Bitter Bite

by Jennifer Estep

  Deirdre had already been horribly tortured, had already sat in that chair and suffered for days on end, but her face still paled, and a sheen of sweat popped out onto her forehead at Tucker’s casual promise of her impending death.

  “So,” I drawled, “you’ve already tortured Mama Dee, and now you’re going to kill her. Why, exactly, am I here, then? Not that I’m complaining, mind you, as I’ll be quite happy to sit here and witness her death. Bring me some popcorn, and I’ll even do the play-by-play commentary.”

  “But?” Tucker asked.

  “But this is a weeknight, and I’ve got a barbecue restaurant to open in the morning. Couldn’t y’all have just called and told me where to find her body?”

  For the first time, a spark of anger shimmered in Tucker’s black eyes, belying his polite words and calm expression. “You’re here because we wanted you here. To see this. To see what happens when people displease us.”

  “And who, exactly, is us?”

  His lips twitched, as though I were a child who’d done something to amuse him and he was holding back a laugh at my expense. “You really don’t know anything, do you? About how things actually work in Ashland?”

  I shrugged. “Ostensibly, I’m the head of the underworld. So that means that everything goes through me.”

  This time, Tucker let loose with a hearty, amused chuckle that almost made him seem likable. Almost. “Mab never told you anything, did she?” he asked. “And neither did your mother.”

  I couldn’t have been more shocked than if his goon had doused me with another bucket of water. Of all the things he could have said, of all the names he could have dropped, I wasn’t expecting him to bring up my mother. This time, my hands were the ones that curled around the arms of my chair as I struggled to hide my surprise. “What does my mother have to do with anything? She’s been dead for almost twenty years now.”

  “You always thought that Mab killed your mother because of some long-standing family feud between the Monroes and the Snows.” Tucker gave me a look that was almost pitying. “You believed exactly what we wanted you to.”

  I frowned, not understanding what he was getting at.

  “It’s true that Mab despised Eira and was worried about your magic. Those are some of the reasons your mother died.” He bent down so that he was at eye level with me. “But those aren’t the only reasons. Why, they’re not even the main ones.”

  Cold fingers of unease crawled up my spine. “What are you saying?”

  Tucker leaned even closer to me. “Mab killed your mother because we ordered her to.”

  I sucked in a breath, my mind spinning in a hundred directions. Every word out of his mouth was like a grenade exploding at my feet, but I pushed aside my shock and surprise and forced myself to think things through. Tucker was a master manipulator. He’d been pulling Deirdre’s strings this whole time without my realizing it. He was just playing me now, trying to confuse me and get me to focus on his lies instead of escaping.

  He hadn’t been there that night. He hadn’t seen my mother and Annabella die. He hadn’t heard their screams as Mab’s elemental Fire had consumed them. He hadn’t seen or smelled or touched their charred bodies. He hadn’t been tied down to a chair and tortured by Mab. I had been, and I knew exactly what had happened and why. Tucker didn’t know anything about my mother.

  Not one damn thing.

  “You’re lying,” I snarled. “Mab killed my family because she wanted to. Because she was an evil, vicious, vindictive bitch. Mab certainly never asked anyone’s permission for any of the bad things she did.”

  “Oh, that’s where you’re dead wrong, Ms. Blanco,” Tucker said, his eyes still on mine, a snake trying to transfix me with the depths of his black gaze. “Mab was certainly all of those things, especially when it came to Eira Snow. But Eira was the one making problems within the group. She wanted us to abandon some of our more . . . profitable endeavors, just in the name of human decency. She actually threatened to go public and expose us. So we let Mab take care of her.”

  “Right,” I drawled, my voice dripping with disdain and disbelief. “Just like you let Mab be head of the underworld.”

  “Exactly,” he replied. “Mab was always a bit . . . showier than the rest of us. She was the perfect figurehead for all the petty crime bosses to focus on, while we carried on with our own interests behind the scenes. But Mab knew exactly what we were capable of doing, even to her, and she went along with us because it was in her best interests to do so.”

