Well, that made two of us who were ill at ease, since I would have much preferred to have been killing him right now. If I thought I could have gotten away with it, I would have lured Vaughn to some dark corner and strangled him with his own tie. No muss, no fuss, no blood on my clothes. I’d even gone so far as to propose the idea to Fletcher on the ride over here, but he’d shot me down the way I knew he would. Even I would admit that it wasn’t the smartest plan, but taking Vaughn out as quickly as I could had its appeal.
Our target had been on Dawson’s guest list because he’d done some work on buildings at the dwarf’s coal mines, and also on his mansion, and he was the reason that Fletcher and I were here. Fletcher wanted to check out Vaughn’s security—or lack thereof—in person before we moved on to the next phase of the job.
Unlike some of the other movers and shakers, Vaughn hadn’t brought any bodyguards along with him. In fact, according to what Fletcher had been able to uncover, except for a few guards at his estate and a couple more who served as drivers, Vaughn didn’t employ any other giants specifically to protect him.
Then again, he didn’t need to, given his Stone magic.
Still dispensing glasses of champagne, I maneuvered through the crowd and over to Vaughn’s corner of the room until I was close enough to feel the magic emanating off him. Stone elementals were fairly rare, but Vaughn had the more common elemental trait of constantly giving off invisible waves of magic, even when he wasn’t using his power. In his case, a sense of solidness continually rippled off his body, as though his muscles and bones were encased in cement, instead of just skin, and your hand would shatter if you tried to punch him in the jaw.
Besides Vaughn’s abuse of Charlotte, his magic was the other most troubling thing about him and the one that could be the most dangerous when I finally went in for the kill. Vaughn wasn’t the strongest elemental I’d ever encountered, but it felt like he had a decent amount of power, more than enough to make anyone think twice about messing with him. I’d have to put him down quickly when we had our inevitable confrontation—
Vaughn’s phone chirped. He pulled the device out of his jacket, stared at the screen, and frowned. Then he tucked the phone away, excused himself from the woman he’d been talking to, and strode out of the room. I wondered what could be so important that would make Vaughn leave the party. Well, I was going to find out.
I glanced over at Fletcher, who was whipping together a raspberry sauce to top the molten dark chocolate soufflés that he’d prepared earlier. I tipped my head at Vaughn’s retreating figure, and Fletcher gave me a tiny nod, telling me to go ahead. He knew as well as I did that any information we could gather about Vaughn might be useful in plotting his death.
I moved through the crowd, passing out glass after glass of champagne. Elliot Slater had already diminished most of my supply, so it didn’t take long. When my tray was empty, I headed toward the open double doors, as though I were going to the kitchen to replenish my stock of bubbly. I might do that . . . eventually. But right now, I was much more interested in what Vaughn was up to.
I glanced around to make sure that no one was watching me, then slipped out of the dining room and followed my target.
• • •
Cesar Vaughn strode through the halls of Tobias Dawson’s mansion like it was his own. His strides were long and purposeful, indicating that he knew exactly where he was going. I wondered whom he might be meeting. A business associate to negotiate a hush-hush deal? A rival he wanted to warn away from a potential project? A secret lover? It could be anyone.
Vaughn rounded a corner and disappeared from sight. I hurried after him—
“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”
I whipped around at the sound of the voice behind me.
A woman dressed in the same tuxedo clothes that I wore strode down the hallway toward me. She clutched a clipboard in one hand, while a headset arced across her head like a plastic crown, unsuccessfully trying to flatten her frizzy black curls. Meredith Ruiz, the event planner for tonight’s dinner and many others that I’d worked. She stopped in front of me and straightened up to her full height, which was a few inches short of five feet, since she was a dwarf.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Meredith snapped.
I gave her my best, most innocent, and most clueless smile and held up my empty tray like a shield in front of me. Too bad the metal wouldn’t actually protect me from her wrath. “I was headed to the kitchen to get some more champagne. Thirsty crowd tonight.”
Her brown eyes narrowed, sizing me up, but I kept right on smiling at her, as if I were doing absolutely no wrong instead of being up to absolutely no good.
“Well, the kitchen’s the other way,” Meredith said. “Come on. I’ll take you there.”
I glanced over my shoulder, but Vaughn was long gone. I bit back a curse. Of course he was. But that was just luck for you. A capricious mistress at best, one who would give you a break every now and then but mostly just screwed you over time and time again. My bad luck was one of the most frustrating things about being an assassin. Because no matter how many times I reviewed someone’s file, no matter how much I planned, no matter how careful I was, something inevitably came up that interrupted my schemes. Like a nosy event planner appearing at exactly the wrong moment.
“Come on,” Meredith said, gesturing with her hand. “This way. Let’s go.”
“What’s the rush?” I asked, still playing dumb and innocent.
She snorted. “You had the right idea to go get more champagne. Believe me when I tell you that you do not want these folks to be thirsty—or sober.”
