“Of course,” I murmured. “We’ll talk more about that and everything else tomorrow. Right now, we both need to get some rest. It’s been a long day.”
“Thank you, Gin,” Owen said in a soft voice. “For believing me. For trusting me.”
I looked at him, at his black hair, his violet eyes, his rough, rugged features that were so appealing to me. All these emotions roared up in my chest. All my love for him, all my caring, all my worry—and all my fear of losing him.
It was that horrible thought, that terrible fear, that spurred me forward. I pressed my body flush again Owen’s, drew his lips down to mine, and kissed him for all I was worth, trying to put everything I was thinking, everything I was feeling, into that one single kiss. Trying to make it perfect, trying to make it everything he’d had with Salina—and more.
The fierceness of my kiss seemed to startle him, but Owen’s arms snaked around me, pulling me even closer. I kept right on kissing him, trying to tell him I understood the things he’d done and the decisions he’d made, even if I didn’t like everything I’d learned tonight about how much he’d once loved Salina.
Sometime later, we broke apart, both of us breathless and aching—for each other and for answers we weren’t quite sure of.
“I love you, Gin,” Owen whispered in my ear, still holding me in his arms.
For the first time since he’d said those words to me, I doubted them—and him—but I kept my troubling thoughts to myself.
“I know,” I whispered back. “And I love you too. We’ll figure this out, just like we always do—together.”
He nodded, dropped his arms from around me, and stepped back. I walked over and paused in the doorway.
“If you need anything tonight, I’m just right down the hall.”
“I know. Sleep well.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t quite make myself smile. “You too.”
I shut the door behind me, but I didn’t go to my room. Instead, I stood there, my hand still on the knob, brooding. I knew Owen loved me, that he loved me just as much as I did him.
But I couldn’t help but wonder if he still loved Salina as well—and if she’d always had more of a hold on his heart than I could ever hope to have.
15
I finally moved away from the door, but instead of taking a shower like I should have, I went back downstairs to Fletcher’s office.
I turned on the light and looked out over the familiar mess. Papers, books, folders, and pens covered the battered desk in the back of the room, and more of the same could be found on the shelves of the bookcases against the walls and on top of the filing cabinets that squatted on either side of the door.
The sight of the old man’s clutter brought a ghost of a smile to my face. I just hadn’t felt like cleaning it, or the rest of the house, up yet. I didn’t know when I would. Sometimes Fletcher’s murder and the knowledge that he was gone still hurt as much as if it had all happened just yesterday. Having his things around comforted me—or at least tricked me into believing that part of him was still here with me.
But it was late, and I was tired, so I put my sentiment aside and got busy. It took me about twenty minutes of digging through the cabinets before I found what I was looking for: the file on Benedict Dubois’s murder.
Even though he hadn’t killed Dubois, Fletcher, being Fletcher, had compiled all the information he could get his hands on about the murder and had organized it in meticulous detail. Besides doing recon on the people he assassinated, the old man was always digging into someone, always keeping track of who was moving up in the underworld and who was getting offed. There was probably more information on more murders in this room than in storage at police headquarters. Fletcher had claimed that his obsessive chronicling was a way to stay ahead of our enemies, but I just thought he liked knowing where all the bodies were buried in Ashland—a trait Finn had inherited from him.
Tonight, though, I just hoped the file told me more about Salina and what she might be up to. I took the folder over to the desk, flipped on a light there, sat down in Fletcher’s creaky chair, and started reading.
According to Fletcher’s notes, Benedict Dubois’s murder had been the talk of Ashland for months—if it could be considered a simple murder. Fletcher had chronicled the series of events that had led to his death, all the skirmishes and problems Benedict had had with Mab, all the things that had prompted him to plot against her, but I skipped ahead to the night it had all gone down. Even then, there were pages of information to go through, covering everything from the blueprints of the mansion to exactly where Dubois had died. Given Fletcher’s attention to detail, there was even a guest list of everyone who’d been there that night.
