing knowledge from a wide source, Auntie Bea had gathered an extensive collection of interesting spells, most of which never worked for her, and a definitive list of magical artifacts, which she used to finance our lives. It had been three years since she got the mad idea of tracking down all the magical artifacts in her file. Three years of being on the road. Three years she didn’t have to live with the humiliation of being a witch shunned from her coven.

  She flicked through the pages of the file, scattering loose sheets. “It’s in here somewhere.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not interested in all the details. Nor am I interested in reading all of this.” I pushed sheets of paper away.

  Auntie Bea slammed her file closed, then reached for her cigarette packet. If only she’d listen to my nagging and stop her disgusting habit. She usually smoked outside, on my insistence, but she’d been jittery since arriving in Davenport—more jittery than usual—and this dive of an apartment had no balcony. I’d relented for tonight, given her anxious energy, and granted her pardon to chain smoke her way through the two packets she’d had me pick up this afternoon, along with the bottle of gin. But after tonight, that was it. She’d have to make her way down the stairs to the street to have a smoke, and that might be enough to dissuade her from having so many.