In the world of Curse Workers, magic has existed since the dawn of human civilization. Magic workers have been known throughout the ages as theurgists, dab hands, workers, hyperbathygammic (HBG) individuals - or colloquially, people with heebeegeebies. "Work," as these skills are most commonly called, is genetic rather than learned and comes in seven varieties: dream work, physical work, memory work, luck work, death work, emotion work, and the rarest, transformation work. It's only since the beginning of the 20th century that non-workers have attempted to legislate and control workers, an attempt that has largely failed. Anti-worker laws went into effect at the same time that Prohibition was written into law, and while Prohibition was eventually lifted, curse work was not decriminalized. In fact, workers were put into work camps during the 1930s, and it was during those years that the worker crime families came into being - and that the worker family mentality came into being. Watch out for the family, take care of the family, screw the other guy. Everything that would later define the Zacharovs and the Sharpes began in those camps.

Fast-forward several decades and the Zacharovs are one of the preeminent worker crime families on the East Coast, with the Sharpes working as the Zacharovs' right hands - advisers, bodyguards, assassins, and so on. Lila Zacharov is the family's heir apparent, introduced through the youngest Sharpe brother's point of view - and Cassel is infatuated with her, so all you see initially is that she's a dream worker, rich, spoiled, savage, and vicious, seeing the world as something owed to her, ready and willing to hurt anyone who gets in her way. This remains more or less true . . . until Lila stumbles across the two elder Sharpe brothers and her cousin Anton conspiring to assassinate her father, tries to stop them, is almost killed herself, and then "rescued" by Cassel, who proceeds to turn her into a cat because - surprise! - he's a transformation worker, the only one in the world, a fact his family has been keeping from him allegedly for his own good. In the end, Lila is caught by Philip and Barron Sharpe and kept in a cage in cat form for three years, from the ages of 13 to 17.

It's here that the series actually picks up: with Lila having escaped at last from her inhumane imprisonment and come to wreak vengeance on a memory-wiped Cassel. He had no idea that she was this weird white cat he kept seeing, but he was drawn to her all the same, and the closer he got to her, the more strange dreams he started to have and the more new memories started coming back to him of things he'd done under his brothers' and mother's influence. Once he figured out what was really going on - that he was the transformation worker and Lila was not dead, but a cat - he transformed her back and she told him that he had been used as an assassin every night by his brothers and Anton, then memory wiped before they let him go back to sleep. Together with two of Cassel's friends, he and Lila came up with a plan to double-cross Barron, Philip, and Anton, and they succeeded with the help of Cassel's grandfather, Desi. Lila reunited with her father, who kept Barron and Philip in his employ rather than killing them outright out of gratitude to Cassel and Desi - but unfortunately, Cassel's mother Shandra worked Lila to love Cassel, so he ran from Lila, allegedly in order to keep him safe.

The summer passed, and Cassel came back after vacation only to find that Lila had transferred to his school to be closer to him, because despite her knowledge of the love curse, she couldn't stand to stay away. She attempted to move on as best she could, since Cassel kept distancing himself from her, but when she got involved with other people he got defensive and angry. Eventually, despite his insistence that he had to do the right thing and stay away from her, he kissed her and would have gone further if he hadn't been interrupted. After this, he asked his friend Daneca to "fix" the problem by working Lila to feel nothing for him. Then he told her that he loved her in preparation for when her memory would theoretically be erased, because that totally made sense.

On a less supernatural-teen-drama front, Lila helped Cassel to solve the murder of his brother Philip, while also doing her level best to keep him from being recruited by a shady government agency seeking to use the world's single transformation worker for their own purposes. It turned out that the murderer was Philip's ex-wife Maura, on the run from Philip's abusive behavior with their child. Lila subsequently helped Cassel frame someone else for Philip's murder.

However, that success wasn't enough to overcome the effects of his betrayal: Lila figured out Daneca was trying to work her and made her confess what Cassel told her to do, realized Cassel was a jackass and thought he had been stringing her along the whole time she was cursed, got her Zacharov necklace (the chain of scars on the neck that marked her as an official member of the Zacharov family), and told Cassel to basically fuck off and die.

☛ black Louboutin boots
☛ one black dress with red accents
☛ a black purse with cards, cash, makeup (~1.5 months' worth), comb, compact mirror