  Part of me wanted to laugh in his face and thank him for the great bedtime story. But his voice, his words, his expression . . . they all held an air of cold, cruel certainty that I couldn’t ignore, that made twin knots of worry and doubt twist together in my stomach. Could Tucker actually be telling the truth? Could Mab have murdered my mother for some reason other than a petty family feud?

  Could I have been wrong all these years?

  But . . . but that would mean that I had been wrong about everything—my mother, what kind of person she had been, why she’d died, even my revenge against Mab. Every single thing that made me, well, me. It would all be wrong. No, it would be worse than that.

  It would all be a fucking lie.

  When I first found out that Deirdre was alive, I’d been worried about shattering Finn’s world and upending everything he knew about his parents. I couldn’t quite believe that the same thing was happening to me. That this wasn’t all just another manipulation on Tucker’s part.

  But I couldn’t ignore the possibility that he was telling the truth.

  I gave him a skeptical look. “I’ll ask again. Who, exactly, is this illustrious we?”

  “You can call us the Circle. We’re the ones who run this town and everything in it. Mab, the underworld, the crime bosses, they’re all just useful tools to hide our activities. Unlike Mab, we see no need to let everyone know our business.”

  “So you’re telling me that some secret group, some secret society of folks, are the true forces of power, greed, and corruption in Ashland?” I laughed. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard—”

  Tucker palmed a knife and pressed it against my throat, cutting off my words and cutting open my neck. I winced at the cold sting, even as warm blood oozed down my throat. The bastard was fast. I hadn’t even seen him move. I wondered if his speed was a natural vampiric ability or the result of drinking other people’s blood. Maybe both.

  “You stupid girl!” he hissed. “We can reach out and crush you anytime we want. The only reason you’re still alive is because it amuses us to watch your pitiful struggles.”

  I stared right back at him, hate blazing in my eyes. “Then do it, already. Make good on your threat. Cut my throat, right here, right now. Otherwise, drop your fucking knife, quit posturing, and tell me what it is that you really want.”

  Tucker dug the blade into my skin, making even more blood trickle down my neck. I glared right back at him, not showing a lick of fear. Finn might be Fletcher’s son, but I was the old man’s daughter in all the ways that truly mattered, and he’d passed down the same stubbornness to me, drilled it into me during all the years he’d trained me to be the Spider.

  I wasn’t afraid, not of Tucker and especially not of the knife at my neck. I’d accepted the inevitability of my violent, bloody, messy death a long time ago. My solace here was that I wouldn’t be the only one departing this world tonight. Because as soon as he was done with me, Tucker would kill Deirdre, which meant that she would never have a chance to hurt Finn again.

  Tucker dug the blade even deeper into my neck, but I didn’t crack and start begging for mercy like he wanted. Instead, my eyes narrowed in challenge, silently daring him to do his worst. If I could have spit in his face without him slicing through my carotid artery, I would have done it in an instant and then lunged forward and sunk my teeth into his throat for good measure.

  The vamp saw that I wasn’t going to break. He nodded in approval, dropped the kni
fe from my neck, and stepped back.

  “Well, it’s good to see that you’re as tough as advertised, Ms. Blanco,” he said. “It’s time that we replaced Mab, and I think you’ll make a fine addition to the Circle.”

  “Join you? The group who supposedly ordered my mother’s murder? Not bloody likely.”

  He ignored me and snapped his fingers. One of the giants stepped forward, and Tucker exchanged his bloody knife for the giant’s gun. Deirdre and I both tensed. Tucker could easily shoot us where we sat, have his men roll our chairs out into the shipping yard, and shove us off the docks and into the river. No one would have any clue to what had happened to us until some poor fisherman hooked our bodies and got the fright of his life a few weeks later.

  Instead of shooting us, Tucker ejected the clip from the gun, then loaded a single bullet back into the chamber. He put the gun on a nearby table and pulled a set of handcuff keys out of his pocket. He held the keys up in front of my face.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, or my men will kill you.”

