Tangled Threads

9

Vinnie looked at me a second more, then bolted out of his chair and headed for the hallway that led into the front part of the house. I sighed. As much as I liked the fact that the mere mention of my assassin name was enough to inspire abject terror in people, it was inconvenient right now. Because I needed to talk to Vinnie, not kill him. Not yet anyway.

But Vinnie didn’t get far. By that point, Finn had finished his coffee run and was strolling back down the hallway, a mug of his steaming chicory brew in his left hand. He saw Vinnie heading toward him, sighed, and reached around behind his back with his right hand. Finn came up with a gun, which he leveled at Vinnie’s head.

The Ice elemental froze in the doorway.

“Why don’t you be a good boy, Vinnie, and go sit down,” Finn said in a pleasant voice before taking a sip of his coffee. His eyes never left the other man, and his gun never wavered. Finn could be a badass when he had to, just like me.

Xavier got to his feet, walked over, and clamped his hand on Vinnie’s shoulder, as a little added incentive. “If we wanted you dead, Vinnie, we would have left you in the sandbox. Relax, man. Nobody here is going to hurt you.”

The giant didn’t add the not yet part. He didn’t have to.

Xavier maneuvered Vinnie back over to his original chair. The Ice elemental sank into the padded seat, a dazed expression on his face. Xavier hovered over his shoulder, in case he decided to run again.

“You’re the Spider. The Spider,” Vinnie muttered, his eyes flicking back to me.

“That’s my name,” I drawled.

He leaned forward and buried his head in his hands. Bits of golden sand fell out of his dirty brown hair and glinted on the floor. “Dead. I’m so dead. You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? That’s why you brought me here. That’s why you healed me. To question me before you kill me.”

Admittedly, that had been my first plan, but now I was reconsidering things. Even assassins could be swayed from time to time.

I tilted my head to one side and gave him a thoughtful look. “Not necessarily. What I really want to know about right now is your little girl.”

Vinnie raised his head out of his hands and looked at me. “Natasha?”

I nodded. “Natasha. Tell me about her.”

The Ice elemental shifted in his chair. “You can do whatever you want to me. I know that I deserve it, for spying on Roslyn like I did, for setting you up like I did. But please, leave Natasha out of it. Please. I’ll do anything you want, tell you anything you want, give you anything you want, if you’ll just let her go.”

I shook my head. “I hate to disappoint you, Vinnie, but I don’t have your daughter. I have no idea where Natasha is.”

Vinnie’s face fell. “But you — you killed those men at the park. The giants. I saw you do it. And you brought me here, you healed me. Surely, you must have Natasha here too.”

“I’m sorry,” I said and meant it. “But we just found you. We didn’t get your daughter as well. Given what I heard the men in the park say, I’m pretty sure that Mab has her now.”

Vinnie closed his eyes. His face took on a greenish tint, and a tremor shook his body. He ran a hand through his hair. More sand fell out of his dark locks and dusted the salon floor. After a moment, Vinnie put his face down in his hands again. His shoulders shook, and even though I couldn’t see them, I knew that tears ran down his face. He tried to muffle a sob and couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

Nobody spoke, and the only sound was Vinnie’s low, anguished cries.

“Gin?” Roslyn finally asked in a soft voice.

I glanced over at the vampire. She looked so cool, calm, and professional in her suit, but that wasn’t the image of her I was really seeing. Instead, I flashed back to that night at Slater’s cabin when I’d found her beaten and tied down to the giant’s bed, about to be raped and murdered. All of that had been horrible enough for Roslyn, a former hooker who knew what the score was and just how twisted things could get in Ashland. I could only imagine the damage that sort of thing would do to an innocent young girl like Natasha.

“Gin?” This time, Jo-Jo was the one who murmured my name.

Gin. The shortened, bastardized version of my real name, the one I’d adopted for myself so many years ago when Fletcher had first taken me in. Three letters, one syllable. A simple name. But now, somehow, full of so many questions, so many things asked, and so much hanging in the balance — including Natasha’s life.

I sighed and nodded at the other two women.

Then I leaned forward and put my hand on Vinnie’s shaking shoulder. “Vinnie, I know that you’re upset right now. That you’ve been through a lot, but I need you to focus for a little while longer. Do you think you can do that?”

I didn’t know if it was fear of me or something else, but Vinnie flinched at my touch. I dropped my hand, wondering if he’d even heard me. But after a moment, his shoulders quit shaking. He wiped the tears out of his eyes and slowly raised and nodded his head.

“Good,” I said. “Now, I want you to think back. This new club that Mab’s opening, the one the vampire said that Natasha could be the star of. Did you hear the men say anything else about it? Where it was going to be? When it was going to open? Anything at all?”

“Why do you care?” Vinnie said. “She’s not your daughter. You don’t even know her — or me.”

No, I didn’t know Vinnie or his daughter. Didn’t know them the least little bit or really care to. But I knew exactly what the Ice elemental was going through right now. All the emotions that he was feeling — and how helpless they all made him.

Instead of telling him that I understood what it was like to lose your family, I just stared at Vinnie, my mouth a flat line in my face. “Humor me.”

Still, something of my pain must have flickered in my eyes, because after a moment, Vinnie slowly nodded his head.

“All right,” he said. “Two nights after LaFleur first approached me, she told me to meet her at Underwood’s before my shift started. She was there eating dinner with a couple of giants, Mab Monroe, and Jonah McAllister.”

Underwood’s was one of Ashland’s most exclusive restaurants — a place that Mab liked to frequent, along with her lawyer, Jonah McAllister. Someone else I’d been having problems with recently.