I put the list aside to give to Finn to see what connections he might be able to make between the guests back then and what Salina might be up to now. For all I knew, she was working with someone on the list besides McAllister.
Finally, I got to Fletcher’s recap of that fateful night. Benedict, an Ice elemental, had thrown an elegant dinner party at his mansion. Just before the soup course, he’d tried to take out Mab by stabbing her in the back with a silverstone knife—only he’d failed. Naturally, the Fire elemental had made an example out of him for his foolishness.
The more I read, the more I remembered that night, until it seemed like every line, every word, caused another image to pop into my mind.
Then I got to the photos.
Fletcher had somehow gotten his hands on police images of Dubois’s body. You couldn’t even tell that the ashy, smoking thing in the photos had once been a man. It just looked like a collection of blackened bones strung together, topped by a skull baring charred teeth.
I’d seen similar pictures before. Hell, I’d witnessed such things myself when Mab murdered my mother and older sister. My stomach twisted, and the phantom stench of seared skin filled my nose, making me gag, as if Benedict Dubois’s corpse were freshly burned and still smoldering at my feet.
I forced myself to flip past the photos and keep reading, but there wasn’t anything else to discover. After she tortured and murdered Dubois, Mab hadn’t had any more problems for a good long while.
I slid the pictures back in the file, closed it, and put a crystal paperweight shaped like my spider rune on top of the folder. The information might be a window into the past, but it didn’t tell me what had really happened with Kincaid and Salina or, more important, what she was doing back in Ashland. So I turned off the light and went back upstairs.
I went through the motions of getting ready for bed—taking a shower, towel-drying my hair, putting on some shorts and an old T-shirt.
Even though I hadn’t killed anyone tonight, I was still exhausted from everything I’d learned about Owen, Salina, Kincaid, and their convoluted history. I was so tired I thought I might fall asleep immediately, but as soon as I closed my eyes, the dreams started, the way they always did. Except they weren’t dreams so much as glimpses of my past, memories of all the bad things I’d seen and done. I’d been having the dreams ever since Fletcher’s murder last year, and I had no idea when they might stop, if ever. I supposed these particular images were triggered by reading through the Dubois file. . . .
No one was supposed to die tonight.
It was supposed to be a simple assignment, one that Fletcher, the assassin known as the Tin Man, could do in his sleep. Slip onto the estate of Benedict Dubois during a dinner party and gather intel on Peter Delov, an Ashland drug lord. See who Delov spoke to, who he snubbed, how close his guards stayed to him. All in preparation for a hit that was to take place later on.
I moved through the halls of the Dubois mansion, calmly, quickly heading toward my destination. As usual, I wore dark clothes, although I’d been forced to don a white tuxedo vest and a matching bow tie over my black shirt, pants, and shoes. The pale fabric felt like a bull’s-eye on my chest, and the fact that I was carrying an empty tray instead of one of the knives Fletcher was teaching me to use made me feel
even more vulnerable. Still, the vest and the tray were an effective part of my disguise, that of a simple waiter.
Tonight, instead of skulking around in the shadows, I boldly strode down the corridor, passing one giant guard after another and nodding to them all in turn. A few eyed me with obvious curiosity, probably wondering exactly how I’d gotten this job, since at fifteen I was a bit younger than the other workers. But no one stopped or questioned me. Finally, I reached the entrance to the kitchen and showed the guard there my tray. He politely opened the door for me, and I stepped inside.
The kitchen was a madhouse. Several chefs were busy chopping, cutting, peeling, boiling, steaming, and sautéing everything from potatoes to pasta to peaches, and my nose itched from the red pepper, cinnamon, and other spices in the air. The chefs called out orders to each other and the dozens of waiters who were busy moving through the cramped aisles, grabbing trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres before scurrying back out to the party to serve up the delicacies.
“Soup’s up!” one of the chefs called out.
