I skimmed through the papers and let out a low whistle. “He’s one sneaky, black-hearted son of a bitch, isn’t he?”
Finn nodded. “You have to admire that about him. It’s a scheme that even I could be proud of. In fact, I may tuck this one into my back pocket for a rainy day.”
“I wonder how long it was going on. Do you think he started before or after I killed Mab?”
He shrugged. “If I had to guess, I would say before. He would have had to in order to accumulate what he has. If I were him, though, I would have left Ashland the second Mab died. Not hung around for all these months. But the real question now is, how do you want to handle him?”
“Oh,” I said. “I know exactly what I want to do about him.”
Finn grinned. “That’s the coldhearted girl I know and love.”
“You have no idea.”
“When?” he asked.
“Tonight,” I said. “Let’s go get the bastard tonight.”
* * *
I sat in the dark and waited for my nemesis to come home.
According to the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner, it was almost midnight. I wondered what he was doing out so late. If I were him, I would have been packing my bags and getting out of town. But he was arrogant. Always had been, always would be. Oh, he’d probably been on edge these past few days, wondering if anyone would be able to trace Clementine and her crew back to him. But given that a week had passed and no one had come knocking on his door, he probably thought that he was finally in the free and clear.
I was going to enjoy showing him just how wrong he was.
It had been ridiculously easy slipping onto his sprawling Northtown estate. There were no giants roaming through the woods, no guard dogs to bark at the first hint of danger, no cameras zooming from one side of the lawn to the other. He didn’t even have a decent security system on the house itself. No bulletproof glass, no iron bars over the windows, no reinforced silverstone doors. The pitiful locks that he did have on the doors were hardly worth the trouble of making a couple of Ice picks to jimmy them open with.
I suppose he thought that the stone wall and iron gate out front would deter most folks. Well, that and who he used to work for—but not me.
After I’d opened one of the doors, I’d gone from room to room to room, looking at all of his things, but the house was as cold and impersonal as he was. Oh, all of the furnishings were the absolute best that money could buy: antique desks and chairs, delicate china in stained-glass cabinets, expensive appliances done in polished chrome. But most of the furniture looked like it had never even been sat on, and there hadn’t been any human touches in the house—no odd knickknacks, no stacks of books, no piles of magazines. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d been at Mab’s beck and call so long he probably hadn’t spent much time in his own house.
The only room that looked remotely lived in had been the master bathroom, and that was only because of all the beauty products inside. They were everywhere—in the medicine cabinet, clustered on the sink, even lined up like plastic soldiers around the rim of the sunken bathtub. Jo-Jo didn’t have as many anti-aging creams, gels, and lotions in her beauty salon as he did in his bathroom. Then again, that didn’t surprise me either. Not knowing what I did about him. He might have been a lackey, but he was a vain one at that.
The only other oddity I’d noticed had been all the mirrors. There was one on just about every wall, as though this was some sort of circus fun house instead of an upscale mansion. I wondered what exactly he saw when he peered into the glass. If he saw the smooth, confident figure he always tried to present to the world or the heartless monster lurking underneath that I did, maybe even if he saw Mab’s ghost trailing along behind him. But it didn’t much matter in the end. All that really mattered were people’s actions, and he’d doomed himself long ago with his.
Those were my thoughts as I waited in his office. I’d decided to make my approach in here because I’d figured he’d probably stop by for a nightcap before heading to bed. Along with the desk I was sitting at, the other main feature of the room was a mahogany wet bar. Behind it perched a cabinet that was stocked with booze. A snifter and a bottle of brandy had been placed in the center of the bar, perpetually on call for their owner to come home and imbibe. I wondered how many drinks he’d had since that night at the museum—and if they’d been downed to calm shaking nerves or to celebrate his actions seemingly going undetected.
I might ask him—before the end.
Outside, a car churned across the crushed-shell driveway, and a pair of headlights sliced across the glass doors behind me that led out to a patio in the front yard. But I stayed where I was at his desk and waited, just waited.
Two minutes later, a key turned in the front-door lock, and a couple of footsteps sounded, scraping repeatedly across the rug inside the door. I admired his cleanliness, if nothing else. Home, sweet home.
He shut and locked the front door behind him, then made other noises as he moved through the house. The soft rustle of fabric as he shrugged out of his suit jacket. The clatter of his keys as he tossed them into a bowl on a table. The dull clang of his umbrella as he slid it into a brass tub. That was the other thing I’d noticed as I’d searched the house: he was very meticulous. Everything had a place, and there was a place for everything. Even Finn would have been envious of his walk-in closet, where the suits, shirts, ties, socks, and shoes were sorted by size and color.
It took him longer than I thought it would to go through his routines and make his way to the office, but I’m nothing if not patient, and he got here eventually. One light turned on in the hallway, perfectly outlining his trim silhouette. If I’d bothered to bring a gun, I could have easily put three bullets in his chest from here. But that would have been a waste of lead. Besides, I needed to talk to him first.
He stepped into the office and started to walk over to the light switch on the wall, but I picked up the remote I’d found earlier and hit a button.
