And she's tryin'
to make a
devil out of me

❧

The call from Rubi that Valentina had received this afternoon was shocking. After Val’s apparent “betrayal” of her older sister, they had all but stopped speaking. It was obvious why. The article that had gone out about Rubi’s affair over two decades ago had obliterated any chance her sister stood at gaining her footing in the Spanish Ministry of Magic. In fact, she hadn’t been able to hold a steady position beyond shopkeeping after the vicious takedown that Valentina had orchestrated. Yes, gossip stuck like Butterbeer Fudge on the heel of a four-inch stiletto. As if ruining Rubi’s career in Spanish politics wasn’t enough, Valentina had stolen her lover, too: Santiago De la Vega.

Ah, Tiago. Valentina knew he would always love her...despite what the divorce papers might say. She was indebted to him now - for the continued use of his last name given the importance of her professional career - and he made sure that she didn’t forget it. Every month came the check request and every month, Valentina paid. He was siphoning nearly twenty-five percent of her prophets, but that was what their agreement had stated. Joint custody of the hijos and a large sum of money on his request. Valentina rolled her eyes at the thought. He would get over it. He always did. This time was surely no different. Valentina half expected him at her office door every time she heard a knock - after all, she had followed him all the way from Barcelona. But he was stubborn. He would come around.

Val smiled. It would be good to have her husband back when he decided he was done playing the poor, unfortunate scorned man, but until then, she saw no reason why she couldn’t play the field, so to speak. There were plenty of men out there that wanted to date her. There were plenty of women, too. People wanted to be with the Editor of a magazine, that was just a fact. Vexed was going to be a huge success in England. Based on the mapping, surveying, and testing she’d already done, the Wizarding World was hungry for unadulterated gossip. They were hungry to see someone else’s face sloshed all over the front cover of a magazine that called their very character into question. They were ready for Valentina De la Vega.

Just the same, she needed to spin a web of spiders. In order for Vexed to be the success that she wanted it to be, Val needed spies that would feed her information. She needed to know when someone left with someone other than their girlfriend. She needed to know when the tides of a relationship were turning. She needed to know the nitty gritty of Wizarding London. So she’d sent out an anonymous post for informants, telling them to meet her here, at the Royal Oak Pub, tonight. No one would expect them to meet at a place that only sold un-enchanted whiskey. It wasn’t Val’s style. Then again, she was trying things a little differently. She would pay well for good information — especially if it helped sell papers. Tipping back her glass of wine, she looked around the room, hoping to catch the eye of her next “client.”

571 ● @open ● Outfit

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Contessa's Outfit

Tag: Valentina

black magic woman turning my heart into stone

Tess was on her own tonight. She knew that she was often on her own, but she had gotten more than used to finding herself in interesting places as of late. It was always something, that she had learned, and while she ran the stables, and gave lessons all day, she found herself enjoying herself at night. There was something to be said for her new resolution to try out every bar that she heard someone talk about. Honestly, she didn’t have a clue who she had heard say something about this one, but sometimes she just, heard things. It wasn’t that she was purposefully listening, she wasn’t honestly nosy, she was just a good listener. She heard the things that were going on around her. She heard the things that happened around her, and that was just how it was. She liked it that way. She liked the way that her life was turning out, there was no denying that. Tess liked who she was, and what she stood for. Even the ring on her finger, the scars on her side, the ones that marked her for what she was, she liked that about herself too. They had made her who she was, and she wasn’t going to be taking any of that back. She thought that it was all good. Everything that she did, she did with a purpose. Even if it was a silly purpose like hitting as many bars as she could in a month. It seemed silly, but it felt like that was what she was doing. She was trying new things, meeting new people. She was tired of focusing solely on a business that was doing exceptionally well all on its own. There was little to no reason for her to fret about it, and she thought that it was something that they were going to have to work out. That it was something that they were going to be focusing on more and more as time went on. For the most part, Tess thought that things were handled, and when things were handled, she could breathe a little easier. She could worry less about the hard facts and worry more about her Pack. She worried nearly constantly about the Pack, but that was her job. She was supposed to worry about them, they were hers. They were hers just as much as they belonged to anyone else, and she wasn’t going to stop worrying about them until the day that she died. She was Alpha. It was her job to worry. She was Mother, and Sister, and Friend. She was protector, and she was comfort. She was home to them when she had to be, and that was exactly what she would always be. She would make sure that they knew that they were taken care of. But tonight, she thought that they could all handle themselves. They were adults. The moon wasn’t for weeks. A glance at her ring told her that the waning crescent on her ring told her that she had plenty of time before she had to worry about that. No, tonight was just going to be all about her, and she was people watching. It was one of her favorite activities, mainly because inventing stories about their lives was entertaining. She liked to make up what they were doing, and who they were doing it with, and whether or not they were doing something that they shouldn’t. Making up stories like that was always going to be amusing, and it was something that she had done with her grandfather since she was a child. Tell me a story. Tell me their story. That was what he would say to her, every time they were in a crowd of people that she didn’t know. She would make up stories of the people that were all around them. It was a way to pass the time, and a way that made a young Contessa a lot easier to handle for her grandfather. Sometimes the people in the stories took on lives that she could only imagine, and now, she realized that some of those lives were a lot more possible. The lives of people that would turn into wolves, and spirits, and anything else that Tess could imagine. The stories of her ancestors, retold in the people of the crowds. Tonight, she was making up stories of the people around her, when her eyes landed on a woman across the bar. She looked like she had quite the story to tell, and from what Tess could tell, from watching her as subtly as she could, she was just as interested in the people in this place as the wolf herself was. Deciding that she might as well keep up her own little tradition of talking to strangers in bars, she picked up her drink and headed that way. Coming up just to the opposite side of the table as the other woman she gave her a half a grin, “You look like you could be making up stories…” Whether or not she was, in the last couple of weeks alone, Tess was quite sure that she could spin a tale or two of her own…

And she's tryin'
to make a
devil out of me

❧

She was pretty. Not what Val had been expecting. Usually, when people wanted to sell out their friends or bury their ex’s in lies and gossip, they were a little…desperate and needy around the edges. But there was nothing grimy about this one. Valentina might have even complimented her style if she wasn’t already tapping her Quick Quotes Quill in her purse.

