Heart of Venom

by Jennifer Estep

  “Is everything okay?” Owen Grayson, my lover, asked.

  My eyes flicked left and right one more time before I answered him. “Seems to be. For the moment.”

  Owen nodded and went back to his meal, while I grabbed a rag and started wiping down the rest of the counter.

  Actually, so far, the day had passed by in a perfectly normal fashion, with the glaring exception that no one had tried to murder me—yet.

  Thinking that I might actually get through the workday unscathed for a change, I let myself relax, at least until the bell over the front door chimed. I looked over at the entrance, expecting to see a new customer, someone ready, willing, and eager to get their barbecue on.

  Only this wasn’t a customer—it was a tall, thin man wearing a delivery uniform of black coveralls and matching boots.

  The guy glanced around the storefront for a moment before his eyes locked on me, and he headed in my direction. I tensed, eyeing the long white box in his hands, and dropped my right arm down behind the counter. A second later, out of sight, a knife slid into my hand, one of five blades that I had hidden on me. This wasn’t the first time someone had dressed up like a deliveryman to try to get close to me at the restaurant. The last guy was still in the cooler out back, awaiting the skills of Sophia Deveraux, the head cook at the Pork Pit who also moonlighted as my own personal body disposer.

  But to my surprise, the guy stepped right up to the cash register, as though this was a simple delivery.

  “I’ve got a package here for Gin Blanco,” he said in a bored voice. “Is that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here. Sign this.”

  He shoved an electronic scanner at me. I slid my knife into a slot below the cash register, where it would still be out of sight, and took the device from him. The man waited while I used the attached pen to scrawl something that sort of looked like my signature onto the screen. The second I was done, the guy snatched the scanner from me and shoved the white box into my hands.

  He tipped his head at me. “Have a nice day.”

  He started to walk away, but I reached out and latched onto his arm. The guy stopped, looked at me over his shoulder, and frowned, as if I’d violated some sort of secret delivery guy protocol by touching him. Maybe I had.

  “Yeah?” he asked. “You need something else?”

  I carefully set the box down onto the counter. Thankfully, the seat next to Owen was empty, so I was able to slide it several precious inches away from us.

  “What’s in the box?” I asked.

  The guy shrugged. “I don’t know, lady, and I don’t care. I just deliver ’em. I don’t look inside.”

  He started to pull away, but I tightened my grip on his arm.

  “You should really tell me what’s in the box.”

  He rolled his eyes. “And why should I do that?”

  “So I can make sure that there’s nothing . . . nasty inside.”

  Confusion filled his face. “Nasty? Why would you think that there’s something nasty inside?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I drawled. “Why don’t you check the name on the delivery order again.”

  He glanced down at his electronic scanner and hit a button on the device. “Yeah, it says deliver to Gin Blanco, care of the Pork Pit restaurant, downtown Ashland. So what? Is any of that supposed to mean something to me—”

  Comprehension dawned in his eyes as he finally recognized my name and realized who and what I really was. Gin Blanco. Restaurant owner. And, more important, the assassin the Spider.

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat. “Look, I don’t want any trouble, lady. I’m just a delivery guy. I don’t know what’s in the box, and that kind of info’s not on my scanner. I swear.”

  I kept my grip on his arm and stared into his eyes, but I didn’t see anything in them but a burning desire to get away from me as fast as he could. Smart man. Still, I let him sweat a few more seconds before I released him.

  “Okay,” I said. “You can go now.”

  The guy whipped around. He started to take a step forward when I called out to him again.

  “Wait. One more thing.”

  The guy froze. He teetered on his feet, and I could almost see the wheels spinning in his mind as he debated making a break for the door. But he must have realized how foolish that would make him look, because he finally turned and faced me again. I crooked my finger at him. The guy swallowed once more, but he eased back over to me, although he made sure to stay out of arm’s reach and keep the cash register between us.

  By this point, my words and actions had attracted the attention of a few customers, who stared at me with wide eyes, as if I was going to whip out a knife and slice open the delivery guy right in front of them. Please. I preferred to be a little more discreet about such things, if only to keep up appearances.

  I stared at the delivery guy for a few more seconds before reaching down behind the cash register and grabbing something underneath it. He swallowed a third time, and beads of sweat had formed on his forehead, despite the restaurant’s air-conditioning. I raised my hand, and he tensed up that much more.