  The giants stepped a little closer, a couple of them pointing their guns at me. I made note of where they were all standing and of all the other obstacles around me. The crates, the boxes, the door at the far end of the warehouse, where a lone giant was posted, angling his phone in my direction.

  Tucker uncuffed my right hand, then slapped the gun into it. He stepped out of the way and gestured at Deirdre. “Shoot her. Prove your loyalty to the Circle, and you can go free.”

  Deirdre’s eyes bulged. “No! Tucker, no! You can’t do this! Think about all the money I’ve made you and the others over the years. Think about how much more money I can still make you.”

  He gave her a cold glare. “We wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place if not for all your bad investments and ridiculous spending habits.”

  I remembered what Silvio had told me about Deirdre’s charity foundation, about how someone had bankrolled her when she first started out years ago. And about how she was now broke and playing a shell game with other people’s money.

  “All these years later, and this is still all about your trust fund, isn’t it?” I said. “You blew through all your money, just like your parents did, and then you lost all your friends’ money too. That’s why you went for the double shot of the exhibit jewelry and the bank vault. Your friends wanted their money back, or else.” I smirked. “I guess champagne bubble baths don’t come cheap. Do they, Mama Dee?”

  Anger stained Deirdre’s cheeks a mottled red, but she didn’t deny my accusations.

  Tucker chuckled softly, enjoying her humiliation. “And now, because of your own incompetence, everyone in Ashland—underworld or not—knows that you tried to rob your own exhibit, along with the bank. You’ve exposed yourself, and potentially all of us, and you know what the penalty for that is.”

  He shook his head. “You should thank me. If it were only me deciding, I would stake you out here and make your death last for days. Ms. Blanco will probably be far more merciful and shoot you in the gut so it only takes you a few hours to bleed out.”

  My fingers curled around the gun, calculating distances and angles. I shifted my feet so that my toes were resting against the concrete floor.

  Seeing that she was getting nowhere with Tucker, Deirdre turned her teary eyes and pathetic pleas to me.

  “Gin, please, honey, you can’t do this. I’m Finnegan’s mother—”

  I snorted. “There is nothing motherly about you. Don’t expect me to save your lying, deceitful, sorry ass. Not after what you did to Finn. I told you point-blank that when you hurt him, I would kill you. You really should have listened. Now you’re going to die here, a victim of your own lies, and absolutely no one will mourn your passing. Especially not Finn.”

  Deirdre realized that she wasn’t going to soften my heart, which was just as cold and hard as hers was. “You stupid bitch,” she snarled. “By the time they’re done with you, you’ll wish you were dead too.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  Tucker gestured at the gun in my hand. “Go ahead. Kill her. You know you want to.”

  I kept my gaze steady on him, even as I wrapped my fingers around the cuff on my left wrist, sending a small trickle of Ice magic into the locking mechanism. The silverstone soaked up that first wave of magic, so I sent out another, slightly stronger one, wanting to drop the temperature of the cuff and weaken the metal.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Do your own damn dirty work.”

  “Shoot her,” Tucker snapped. “Now.”

  “Why? So you can record the whole thing and blackmail me with it? I see your man with his phone out over there.”

  Tucker couldn’t help but look in that direction. The giant at the door winced and lowered his phone.

  “Seems like the invitation to join your precious Circle is more of an order, and I don’t take orders from anyone, sugar.”

  “Then you’re a fool,” Tucker snapped.

  “And you’re a dead man.”

  “If you won’t kill her, then I will. And then I’ll kill you too. Only I won’t be so nice as to use a gun.” He gestured at the knife he’d cut me with, the one the giant was still holding on to for him. “I’ll carve you up, just like you’ve done to so many other people. But there won’t be anything quick and painless about it. Your screams will be like a sweet serenade, and I won’t stop cutting until you beg me for mercy.”

  I snorted again. “You can make me scream, certainly, but I won’t beg. You want Deirdre dead, then kill her your damn self. Mab might have been involved with you, but I’m not her. I’m not one of your lackeys, and I never, ever will be.”