“Anyway, I went inside, but LaFleur didn’t want to see me right away, so I had to hang out by the bar for a while. But their table was close by, and I heard them talking. It’s true. Mab is opening up her own nightclub. Some kind of underground place where anything goes—anything. Kids, cutting up women, whatever sick things that people would pay for. Mab kept saying how it was time for Northern Aggression to disappear — for good.”

My gaze cut to Roslyn. The vampire sat on the couch, a hard look on her face, but I could see the worry flickering in her eyes. Northern Aggression was her livelihood, the way that she supported herself, her sister, Lisa, and young niece, Catherine, the way that Roslyn was providing a better life for them. Not to mention all the people who worked for her. All the vamps who might be hooking on the streets in the midst of all the dangers connected with that profession in Ashland, instead of being in the safer environment that Roslyn provided.

It wasn’t hard to realize what Mab’s reasoning was. Roslyn was at the center of Elliot Slater’s death, and the press has painted her as the tragic victim, the way that she really was. All that meant that the Fire elemental couldn’t touch Roslyn right now, not with the Ashland news media still focused on the incident. It would just be too messy, even for Mab, especially given the fact that she also had me, the Spider, to deal with. So the Fire elemental had decided to go after Roslyn another way — by destroying her business. And Vinnie and Natasha had been caught in the middle of it all.

“So you don’t know where the club might be?” I asked Vinnie.

The Ice elemental shook his head. “No. Only that Mab plans to start it soon. From the way things sounded, she’s hired LaFleur to run it, as well as oversee her men.”

So LaFleur wasn’t just in Ashland to find and kill me. It looked as though the other assassin was also coming on board as Mab’s newest top lieutenant — a position formerly held by the late, unlamented Elliot Slater.

“Finn?” I asked.

My foster brother leaned against one of the salon walls. He’d put his gun away, but he was still sipping his coffee. The warm, fragrant, chicory blend drifted over to me.

I thought of his old man then and how he’d helped people on the sly for years, even when he was working as the assassin the Tin Man. My mind had already been made up, of course, but thinking of Fletcher comforted me. I could almost see him behind the counter at the Pork Pit, nodding his head in approval of what I was about to do.

“Yeah?” Finn asked.

“Start digging and see what you can find out about this new nightclub. The name, where it might be located, anything useful.”

If there was anyone who could ferret out the information in a hurry, it was Finn. In addition to his banking skills, he also had a network of anonymous spies and sources that any clandestine agency would be proud of. And if his spies couldn’t find something out for him, Finn was more than capable of hacking into whatever computer system contained the knowledge he needed.

Finn nodded. “I’m on it.”

I turned to look at Roslyn and Xavier. “You two need to be extremely careful right now. We know about Vinnie, but there’s no telling who else Mab and LaFleur might have bribed on your staff. You need to discreetly nose around and figure out who you can trust and who you can’t.”

Roslyn and Xavier both nodded.

“Don’t worry, Gin,” Roslyn said. “After what Elliot Slater did to me, anybody who’s working on the sly for Mab is getting booted out on her ass.”

Next, I looked at Jo-Jo. “You know that Vinnie’s going to need a place to stay out of sight until we can get this thing sorted out.”

The dwarf smiled at me, the lines deepening on her middle-aged face. “It’s a good thing that I’ve got plenty of extra bedrooms then, isn’t it?”

Vinnie glanced at me, then the others. “What’s going on? What are you all talking about?”

I stared at him. “I’m talking about you staying here where you’ll be safe, Vinnie. I’m talking about getting you out from under Mab’s and LaFleur’s heavy thumbs. I’m talking about rescuing your daughter from whatever hellhole Mab has got her stashed in. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Vinnie’s mouth fell open in shock. He blinked several times, as though he was thinking about speaking but the words just wouldn’t come to him.

“Do you want me to do that?” I asked. “Do you want me to find your daughter? Because I was under the impression that you cared about her — a lot.”

“You — you would do that for me? Try to find Natasha?” Hope brightened Vinnie’s pale blue gaze.

Hope. An emotion that always kept suckering me in, time after time, despite my supposed retirement from the assassin business. Hope. The one thing that always seemed to get me into more trouble than just killing people for money ever had. Ah, hope. Sometimes, I really hated it.

“Yes.”

Vinnie blinked again, and suspicion darkened his eyes. “But why would you do that? Nobody does something like that for free, and I–I don’t have any money to pay you. But I can get some,” he hurried to add. “I can get however much you want. I promise you that I can.”

“I don’t want your money, Vinnie. I have more of my own than I can ever spend.”

The Ice elemental frowned at the harsh tone in my voice, but I couldn’t be any gentler with him. I couldn’t get his hopes up any higher than they were. Not until I found Natasha and saw exactly what had been done to her.

“As for why I would do something like this, well, there are a lot of reasons,” I continued. “But mainly, because it seems to be what I do now. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not promising you kittens and rainbows. Mab’s men have had Natasha for hours already. There’s no telling what kind of shape she’s in. Do you understand what that means? How hurt she could be? Inside and out? Even if we find her, even if we get her back, she might never be the same little girl that you knew and loved before. Can you handle that? Can you give her the help that she’s going to need?”

Vinnie closed his eyes a moment, but he slowly nodded.

“All right then,” I said. “I’ll find your daughter. I’ll find Natasha. And if I can’t do that or if she’s already dead when I get to her, then I promise you one thing — that the people who took her will wish for their own deaths long before I am through with them. How does that sound to you?”

Vinnie stared at me with his pale blue eyes. Emotions swirled in his gaze. Fear. Grief. Anger. Anguish. Worry. Slowly, he nodded his head once more.

“Good,” I said. “Then we have a deal.”