She clamped her hand on my arm and started dragging me down the hallway. An easy thing for her to do, given her dwarven strength. My hands tightened around my tray, and I considered bashing her over the head with it. But the flimsy metal wouldn’t put so much as a dent in her thick skull. Besides, she wasn’t my target, and collateral damage was something that Fletcher had taught me to avoid at all costs.
“Something wrong?” Meredith barked.
There was nothing I could do. Not without arousing even more of her suspicions, so I shook my head and let her march me down the hall in the opposite direction from Vaughn.
• • •
Meredith led me to the far side of the mansion where the kitchen was. That was bad enough, but she also watched while one of the wine stewards poured several fresh glasses of champagne and arranged them on my tray.
“You take that straight back to the dining room,” she barked when the steward had finished. “And don’t even think about stealing a glass for yourself. You’re here to work. Not booze it up.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I drawled, grabbing the tray and hurrying away from her.
The whole thing only took five minutes, but that was enough time for me to completely lose track of Vaughn. I made it back to the spot where I’d last seen him and looked up and down the hallway, which was empty. I bit back another curse. Where had he gone?
I reined in my anger and thought about the floor plans for Dawson’s mansion that Fletcher and I had reviewed earlier today. Vaughn had been moving down this hallway toward the west wing. If he was hooking up with a lover, there were plenty of bedrooms, sitting areas, and other secluded corners where a pair of paramours could meet and get down and dirty with each other. But Vaughn didn’t strike me as the kind of guy to wander off and engage in a quickie, especially not at a business dinner. He was too solid, too sensible for that sort of thing. So whom could he be meeting, and where would they go? It had to be something important, something serious, for him to slip out of Dawson’s soiree.
The library, I thought. That was the only other room in this part of the mansion where folks might have a quiet discussion that they wanted to go unnoticed by everyone else.
So I headed in that direction, careful to keep out of sight of the giants roaming the hallways. Like Vaughn, Tobias Dawson didn’t have all that many guards, but I didn’t wa
nt one to spot me and wonder what I was doing so far away from the dining room—or, worse, call for backup.
I made it to the library without any problems, although I was faced with one the second I got there: the double doors were closed.
I slowly, carefully, quietly tried the brass knobs, which were shaped like bison heads, but both doors were locked from the inside. Faint murmurs sounded on the other side of the heavy wood, and I was willing to bet that at least one of the folks in there was Vaughn. I wanted to see what he was up to, but I couldn’t just barge in. Even if the doors hadn’t been locked, my ditzy-waitress act wouldn’t fly here, and that would be a one-way ticket to getting dead.
Yep, my bad luck was out in full force, and she was being a real bitch tonight.
I stood there, fuming for a few seconds, before I forced myself to dampen my frustration. I thought about the mansion’s floor plans again. But I didn’t remember there being any other entrance to the library, although there were several windows set into the back of the room—
A smile curved my lips. Windows. Of course.
Still carrying my tray of champagne, I hurried away from the doors and into the hallway that ran parallel to the library. A large window was at the end of the corridor. Perfect.
I put my tray down on the floor behind a table that was shaped like an oversize barrel, hoping that no one would notice it sitting there in the shadows. Then I opened the window and stuck my head outside.
The dining room and the library were both on the third floor, but for once, I was in luck, because a ledge ran beneath the window and continued on the entire length of the mansion. I calculated the distance from this window over to the next set, the ones in the library.
It looked to be about fifty feet over to those windows and fifty feet down to the ground below. A troubling distance. If I slipped and fell, I might not have enough time to reach for my Stone magic to harden my skin before I hit the ground. If that happened, I’d break at least a few bones, if not my neck outright. And moaning and groaning from the pain would be a quick way to get noticed—and probably executed—by Dawson’s guards.
Fletcher probably would have told me to close the window, scurry back to the dining room, and blend in with the rest of the servers. That this was a risky idea at best and a fatal one at worst. But it was worth the danger to see whom Vaughn was talking to. Besides, at least this way, I’d feel like I was actually doing something to help Charlotte, instead of just standing around, twiddling my thumbs, and watching Vaughn.
So I hoisted myself up and out the window.
Holding on to the sill, I scraped my boots down the stone until my toes touched the ledge, which was about three feet below the window. I moved to my left a few inches and then to my right, carefully testing my balance. The ledge was thin, no more than two inches wide and more of a pretty decoration than anything else, but it was sturdy enough to hold my weight. So I flattened my body against the wall, let go of the sill, and started tiptoeing toward my destination.
It was hard hugging the side of the mansion, especially since my fingers had nothing to grip but pitted stone. But I decided not to use my Stone magic to help me hold on. Vaughn might sense it, even through the thick walls, and I didn’t want to give him any clue that I was watching him.
Inch by inch, foot by foot, I sidled closer to the library windows, crawling my fingers over the stone and scooting my toes along the ledge. It was after eight now. A thunderstorm was blowing in from the west, and the hot summer wind whipped and howled around me, as jagged streaks of lightning danced across the darkening sky. I had a sudden image of a white fork bolting down from the thick, blue-gray clouds and frying me on the spot, leaving nothing behind but the black, smoking outline of my body on the wall, like a cartoon character.
