Unraveled

by Jennifer Estep

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “That’s your mom.”

  “Not just her,” I whispered. “Not just her.”

  The picture showed a group of people sitting at a table in the middle of the hotel lobby sometime during the holidays, given the mistletoe, bows, and other decorations in the background. And my mother wasn’t the only person that I recognized. Deirdre Shaw was in the photo too, along with Mab Monroe. Several other people were also gathered around the table, their faces clearly visible, although I didn’t know any of them.

  The group seemed to be celebrating something, given the champagne glasses on the table and the pleased grins on everyone’s faces—except for my mother’s. Her mouth was a hard slash in her face, and her hand was wrapped around her champagne flute, her arm drawn back slightly, as though she were thinking about hurling the glass at the two people sitting across the table from her.

  Finn tapped his finger on one of those people. “There’s Tucker.”

  I nodded. “And I’m willing to bet that this is the rest of the Circle.”

  “Deirdre, Tucker, Mab, your mother. You might be right. But who are the rest of these folks?”

  I studied the faces a little more closely, but I still didn’t recognize anyone. “No idea.” I pointed to the photo again. “But this guy—he’s the leader.”

  The man was sitting next to Tucker and seemed to be the person that my mother was glaring at. He was the only person whose face you couldn’t see, since his back was turned to the camera. All I could tell about him was that he had dark hair and looked to be a big, tall, strong guy.

  Finn frowned and leaned forward, staring at the photo again. “Why do you think that he’s the leader?”

  “Because Tucker is sitting next to him, and look at the vampire’s posture. He’s leaning in and ducking his head. You know Tucker. He wouldn’t show that sort of deference to anyone . . .”

  “Except his boss.”

  “Exactly. Besides, my mother is sitting as far away from this man as she can possibly get, clear on the opposite side of the table. He’s the leader. I know it.”

  I did know it—deep down in my bones.

  “But why doesn’t Dad have a shot of this guy’s face?” Finn asked. “He has a clear view of everyone else. Surely it wouldn’t have been that hard to discreetly move around the table and snap a picture of the leader. So why didn’t he?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe Fletcher could only get this one shot of the whole group of them. These people are paranoid about their secrecy. They wouldn’t have wanted anyone taking pictures of them.”

  Finn nodded, accepting my explanation, but my mind kept churning and churning. He was right. Fletcher should have included a picture of the leader’s face, but he hadn’t, and I couldn’t help but think that it was a deliberate omission. But why? What was so interesting or horrible or shocking about this man that Fletcher had excluded him?

  And how was it going to impact me, Finn, and everyone else?

  Finn pointed at the photo. “Hey, look at that. What does that look like to you?”

  I squinted at the picture. I hadn’t paid any attention to it before, but the table boasted an elaborate metal centerpiece, the sort of thing you might put candles in, although this piece had none. “That looks like . . . a group of swords, all bound together and pointing outward.”

  “Not just a group of swords, but a group of swords in a circle.” Finn looked at me, excitement flashing in his eyes. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think that we just found the official rune for the Circle.” He paused. “Well, the official, probably top-secret, and no-one-knows-about-it-but-them rune. But still.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  We looked at each other, both of us grinning like fools, realizing that we were finally—finally—on track to getting the answers we wanted.

  31

  We went through the rest of the safety-deposit boxes, opening them one by one, and examining all the items inside.

  They were all filled with photos, just like the first one, and all the pictures were various shots of the people that had been gathered around that table. I hoped that there might be more. Perhaps some diaries or logs of who the people were and all their movements, but nothing like that was in the boxes. Perhaps Fletcher hadn’t been able to get all that much information about the members of the Circle. I’d probably never know for sure, but the uncertainty didn’t bother me the way it had before. The old man had given me a place to start. That was all that I needed.

  The only person Fletcher didn’t seem to have photographed was the man with his back to the camera in that first photo, the leader of the Circle. I still wondered why Fletcher hadn’t identified him as well, but I wasn’t overly worried about it. I’d find his friends first, and they would eventually lead me to him.

  The photos in the last box made tears well up in my eyes. They were all shots of my mother. And not just of her, but me, Bria, and Annabella as well. I didn’t know how long Fletcher had been watching us, but he’d snapped dozens of shots of us around our mansion, playing in the backyard, window-shopping, and walking the streets of Ashland. There was even a picture of the four of us sitting in a booth at the Pork Pit, looking over our menus.

  Instead of being angry that Fletcher had never shown these to me, I found myself comforted instead. The old man hadn’t left these here as a reminder that my mother had been mixed up in the Circle, but because he knew that I would want the photos as mementos of her and Annabella. Of my family. Of happier times.

  Simpler times.

  I stared at a photo of my mother holding me close to her side and smiling down at me. I’d been thinking a lot about what had happened before the holiday party and then later on that night in her office. I still didn’t know exactly how she’d been involved with the Circle, or the horrible things she might have done for them, but the unanswered questions didn’t eat away at me the way they had before. Because my mother hadn’t worked for Tucker of her own free will, and she’d tried to protect our family as best she could. Those were the things that mattered, and those were the things that told me the kind of person she’d been—a mother who’d loved her daughters.