  I reached out and tucked a hundred-dollar bill into the pocket on the front of his coveralls.

  “Have a nice day,” I said in a sweet voice.

  The guy stared at me, his mouth gaping open, as if he couldn’t believe I was sending him on his way without so much as a scratch on him. But he quickly got with the program. He nodded at me, his head snapping up and down, even as he backed away toward the door.

  “Y’all come back now,” I called out to him. “Sometime when you have a chance to sit down and eat. The food here is terrific, in case you hadn’t heard.”

  The delivery guy didn’t respond, but he kept his eyes on me until his ass hit the doorknob. Then he gulped down a breath, threw the door open, and dashed outside as fast as he could without actually running.

  Owen raised an eyebrow at me. “I think you about gave that poor guy a heart attack.”

  A grin curved my lips. “Serves him right, for not being able to tell me what was in the package.”

  His gaze flicked to the white box sitting off to the side. “You going to open that?”

  “Later,” I murmured. “When we’re alone. If there is something nasty inside, there’s no use letting everyone see it.”

  “And if it’s not something nasty?”

  I snorted. “Then, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I’m not holding my breath about it, though.”

  * * *

  Owen finished his cheeseburger and onion rings and had a piece of cherry pie with vanilla bean ice cream for dessert, while I spent the next hour working. Slicing up more potatoes for the last of the day’s French fries. Checking on the pot of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce that I’d set on one of the back burners to bubble away. Refilling drinks and ringing up orders.

  I also took the package into the back and placed it in one of the freezers. I didn’t know what surprises the box might contain, but I didn’t want any of my staff or customers to get injured by whatever might be lurking inside.

  Finally, a little after seven o’clock, the last of the customers paid up and left, and I decided to close the restaurant early for the night. I sent Sophia and the waitstaff home, turned off all the appliances, and flipped the sign over to Closed before locking the front door.

  Now all that was left to do was open the box.

  I carefully pulled it out of the freezer, took it into the storefront, and put it down on the counter in the same spot as before. I made Owen get up and move to the other side of the restaurant, well out of range of any elemental Fire or other magic that might erupt from the inside. Then I bent down and peered at the package.

  A shipping order was taped to the top, featuring my name and the Pork Pit’s address. But there was nothing on the slip of paper to tell me who might have sent the box or where it had come from. All of that information had been left blank, which only made
me that much more suspicious about what might be inside.

  And the box itself didn’t offer any more clues. It was simply a sturdy white box, long, rectangular, and about nine inches wide. No marks, runes, or symbols of any kind decorated the surface, not even so much as a manufacturer’s stamp to tell me who had made the box in the first place. I hesitated, then put my ear down close to the top and listened, in case someone had decided to put a bomb with an old-fashioned clock tick-tick-ticking away inside. Stranger things had happened, in my line of work.

  But no sounds escaped from the container. No smells either, and I didn’t sense any elemental magic emanating from it.

  “Anything?” Owen asked from his position by the front door.

  I shook my head. “Nothing so far.”

  The lid of the box had been taped down, so I palmed one of my knives and sliced through the material, careful not to jiggle the package any more than necessary. Then I waited, counting off the seconds in my head. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . forty-five . . . sixty . . .

  After two minutes had passed, I was reasonably sure that nothing would happen until I actually opened the box.

  “Here goes nothing,” I called out to Owen.

  As I slowly drew the top off the box, I reached for my Stone magic, using it to harden my skin, head, hair, eyes, and any other part of me that might get caught in a blast from a bomb or any rune trap that might be hidden inside. A sunburst rune that would make elemental Fire explode in my face; a saw symbol that would send sharp, daggerlike needles of Ice shooting out at me; maybe even some sort of Air elemental cloud design that would suck all of the oxygen away from me and suffocate me on the spot.

  But none of those things happened, and all I saw was a thick layer of white tissue paper that was wrapped around whatever was inside.

  So I drew in another breath and carefully pushed aside the paper, still holding on to my Stone power to protect myself from any possible problems. But to my surprise, the box held something innocuous after all: flowers.

  Roses, to be exact—black roses.

  I let go of my magic, my skin reverting back to its normal, soft texture, and frowned, wondering who would send me a box of roses. I picked up one of the flowers, mindful of the sharp, curved thorns sticking out from the stem, and turned the blossom around and around, as if it held some sort of clue that would tell me who had sent them and why.