Her words made Valentina smile — grin, even. That was precisely what she was doing. Very little of what was included in Vexed was factual. What began as fact was twisted by Val and her Gossips. They turned simple coffee shop meetings into full-blown affairs, they surmised that which no one else even dared, and in Vexed? No one was safe. Not the Minister, not the Death Eaters, not even Val herself. She’d been known, on occasion, to drop in little tidbits about her personal life that were always largely embellished. Sometimes Santi made an appearance in the pages, though he still chastised her for that. Sometimes, it was even a story about the pair of them together, rekindling their long-lost romance. He liked those least of all.

They usually had to have mediation after those stories went out to the general public. Santi would threaten to pull his funding from the magazine and his last name out from under Val, and she would back down and promise never to do it again. She loved a good game of cat and mouse with her ex-husband just as much as the next girl loved staring at his washboard abs. Her relationship with Santi was strained, but not beyond repair. At least, in her mind, it wasn’t.

The pair was playing a silly little game like they always did. Santiago would come back to her eventually, and when he did, she would play hard to get. That was the way things worked.

Her attention returned to the girl that was standing in front of her. American, by the sound of her voice. What did an American have to tell her? If Val was lucky, it would be about that headache of a Quidditch player Jaxon Cole. She had a whole storyboard drawn up for next week’s issue, but it was missing a few finishing touches. Could she be that lucky? If this woman was indeed her client for the evening, she had better order her another drink. “A round on me?” Val asked as she offered the seat next to her to the mysterious stranger. “I don’t make up stories, Miss—” She probed for the woman’s name. “I just embellish the truth.” She winked and raised her glass to clink it against hers. “Isn’t that what all good storytellers do?”

@contessa | Outfit

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Black Magic

Woman

She had made a habit of stopping off in every bar that she had heard of. It was her new thing. She didn’t think that it would last forever. Sooner or later she would have had to have been to every bar in England at least once. The ones that were worth going to anyway. She didn’t think that she was going to be the one that was listening in on conversations, and pulling information out of them, but information was power, and that was something that she had learned a long time ago. If she had the information then she had the upper hand, and there was never going to be a time when Tess didn’t think that that wasn’t worth it. She thought that there was a lot to be said for having information and knowing when to use it. If she wanted someone’s attention, she knew how to get it, and really that was that. She could do what she wanted, and she could have her way with whomever she pleased, so long as the information that she got out of it was worth it. Something about listening to conversations was not nearly as fun as other means of extracting information from people, but in this case, it had suited her needs. Tess had seen the ad and she thought that she might just have been in a position where she could have some information that was of value.

Tess made sure that the information that she had wasn’t going to affect her pack. She knew that they were always going to be her first priority, and she knew that that meant more to her than just about anything else. There was nothing that she thought was actually going to make all that much of a difference in what she had to say right now though. It didn’t touch her pack, and that was what was important. This was just information about other people. It was information about the people that she had seen together. Information that came up at the music festival that she had seen, and being behind the scenes, with some of the members of the band, she had gotten to see more than she had paid for. That much was for sure. Tess didn’t think that they had even really thought anything of her being there. She had gone to the back with Van Parkinson. Helping him carry drinks, of all things, and she hadn’t been looking for an insider’s scoop. She hadn’t been looking for a backstage pass, but she thought that it was worth taking in everything that she had seen just in case.

Nothing was every as easy as she thought that it was going to be. That was just how life worked out. There was something about all of it that was complicated. Something about it that just made it all complicated, and she didn’t think that there was all that much difference that she could make right now. The things that she did, and the things that she knew, either this woman was going to want to hear them or she wasn’t, and whether or not she thought that it was worth her time… Well Tess wasn’t looking for a payout really, she was just looking for someone to hear what she had seen and go with it. Because everyone had seen the way that Van Parkinson had pulled Caterina Shafiq onto the stage with them. But she wasn’t the only member of the crowd that made it into the band’s afterparty area. There were quite a few girls there, but there were only a few that the boys in the band had been all that interested in.

That was enough to a story to get just about anyone’s attention, but she thought that there was plenty of gossip to go around. Things that they were going to have to learn about one another. Things that they were going to need to know. Or things that they were going to want to know. At the very least. “Why not…” She slipped into the seat next to the woman as she offered another round. “Of course,” There was no chance that she was actually going to tell this woman her name quite that easily. She would give her that she was American. That much she couldn’t hide, but her name was none of her concern at the moment. “I suppose it is. It’s just a matter of what you intend to do with those stories, that defines who you are.” Who this woman was, was no secret, but Contessa thought that telling her what she had seen didn’t really make her all that much better. She was an accessory to whatever was going to happen after this, and she knew it.

@ val - 802 - contessa's outfit

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