  I traced my fingers over her smiling face, then set that photo aside and looked through the others. When we finished with the last box, Finn looked out over the table where all the boxes were lined up, their tops open, revealing the pictures inside.

  “What do you want to do with all of this?” His voice was rough with emotion. “Take it to Dad’s house?”

  I shook my head. “No. There’s too big a risk of Tucker breaking in there, seeing it, and realizing that we’re finally onto the rest of the Circle. Let’s leave it all here. It was safe in the vault all these years, and I want it to stay that way. We’ll make copies, and leave all the originals here.”

  “But aren’t you worried about Tucker finding the copies too?”

  I grinned. “Oh, I know just where to hide those.”

  * * *

  I told Finn where I planned to store the information. He snorted out a laugh, and we both got to work, pulling out our phones and taking photos of everything. Once we were finished with that, we slid the original photos into the appropriate containers, put the boxes back into their slots in the wall, and locked them up tight again. After that, we went to Finn’s office, where he printed out copies of all the photos, since he had a fancy color printer, among other things.

  Two hours later, I left the bank carrying that cardboard box that I’d used to hold Finn’s food the other day. Empty cartons were stacked in the box now, and a thick folder of photos was nestled in the very bottom. I kept that folder hidden inside the box while I worked my usual shift at the Pork Pit, closed down the restaurant, and went home to Fletcher’s. Then, late that night, after I’d changed into my usual black assassin clothes, I grabbed the folder out of the box, left Fletche
r’s house, and headed to my new home away from home.

  My shipping container.

  I drove into the city and cruised around the downtown streets for almost an hour, just to make sure that I wasn’t being followed. Then I parked my car three miles away from the shipping yard, just for a little bit of extra insurance. Now that I finally had some information about the Circle, I wasn’t going to be foolish enough to let Tucker stumble across it and realize how close I was to identifying his friends. I had the advantage now, and I was determined to keep it.

  I approached the shipping yard cautiously and quietly, doing a complete circuit around the perimeter, but except for a single giant guard, the area was deserted, and even Lorelei wasn’t here tonight. Still, I kept scanning the landscape and was extra careful as I crept toward my container. Just like the last time that I’d been here, I bent down and listened to the rocks that I’d strategically placed around the metal container, but they were in the same positions as before, and no one had been near them in days. Good.

  I opened the padlock, slipped inside, and shut and locked the door behind me. Then I turned on the lanterns and went over to the dry-erase board that I’d set up along one of the walls. All those blank boxes and question marks didn’t haunt me nearly as much as they had before. Not now.

  I wiped everything off the board, leaving only a few of the silly doodles that Lorelei and I had drawn in the corners. Then I opened up my folder of information and grabbed the group shot of those people sitting in the lobby of the Bullet Pointe hotel. I put that in the top center of the board, since it was my starting point, the first strand that I would use to build my web of death. I traced my fingers over my mother’s angry face, then went through all the copies of the photos that had been in Fletcher’s safety-deposit boxes, matching up photos of individual people with the ones in the group shot.

  It took me a couple of hours, but by the time I finished, I had several sections of photos tacked up to my dry-erase board. I still didn’t know their names, but I thought that I now had a pretty good idea of who the members of the Circle were. Big-time movers and shakers in Ashland and beyond, just like Tucker had claimed.

  Only one big piece was still missing—the man in the middle of it all. Tucker’s boss and the leader of the Circle. The only shot I had of him was of his back, so I still had no real clues as to his identity. But I’d find him eventually. And once I did, I’d ask him exactly why he’d given Mab Monroe the green light to murder my mother, what trouble Eira had been making that had resulted in her death.

  Then I would kill him for taking her and Annabella away from Bria and me.

  It was late, and I should have gone home to get some sleep. I still had the Pork Pit to open up in the morning. But for the first time since this whole thing had started, for the first time since I’d learned about my mother and the Circle and everything else, I wasn’t tired. Wasn’t weary or heartbroken or just sick to my stomach.

  Now—now I was determined to find the man in the middle and tear apart the Circle. One person and one body at a time until nothing was left.

  I had faces now. The names wouldn’t be too hard to get. And once I put the two together, I could finally get even. I’d find the weak link in the Circle and use that person to unravel the rest of their dark, poisonous web.

  So I poured myself a glass of gin, pulled a chair up in front of the dry-erase board, and started looking at all the photos again.

  The Spider had new targets.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at the next book in the Elemental Assassin series

  By Jennifer Estep

  Coming soon from Pocket Books

  1

  Being an assassin meant knowing when to kill—and when not to kill.

  Unfortunately.

  I stood in a pool of midnight shadows, my boots, jeans, turtleneck, and fleece jacket as black as the night around me. My dark brown hair was stuffed up underneath a black toboggan that matched the rest of my clothes, and I’d swiped a bit of black greasepaint under my eyes to break up the paleness of my face. The only bit of color on my body was the silverstone knife that glinted in my right hand. I even inhaled and exhaled through my nose, so that my breath wouldn’t frost in the chilly January air and give away my position.