I handed my empty tray off to one of the dishwashers, got a clean one filled with white china bowls, and headed toward the back of the kitchen to the chef who’d spoken. The overhead lights brought out the silver threads in his walnut-colored hair, while the heat from the ovens and burners had made his cheeks even ruddier than usual.
I put the tray down on the counter next to his elbow and watched while the chef ladled a scrumptious-smelling, gourmet broccolini soup into the bowls.
“Anything interesting?” Fletcher murmured as he used some freshly grated Parmesan cheese and sourdough croutons to garnish each bowl of soup.
“Not really,” I replied. “Just Delov moving through the crowd, eating, drinking, and greeting his business associates. The usual. Although Delov looks to be in the market for a new mistress. He’s barely glanced at the woman he brought along tonight. Instead, he’s been fawning all over one of the women who came with Beauregard Benson.”
“Benson won’t like that, but I doubt it will stop Delov,” Fletcher said. “See if you can find out who she is. Might prove useful later on.”
I nodded, pleased he was trusting me with such an assignment. Fletcher often hired himself out for events like these as a way to surreptitiously study potential targets. Usually, he worked as a waiter, but tonight he’d been needed in the kitchen to cook, so the old man had brought me along to be his eyes and ears at the party, which was being held on the lawn outside. It was something he was doing more and more of these days, now that I was two years into my training with him.
Fletcher said that soon I’d be ready to start doing solo scouting jobs. Serving food and drinks to the puffed-up power players of Ashland wasn’t exactly the most thrilling way to spend my nights, but Fletcher said that blending in with a crowd and getting close to my targets was a necessary skill to learn. That it would prepare me for more violent, bloodier things later on. I wasn’t quite sure I believed that, but the old man had been right about so many things so far that I wasn’t going to argue with him. Besides, the waiter money was decent enough, and I almost always got to take home a bag or two of leftovers.
“Be careful,” Fletcher warned as he finished garnishing the last bowl of soup. “Be quiet and be invisible just like always. Don’t get yourself noticed by anyone, especially not tonight.”
The worried tone in his voice made me look at him. “Is something wrong?”
He shrugged, but his green eyes were dark and troubled. “I heard some rumors that something big might go down at the dinner—”
A scream erupted, cutting through the noise and clatter in the kitchen.
Everyone froze, wondering if we’d all just imagined the sound—but we hadn’t. More sharp screams sounded, along with a couple of loud, booming crack-crack-cracks of gunfire. But the most troubling thing was that even here in the kitchen, a hundred feet from the doors that led out to the party, I could feel the crackle of magic in the air. A blast of frigid Ice power, followed by an intense wave of Fire, both of them rubbing against my skin like invisible sandpaper.
Fletcher noticed the grimace on my face. “What is it, Gin?”
“Some elementals are using their power,” I said in a low voice. “Ice and Fire. They must be strong, really strong, for me to sense their magic all the way in here.”
He nodded. “We need to get out of here—”
But it was already too late. The kitchen doors flew open, and giants stormed into the room. Every single one of them had a gun in his hand. There was nothing Fletcher and I could do, no way we could escape without drawing attention to ourselves and making things worse, so we bowed our heads and put our hands up like everyone else did.
The giants marched the entire kitchen and waitstaff outside onto the lawn. When I’d been out here five minutes ago, the area had been pristine, and everything had gleamed, from the fine crystal and china to the elegant, blue-green tablecloths. Now, tables and chairs were overturned, platters of food had been upended, and splintered shards from the broken champagne glasses glinted like razor blades underfoot.
The dinner party guests had been herded into a tight group out on the lawn, and the giants ushered us in that direction as well. No one spoke, although several folks unsuccessfully tried to hold back frightened sobs and whimpers.
“Good,” someone purred in a low, feminine voice. “More witnesses.”
I couldn’t see exactly who was speaking through the crowd of people in front of me, but I saw the shimmer of copper-colored hair and the flash of a gold necklace around a woman’s throat. I looked at Fletcher.