I grimaced. Maybe this hadn’t been quite as brilliant a plan as I’d thought. But I was more than halfway there, so I edged onward.
Finally, I made it over to the library windows. Once again, I was surprised with a bit of good luck in that the windows had been cracked open, probably to let some cool air from the approaching storm blow into the room. I hooked my arms over one of the black shutters so I would have a better grip and to take some of the pressure off my legs. When I felt steady enough, I peered around the edge of the shutter and in through the windows.
The library had the same rustic feel as the rest of the mansion, with lots of barrels, bison heads, and antlers decorating everything from the tables to the chairs to the light fixtures overhead. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that Dawson was a cowboy instead of a miner. As expected, shelves filled with expensive-looking leather-bound books lined two of the walls, but my attention was drawn to the center of the room, where Vaughn was standing in front of an ornate wood-and-brass desk.
I hadn’t expected Vaughn to be alone, but I was mildly surprised to see his son, Sebastian, standing by his side. Sebastian’s name was on the guest list, but I hadn’t spotted him in the dining room. Perhaps he’d come straight here instead of stopping off for a drink.
Either way, the Vaughns looked like they were facing a firing squad. Both were stretched up to their full six-foot heights, their bodies stiff and tight with tension, their wary eyes fixed on someone sitting in the dark green leather chair behind the desk.
Tobias Dawson lounged on a sofa off to one side of the room, along with Elliot Slater. They must have left the dining room when I’d taken my forced detour to the kitchen. Both men looked far more relaxed than the Vaughns did.
“You can imagine my concern,” a low, smoky feminine voice drifted out the cracked windows to me.
Vaughn dry-washed his hands a few times before he realized what he was doing. His hands stilled, and he clasped his fingers together to keep himself from repeating the nervous, worried motion. Sebastian’s dark eyes flitted to his father, but that was his only reaction.
“I do understand your concern,” Vaughn said, his voice stronger than I thought it would be, given his obvious apprehension. “But as I’ve told you repeatedly, I have no idea what happened. I’ve been over everything a dozen times—the materials, the work history, even the crew that did the job—and I can’t find anything wrong. Not one single thing. I don’t know why that terrace collapsed.”
My eyes narrowed. They were talking about the accident at the restaurant, the one that had killed and injured so many people. The most likely reason that someone wanted Vaughn dead.
“Does it really matter why?” the woman asked.
Vaughn gave her a helpless look.
“Of course not,” she answered her own question. “All that does matter is that it did happen. And now we need to find someone to blame for it.”
For a moment, Vaughn’s gaze cut to his son, but no one else seemed to notice. If Vaughn was capable of abusing his own daughter, I had no doubt that he would throw Sebastian to the wolves in front of him in order to save his own skin.
So he was a coward too. Another thing that made me want to kill him.
A rustle of silk sounded, and the woman in the chair gracefully rose to her feet. She wore a deep emerald-green gown that clung to her curves in all the right places, and a bit of gold glinted around her neck.
Vaughn and Sebastian both swallowed, as if they were afraid that the woman was going to snap her fingers and kill them on the spot. I wondered whom they could be more scared of than Slater, but I got my answer a moment later. The woman turned toward the windows, and I finally got a good look at her face.
Her coppery hair was smoothed back into a sleek bun, the bright color a stark contrast to the absolute blackness of her eyes. Her skin was pale and luminous, dotted here and there with faint freckles above the generous swell of her décolletage. But my gaze locked onto the necklace that ringed her throat: several dozen wavy golden rays with a large ruby set in the middle of the design. I recognized it—and her—immediately.
A sunburst, the symbol for fire, the personal rune of Mab Monroe.
5
Mab paused, almost as if she were posing to let everyone in the room get a good look at her in all her glory. Then she did the worst thing possible.
She walked toward the windows.
Mab moved closer and closer to the glass, her green gown rippling out like water around her, the fabric swirling away and then settling back against her body, every fold and drape perfectly in place once more. She walked slowly, carefully, deliberately, as though every step were a great debate of some sort—probably about whether Cesar and Sebastian lived or died.
And me too if she spotted me.
I froze, scarcely daring to breathe, but Mab kept coming and coming, heading right toward the windows—and me. Five more feet, and she’d see me hanging on to the shutter. It was no longer a matter of if she noticed me but when. Four feet . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .
Mab stopped.
She clasped her hands behind her back and peered straight out through the glass, her black eyes scanning the ominous clouds and the lightning that was still crackling in the distance.
I stayed exactly where I was, hanging on to the shutter, my toes perched on the ledge below the windows, not moving so much as a single muscle, not wanting to do anything that might catch her eye. I wouldn’t have even breathed if I could have managed it.
Because if Mab noticed me, if she realized that I was eavesdropping, she would raise her hands and incinerate me with her Fire magic. Everyone knew that Mab was the most powerful person in Ashland. Some even said that she was the strongest elemental born in the last five hundred years. I might have scoffed at the rumors before but not now—because I could feel exactly how powerful she really was.
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