  Not that anyone was actually looking for me.

  Oh, a dwarf on guard duty was patrolling the back side of the mansion. Supposedly, he was here to keep an eye out and make sure that no one snuck out of the woods, sprinted across the lawn, and broke into the house. But he was doing a piss-poor job of it, since I’d been watching him amble around for more than three minutes now, making an exceptionally slow circuit of this part of the enormous landscaped grounds.

  Every once in a while, the guard would raise his head and look around, scanning the twisting shadows cast out by the trees and ornamental bushes that dotted the rolling lawn. But most of the time, he was more interested in playing a game on his cell phone, judging from the beeps and chimes that continually rang out from it. He didn’t even have the sound muted—or his gun drawn. I shook my head. It was so hard to find good help these days.

  Still, I tensed as the guard wandered closer and closer to my position. I was standing at the corner of a gray stone house, set back several hundred feet from the main mansion. Trees clustered all around the house, their branches arching over the black slate roof and making the shadows here particularly dark, giving me a perfect hiding spot to watch and wait out the guard.

  I was sure that the man who lived in the mansion charitably referred to this house as a caretaker’s cottage, or something else equally dismissive, even though the house was almost large enough to be its own separate mansion. Even Finnegan Lane, my foster brother, would have been impressed by the spacious rooms and expensive furniture that I’d glimpsed through the windows when I’d been getting into position—

  “So are you actually going to go into the mansion or are we just going to stand around out here all night in the dark?” a low, snide voice murmured in my ear.

  Speak of the devil, and he will annoy you.

  I looked to my right. Fifty feet away, a tall, man-shaped shadow hovered at the edge of the tree line. Finn was dressed all in black the same way that I was, although I could just make out the glimmer of his eyes, like a cat’s in the darkness.

  “I’m waiting for the guard to turn around and go back in the other direction,” I hissed. “As you can bloody well see for yourself.”

  The transmitter in my ear crackled from the force of Finn’s snort. “Mr. Cell Phone Video Game?” He snorted again. “Please. You could do cartwheels naked across the lawn right in front of him, and he still wouldn’t notice.”

  Finn was probably right, but the guard was only about thirty feet from me now, so I couldn’t risk responding. Instead, I slid back a little deeper into the shadows, pressing myself up against the side of the cottage. As my body touched the wall, I automatically reached out with my elemental magic, listening to the gray stone that made up the structure.

  Dark, malicious whispers echoed back to me, punctuated by high, shrill screaming notes of agony as the stone continually muttered about all the blood and violence that it had witnessed over the years—and all the people who had died inside the cottage. The mutters didn’t surprise me, given where I was, but their deep, harsh intensity made me frown. I wouldn’t have thought that the caretaker’s cottage would have been this affected by the man in the mansion, given its distance from the main structure.

  Then again, anything was possible when dealing with the Circle.

  I shut the stone’s mutters out of my mind and focused on the guard, who’d finally reached the cottage. Like most dwarves, he was short and stocky, with bulging biceps that threatened to pop right through the sleeves of his suit jacket. Your typical muscle, except for the thin, scraggly wisps of black hair that lined his upper lip. Someone was trying to grow a mustac
he with very little success.

  The guard stopped about ten feet away from me, raised his head, and glanced at the front of the house, making sure that the door and the windows were shut. He even tilted his head to the side, listening to the whistle of the winter wind as it made the tree branches scrape together like dry, brittle bones.

  I tightened my grip on my knife, feeling the rune stamped into the hilt pressing into the larger, matching scar embedded in my palm, both of them a circle surrounded by eight thin rays—a spider rune, the symbol for patience.

  Something that the guard had little of, since five seconds later he turned his attention back to his phone and started his slow, ambling walk again, one that took him right by my hiding spot. I could have reached out of the shadows, sunk my hand into the dwarf’s hair, yanked his head back, and cut his throat. He would have been dead before he’d even realized what was happening. But I couldn’t kill him—or anyone else here—tonight.

  Unfortunately.

  Once I started dropping bodies, the members of the Circle, a secret society responsible for much of the crime and corruption in Ashland, would realize that I was onto them. Then they would close ranks, increase their ­security, and come after me—or worse, my friends. Something that I wasn’t ready for.

  Not yet.

  So as easy as it would have been for me to kill the guard, I let him wander away, never knowing how close he’d come to playing his last video game.

  Once the guard had moved far enough away, I relaxed and looked over at Finn, who flashed me a thumbs-up, then raised the gun in his other hand and saluted me with it.

  His voice crackled in my ear again. “I’ll be here waiting, but with guns drawn instead of bells on. Just in case you need the cavalry to ride to your rescue.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Please. I’m Gin Blanco, fearsome assassin and underworld queen, remember? The only thing I need rescuing from is you and your bad puns.”