  And it did.

  Because this wasn’t your typical rose. The stem was a milky white instead of the usual green, and the thorns were the same pale shade. But really it was the petals that caught my attention, because they weren’t black so much as they were a deep, dark, vivid blue—a color that I’d only seen one place before.

  “All clear,” I said.

  Owen stepped over to the counter and peered into the box. “Roses? Somebody sent you roses?”

  “It looks that way,” I murmured.

  A white card was lying on top of the flowers, so I picked it up. Only two words were scrawled across the front in black ink and tight, cursive handwriting.

  Happy anniversary.

  That was it. That was all the card said, and no other marks, runes, or symbols decorated the thick bit of stationery.

  I ran my fingers over the card. Not what I had expected it to say. Some sort of death threat would have been far more appropriate. Then again, I hadn’t thought that I’d get a package like this today either. But most troublesome was the fact that the two simple words gave me no clue as to the writer’s tone, state of mind, or true meaning. The card, the message, the roses, could have been anything from a simple greeting to the most biting sort of sarcasm. If I were betting, though, I’d put my money on sarcasm. Or, perhaps a warning. Maybe even a promise of payback, retribution, revenge.

  “Happy anniversary?” Owen asked, leaning over the counter and peering at the card in my hand. “Anniversary of what?”

  I glanced up at the calendar I’d tacked on the wall near the cash register. August twenty-fifth. Ten years to the day it had happened. Funny, but right now, it seemed like ten minutes ago, given how hard my heart was hammering in my chest. I breathed in, trying to calm myself, but the sweet, sickening stench of the flowers rose up to fill my mouth and slither down my throat like perfumed poison. For a moment, I was back there, back with the roses, back in the shadows, beaten and bloody and wondering how I was going to survive what was coming next—

  “Gin?” Owen asked. “Are you okay? You look like you’re somewhere far away right now.”

  “I am,” I said in a distracted voice, still seeing things that he couldn’t, memories of another time, another place.

  Another man.

  Owen reached over and put his hand on top of mine. “Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked in a soft voice.

  His touch broke the spell that the roses had cast on me, and I pulled myself out of my memories and stared at him. Owen looked back at me, his violet eyes warm with care, concern, and worry. It always surprised me to see those feelings reflected in his face, especially since we’d almost called it quits for good a few months ago. But we were back together and stronger than ever now. More important, he deserved to know about this. He deserved to know why I was the way that I was—and who had helped make me that way.

  I gestured for him to take his seat on the stool again while I gently laid the dark blue rose back down in the box with the others. I kept the card in my hand, though, my thumb tracing over the words again and again. Then, I sat down on my own stool, leaned my elbows on the counter, and looked at Owen.

  “Get comfortable,” I said. “Because it’s a long story. Funny enough, it all begins with a girl—a stupid, arrogant girl who thought that she could do no wrong . . .”

  PHOTO © ANDRE TEAGUE

  JENNIFER ESTEP is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author prowling the streets of her imagination in search of her next fantasy idea. Spider’s Bite, Web of Lies, Venom, Tangled Threads, Spider’s Revenge, Thread of Death, By a Thread, Widow’s Web, Deadly Sting, and Parlor Tricks (in the Carniepunk anthology) are the other works in her red-hot Elemental Assassin urban fantasy series for Pocket Books. Jennifer also writes the Mythos Academy young adult urban fantasy series and is the author of the Bigtime paranormal romance series.

  For more on Jennifer and her books, visit her at www.JenniferEstep.com and @Jennifer_Estep.

  FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jennifer-Estep

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  DISCOVER MORE GREAT BOOKS AT

  PREVIOUS BOOKS IN THE ELEMENTAL ASSASSIN SERIES BY JENNIFER ESTEP

  Spider’s Bite

  Web of Lies

  Venom

  Tangled Threads

  Spider’s Revenge

  By a Thread

  Widow’s Web

  Deadly Sting

  E-NOVELLAS

  Thread of Death

  Kiss of Venom

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Estep

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
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  First Pocket Books paperback edition September 2013

  Cover Illustration by Tony Mauro

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  ISBN 978-1-4516-8900-6

  ISBN 978-1-4516-8904-4 (ebook)