  The vampire glared at me, his eyes narrowed to two black slits in his face, but I stared right back at him, even as I fed a little bit more Ice magic into the cuff on my left wrist. The metal was so cold now that it was starting to steam in the ambient heat of the warehouse, but no one noticed the wisps of frost except me. Almost there.

  “Fine,” he snapped. “It will be easier to kill you both now anyway.”

  Tucker bent down, as though he was going to wrest the gun out of my hand, but I dug the toes of my boots into the floor and pushed back as hard as I could. The rollers on my chair sailed smoothly along the concrete floor, shooting me back, well out of Tucker’s reach.

  He swiped for me and ended up staggering to keep his balance. For a moment, everyone was frozen, but I kept digging and digging my toes into the floor the whole time, trying to roll myself toward the door at the end of the warehouse. Even as I sailed away, I whipped up the gun, pressed it against the lock on the handcuff on my left wrist, and pulled the trigger.

  Crack!

  The shot reverberated through the warehouse. The bullet, combined with my Ice magic, was enough to shatter the lock on the silverstone handcuff. The second the cuff fell away, I tossed the empty gun aside, lurched out of the chair, and sprinted for the door.

  Crack!

  Crack! Crack!

  Crack!

  My shot must have also jolted Tucker’s men out of their shock. Bullets zinged through the warehouse in my direction, but I reached for my Stone magic and hardened my skin into an impenetrable shell. One of the bullets caught me square in the back, throwing me forward as though someone had punched me in my spine, but my magic saved me from being killed. The blow still hurt—the force of the bullet was hard enough to bruise my back and ribs and make breathing uncomfortable—but I ignored the pain and staggered forward.

  Shouts rose behind me, and more bullets whizzed through the air, plowing into the crates and boxes as I ran past them, but I kept my legs churning and my gaze locked on the door at the end of the warehouse. I needed to get out of here, and not just so I wouldn’t get killed. I needed to warn Finn and the others about Deirdre, Tucker, and everything he’d said. But first, I had to survive this.

  A lone giant was standing by the door, the guy who’d been recording me. He was still holding his phone, and he fumbled for the gun i
n his shoulder holster. Something silver glinted in my field of vision, and I veered over to a worktable, snatching up a wrench. The man yanked his gun free and raised it to fire at me, but I was faster, and I cracked the wrench across his face before he could pull the trigger. He screamed and dropped to the ground, losing his grip on his gun and his phone.

  I stopped long enough to drop the wrench and scoop up his gun and phone from the floor, then slammed my shoulder into the door, stumbled out of the warehouse, and sprinted into the dark night.

  30

  Hide-and-seek had always been one of my favorite games as a kid, mainly because I’d always had the patience to wait out whoever was looking for me and slip away to a new spot when their back was turned.

  As an assassin, it wasn’t so much a game as it was a necessary survival skill.

  The good thing about being trapped in a shipping yard at night was that there were a lot of places to hide.

  The bad thing was that Tucker had brought a whole lot of men with him.

  Several giants had been guarding the perimeter, and the gunshots sent all of them racing toward the warehouse, their own guns drawn, ready to shoot any shadow that moved. The snow had stopped while I was in the warehouse, and the moon was now shining big and bright in the sky. I slipped into the closest patch of shadows and hurried down a row of metal containers as fast as I could, kicking up sprays of snow.

  I came to a corridor in the containers, cut to my right, then right again, heading back in the direction I’d just come from, hugging the sides of the containers to hide my tracks as best I could. Going back to the warehouse was dangerous, but there were two more things I needed to do: find out as much as I could about Tucker’s operation, and make sure that Deirdre was dead.

  Less than a minute later, I was back at the front of the containers, peering over at the warehouse. I stopped long enough to fiddle with the guy’s cell phone, setting it to video mode. Then I found a small crack to hide in, worming my way in between two shipping containers. My hidey hole was cloaked in shadows but still gave me a clear view of the warehouse.