The crystal chandelier above my head blazed with light. A startled gasp escaped his lips, and he whirled around. His eyes widened when he realized there was someone in his house—and that someone was me. His mouth dropped open, although the rest of his tight features remained where they were, like usual.
“Hello, Jonah,” I said.
31
Jonah McAllister blinked and blinked, as if he couldn’t quite believe that I was sitting in his office—in his own chair, no less.
I gave him a lazy grin, tilted back the chair, and propped my boots up on top of the desk. My shoes were not particularly clean, and McAllister’s left eye twitched with fury as he realized that I was mucking up his pristine workspace. I crossed one leg on top of the other and leaned back a little farther, getting even more comfortable in his chair.
“What are you doing in my house?” he finally demanded.
“What?” I asked. “No ‘Hello, Ms. Blanco’? No, ‘You’re looking well this evening’? Why, Jonah, wherever are your manners? I bet you were never this rude to Mab.”
The lawyer’s eye twitched again, but he stayed by the wall. I could almost see the wheels turning in his mind as he debated making a break for the door. Couldn’t blame him for that. Late-night visits from the Spider tended to involve only one thing: blood, and a lot of it.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “You locked the front door behind you, remember? And I have no doubt that I can run faster than you.”
He stared at me for several moments. Thinking.
“You’re right. But since we both know that you’re going to kill me, will you at least allow the condemned man one last drink?”
I gestured at the wet bar. “Be my guest.”
McAllister moved behind the bar, his body stiff with tension, but he kept sneaking glances at me, wondering how he could get the upper hand and get out of this alive. Fool. He should have known by now it was far, far too late for that.
McAllister poured himself a brandy. I ha
d to hand it to him, his fingers didn’t shake at all as he fixed the drink. Then again, he’d worked for Mab for years. His nerves were probably as good as mine were—maybe even better.
McAllister carefully sipped the brandy, savoring each and every mouthful, instead of slugging it down the way I thought he might. It took him a few minutes, but he finished that first brandy and poured himself another one, adding more amber liquor to the snifter this time around. I wondered if he thought getting drunk would ease the pain of what I was about to do to him. Not the worst strategy, but it wasn’t going to help him. Not tonight.
“What do you want?” he finally asked. “Or are you just here to kill me?”
“Well, as tempting as that thought is, I thought we might talk first,” I said. “Chitchat a little bit.”
He gave me a blank look. “And what do you think that we would have to talk about?”
Instead of answering his question, I asked one of my own. “You didn’t really think you’d get away with it, did you?”
He tensed before he could stop himself. “And just what do you think it is that I’ve gotten away with?”
“Nothing much,” I drawled. “Just hiring Clementine and her crew to rob the Briartop museum.”
His eye twitched again, his shoulders shot up to his ears, and his lips pressed together so hard that they disappeared into the rest of his face. For a moment, I thought he might try to deny it, but McAllister had an entirely different reaction: he laughed.
He choked on that first laugh, trying to smother the harsh, barking sound, but he couldn’t, and after a moment, he quit trying. It was like that one sound opened the floodgates of his emotions, because he just kept right on laughing, louder and louder, harder and harder, until tears streamed down his cheeks and he was almost bent over double from the force of his own mirthless chuckles.
I sat there and waited until he’d calmed down. It didn’t take long. McAllister was a lawyer after all, used to tense, high-pressure situations. It didn’t get any more tense or high-pressure than having an assassin appear in your office late at night.
“Forgive me,” Jonah said, pulling a white silk handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his blue suit jacket and dabbing away his hysterical tears. “It takes a lot to surprise me, but you managed to do it. In fact, you’ve surprised me quite a bit since we first met last year, Ms. Blanco.”
“Please. Let’s not stand on formality tonight. Call me Gin.”
“Very well, Gin,” Jonah said. “As I said, it takes a lot to surprise me. I’ve been expecting you to be waiting for me in here for a long while now.”
I shrugged. “I’ve been busy. Although you have been on my to-do list for quite some time.”
He shrugged back.
We stared at each other, jaws tight, lips flat, eyes cold.
Finally, he sighed. “How did you figure it out? At least tell me that much.”
“You made a couple of mistakes. Small things, really, but they added up to point the finger in your direction.”
“Like what?” he asked, seeming to be genuinely interested in what I had to say. I supposed there really was a first time for everything.
“Your first mistake was when you confronted Clementine right after she took everyone hostage. It wasn’t something I expected from you.”
He raised an eyebrow, although the rest of his face didn’t move with it. “How so?”
“One thing I admire about you, Jonah, is your sense of self-preservation,” I said. “So why in the world would you confront a bunch of giants with guns? Oh, I could imagine you doing it if Mab had still been alive. You would have had to put on an indignant show to keep her from roasting you because someone ruined her exhibit. But she’s dead, so why not let the museum director huff and puff instead? But no, you immediately shoved your way to the front of the crowd and faced down Clementine all by your lonesome. It just didn’t make any sense.”