“Mab Monroe,” he murmured in my ear. “I’d heard Dubois was planning to make a move against her tonight. Looked like he didn’t plan well enough. Poor bastard. He’ll pay for it now—more than he ever imagined.”
I didn’t have to ask Fletcher what he meant. The old man had told me all about Mab and her ruthless reputation.
Two giants dragged a man across the lawn, causing murmurs to ripple through the crowd. He was a handsome man with blond hair, but his once-impeccable tuxedo jacket hung in smoking tatters on his shoulders, while his white shirt was charred. The holes in his shirt showed the blistering burns on his skin. The giants stopped with him in front of a beautiful stone fountain shaped like a mermaid. Twinkling white lights had been wrapped around the mermaid’s elegant form, although they seemed to make the shadows darker, rather than lighter.
It took me a moment to gather my courage enough to drag my gaze away from the mermaid and look at the injured figure again. I knew what was going to happen now. Everyone did.
“Tie him down.” Mab’s command floated through the air.
Two of the giants moved off to the left and pulled some metal hoops out of the ground and picked up some wooden mallets. A croquet set. I’d seen it on the lawn when I’d been serving champagne earlier. That was what the giants had grabbed, although I had no idea what they planned to do with it.
I got my answer a few seconds later. Four giants held the man down spread-eagled, while two more positioned the metal hoops over his arms and legs and then pounded them into the ground.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
The light, ringing sounds were so at odds with what was happening, and every blow the giants struck took on a somber, sinister note in my mind, until all I heard were death knells. We all knew that was what they really were, and so did Benedict Dubois, who started swearing and screaming at the giants to let him go. When that didn’t work, he reached for his Ice magic, trying to blast his captors with it. But the giants were ready for that. They punched and kicked him over and over again, breaking his concentration, his ribs, and his nose, and hurting him until he was too bloody and battered to summon any more of his power.
Finally, Dubois raised his head off the ground and looked out at his dinner guests, his friends and business partners. He started yelling at them to help him. But no one stepped forward—no one dared to, not with Mab staring at them.
>
No one wanted to share Dubois’s fate.
Finally, the giants finished their work and stepped back. A hush fell over the crowd, and even Dubois grew silent as Mab walked across the grass toward him.
“Daddy?” a voice called out. “Daddy!”
A girl a few years older than me sprinted across the lawn, her long, blond hair streaming out behind her like ribbons of silk. She must have been in some other part of the mansion, because I hadn’t seen her before at the party. A boy with black hair chased after her, catching her just before she reached her father. He wrapped his arms around the girl and held her tight, even though she struggled against him. Smart guy. He knew it was already too late for Dubois, even if the girl didn’t.
“Let me go!” she yelled. “We have to help him! Someone please help him!”
But no one did. Instead, they all looked at the girl with pitying eyes.
A couple of the giants moved toward the young couple, probably to try to get the girl to shut up, but Mab held up her hand.
“No,” she purred. “Let her watch. Let it be a lesson to her—and everyone else here tonight.”
Mab held out her hand, and elemental Fire sparked to life on her fingertips, hissing and crackling with evil intent. I could see the glow of the flames through the crowd, and once again, I felt the invisible waves of her power pressing against my skin. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I got the impression that Mab smiled before she bent down.
And then she started torturing Dubois.
I couldn’t see everything that was going on, but I didn’t need to. I didn’t want to. Dubois’s screams let everyone know exactly what was happening to him—and just how much it hurt.
The stench of burning flesh filled the warm spring air, reminding me of the night that a Fire elemental had done the same thing to my mother and older sister, how she’d burned them to death. My stomach roiled, and bile coated my throat. For a moment, I thought I might vomit, but I managed to swallow down the bitter liquid that choked me. Other people in the crowd didn’t manage to do the same, turning to the side and retching up the food and drinks they’d just downed.
Widow's Web (Elemental Assassin) Page 12