“That’s it?” he asked. “That’s what you based your grand conclusion on?”
“Oh, no. There’s more.”
McAllister gestured with his brandy, graciously telling me to continue.
“Then there was the fact that Clementine didn’t shoot you for standing up to her. Instead, she just slapped you around a little bit. It didn’t make any sense that she wouldn’t kill you, especially since I’d heard her talk about shooting someone in the face like it was no more important than getting her nails done. Sure, she wanted to keep the hostages calm, but you directly challenged her. She should have put you down just for that.”
“So she didn’t shoot me. So what?”
“So why didn’t she just go ahead and kill you and make everyone else fall into line that much quicker? There was only one reason she wouldn’t: because you were her boss. She wouldn’t kill the person who’d hired her to pull the heist, or she wouldn’t get paid the rest of her fee,” I replied. “You really should have at least let her wing you with a bullet or two. But instead, you got away with only a bitch slap. Now, that seems to be something you excel at, so I didn’t think too much of it at the time. But later on, it was just one more thing that didn’t quite add up.”
He eyed me. “And what were these other things that you found so troublesome?”
“Well, for starters, there was the fact that a woman was murdered—a woman who was wearing the exact same dress as I was,” I said. “That made me think that I was the intended target, which I was. Now, I have more enemies than most, but there were a lot of bad people at the gala. So why come after me and not someone else? Because you knew that I was a threat to your plans to steal Mab’s will. And, well, killing me would have been a nice bonus. You’ve wanted me dead for a long time now, and you saw a chance to finally make it happen at the museum.”
“It would have worked too,” he muttered. “If not for that damn dress.”
This time, I nodded, agreeing with him. “Maybe. Although I imagine you were quite happy when Clementine dumped that body in the rotunda and you thought it was me.”
“Ecstatic, actually. Too bad it didn’t take. It never seems to, with you.”
I grinned. He gave me a sour look, finished off his brandy, and poured himself another one. The first two rounds had already given his cheeks a ruddy flush—or perhaps that was just his anger finally showing through his too-smooth skin.
“Then there was Owen,” I continued. “Since you were in charge of the gala, you knew exactly who was coming. When you saw his name on the guest list, you realized you could force him to help Clementine open the vault. Plus, you would never pass up a chance to hurt my friends and family. No doubt, you told Clementine to kill Owen immediately after he opened the vault for her.”
McAllister shrugged. “You’d taken away my son. So yes, I wanted you dead, but I wanted the rest of your band of miscreants to suffer too. Killing Grayson seemed like an ideal way to do that, and I was going to make it look like he was working with Clementine the whole time. Just think of the problems that would have created for that sister of his. Everyone in Ashland would have been pounding on her door, demanding to know what her brother did with all of that stolen art. It would have been amusing to watch.”
The brandy really must have bolstered his courage, because he was actually bragging—bragging about how he’d planned to hurt the people that I loved. Rage pulsed through my body. It had been bad enough that he’d put Owen in the line of fire, but to frame him after the fact . . . it almost made me rethink my plan for McAllister.
Almost.
“But the most interesting thing is exactly why you hired Clementine and her crew to break into the vault,” I continued. “That’s the really fascinating thing about all of this—what you wanted her to steal.”
I reached down. McAllister tensed, but I wasn’t going for one of my knives. Instead, I pulled the ebony tube out of a pocket on the front of my vest. I set it on the desk and scooted it forward, then turned it so he could see the sunburst rune glinting on the side.
“When I fi
rst went into the vault, I had no idea what Clementine was after,” I said. “There were lots of treasures in there. Art, jewelry, paintings worth tens of millions. But all she wanted—all you wanted—was this. You didn’t want anything else from the museum, not even the jewels that Clementine took from the partygoers. No, all you were after—all you needed—was this one little tube.”
McAllister’s face pinched even tighter than before, the flush in his cheeks taking on a fiery tomato tint, and I could tell that he was struggling to control himself. So I decided to be a good guest and answer his silent questions.
“It took me a few minutes, but I figured out how to open it,” I said. “And I know what’s inside. In fact, I’ve spent the last few days reading and rereading Mab’s will. Quite a bit shorter than I thought it would be. But fascinating all the same for what it says—and what it doesn’t.”
“And what do you think you’ve figured out from it?” he sneered.
“Why you wanted Mab’s will so badly,” I replied. “I must say I’m a little shocked that she didn’t leave you a little something-something for all your years of loyal service. But you aren’t mentioned in the will at all. She didn’t leave you a nickel’s worth of anything. No cash, no land, no personal property. Not even so much as a silverstone pen or a cheap gold watch. No wonder you were so pissed.”
McAllister stared at the tube, his cold, furious gaze locked onto the sunburst rune. “You have no idea what it was like working for her. Being at her beck and call night and day for years—years. Constantly knowing that one wrong word, one wrong move, and she’d kill me with her Fire magic right where I stood with no warning and no sympathy. Mab wasn’t even particularly clever. She was just strong. All that power, all that magic, all that money. She could have done so much with it. But she never could think big enough.”
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