Tangled Threads

4

Since it was less than a week before Christmas, Owen was taking some time off from his various business interests, which meant that he got to sleep in the next morning. But I still had a barbecue restaurant to run, so I slipped out of bed early and took a hot shower.

Owen was still asleep when I finished getting ready. He sprawled face down on the king-size bed, a soft blanket covering his bare back, one strong arm jutting off the mattress into the empty air in front of the nightstand.

I stood there by the bed, staring down at him. Blue-black hair, rough, chiseled features, hard body. Owen Grayson was everything that I’d ever wanted in a lover. Attentive, inventive, skilled, confident. But the strangest thing was that he really seemed to care about me, Gin Blanco. The semiretired assassin known as the Spider.

After we’d finished in the living room, we’d gone into Owen’s bedroom to spend the rest of the night together. Owen had wrapped us both in a fleece blanket, and we’d sat there in front of the crackling fire, talking until the orange-red flames died down to glowing embers. We’d discussed everything from my ongoing war with Mab to my weird relationship with Bria to the new Mercedes that he’d decided to give Eva for Christmas. To my surprise, it felt good to talk to Owen, to just be with him, sex or not.

And it scared the hell out of me.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted that kind of relationship with him. My former lover, Detective Donovan Caine, had burned me a little more than I’d let on to Owen or anyone else. Donovan had just never been able to accept my past as the Spider and all the bad things that I’d done over the years, all the people that I’d killed for money, survival, or something else. No matter how much he might have wanted to be with me.

I didn’t want to look into Owen’s violet eyes one day and see the things that I’d seen in Donovan’s golden gaze. I didn’t want to look at Owen and realize that my bloody past and sharp skills disturbed him the way they had Donovan.

I didn’t want Owen to hate me like Donovan had.

Owen murmured something in his sleep and rolled over onto his back. I hesitated, then bent forward and traced my fingers down the side of his face. A hint of dark stubble pricked my skin, but not in an unpleasant way. Owen leaned into my touch and sighed, as though it comforted him.

I quickly withdrew my hand, not wanting to wake him or think too much about the warm softness that flared in my chest whenever I was near him. A dodged, determined, creeping sort of softness that I was struggling more and more to squash — or at least contain before it infected what little was left of my cold, black heart.

Donovan had hurt me when he’d left Ashland. But losing Owen the same way? For the same reasons? I was beginning to think that might just break me completely.

Still, I stared at Owen a moment more before turning and slipping out of the bedroom.

I spent the day cooking at the Pork Pit, the barbecue restaurant that I operated in downtown Ashland. Then I went home to change and get ready for my evening with Vinnie Volga, the Ice elemental who seemed to be part of whatever trap Mab was baiting for me, for the Spider. Just after nine that night, I pulled my Benz into the parking lot of Northern Aggression.

As its name suggested, the nightclub was located in the heart of Northtown, where it catered to some of Ashland’s wealthiest citizens — or anyone who had enough cash or plastic to pay for the hedonistic delights offered inside. Blood, drugs, sex, smokes, alcohol, and everything in between. You could get it all at Northern Aggression, in whatever quantities or combinations that you wanted, for the right price.

The outside of the club wasn’t much to look at, just another ordinary, warehouse-like building with a sign over the front door, that grayed out and faded into the rest of the immaculate Northtown landscape. If you’d driven by Northern Aggression during the day, you might have thought that the club was some anonymous office full of corporate drones sitting in their tiny cubicles and talking on their headsets.

But at night the place and the people inside it came alive in all sorts of ways.

I parked my Benz in one of the side lots that flanked the building, got out, and headed for the front door. An enormous neon sign hung over the entrance — a giant heart with an arrow through it. Roslyn Phillips’s personal rune and the symbol for her decadent nightclub. The sign glowed red, then yellow, then orange in the night, bathing the dozens of people waiting in line below it in its bright, suggestive light.

Xavier, the guy who was Roslyn’s main squeeze, stood outside the door, deciding who got into the club and who was left standing out in the cold. The giant bouncer stood roughly seven feet tall, with a strong, muscled body to match. His black eyes and shaved head both gleamed like polished onyx underneath the glare of the neon heart-and-arrow sign. Xavier held a large clipboard in his hands, checking off names on his list and taking the occasional C-note bribe to lift the red velvet rope and allow people to go inside the club.

I strolled to the front of the line, past all the men sporting sharp suits and the women wearing as little as they could bear given the chill in the December air. A few of the women gave me pointed, dirty looks, especially since I wasn’t dressed for a night of clubbing.

Instead of a thigh-high miniskirt or a leather bustier, I wore my usual ensemble — dark jeans, heavy boots, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a black fleece jacket. Since it was almost Christmas, I’d donned one of my more festive T-shirts to celebrate — thick crimson cotton with a giant candy cane in the middle of my chest. The fabric was dark enough that Vinnie Volga’s blood wouldn’t stand out on it — much. Happy holidays.

And, as always, I carried my usual five-point arsenal on me as well. Two silverstone knives up my sleeves, two more in my boots, and one tucked away in the small of my back. Never left home without ’em. Not even if I was supposedly retired these days. So far, this so-called taking it easy had been far more dangerous than being the Spider full-time ever was.

I stepped in front of Xavier. “Hey, there, handsome,” I drawled. “Know where I can find a party tonight?”

Xavier grinned, his white teeth gleaming in his face underneath the burning glow of the neon light. “I thought the party was always wherever you were at, Gin.”

I grinned back at him. “True. But I thought that I’d branch out a little tonight. Can we talk a second?”

I jerked my head at Xavier and walked a few feet away from the front door. The giant followed me. Several people waiting in line let out soft curses, but one look at my cold, hard face and even colder eyes was enough to get them to shut their mouths.

Xavier also glowered and cracked his massive knuckles at the impatient crowd for good measure. Suddenly, nobody was even looking in our direction, much less muttering under their breath about the delay. None of the rich yuppies standing in line wanted to mess with a seven-foot-tall giant. Especially not with Xavier, who also moonlighted as a member of the Ashland Police Department. As fate would have it, he also happened to be my sister, Bria’s, partner. Ah, the irony. Always out to get me.

“Did Finn call you earlier?” I asked the giant in a low voice. “He was supposed to mention that I was coming by tonight to talk to Vinnie.”

Xavier nodded, his face dark and serious. The giant was one of the people who knew that I was the assassin the Spider. A few weeks ago, I’d helped Roslyn Phillips deal with Elliot Slater, the sick, twisted, giant bastard who’d been stalking her. Slater had been working up to raping and killing Roslyn, before she and I had made him dead first. Something that had ensured that Xavier was my friend for life, since he cared about Roslyn more than anything. He realized that talking was probably the last thing that I was going to do with Vinnie, but he didn’t even blink at the subtle threat in my words.

“Yeah,” Xavier said. “Finn called Roslyn earlier and told her about the situation. Finn’s already here, and Roslyn’s inside waiting for you too.”

I hesitated. “How’s she doing?”

Shadows further blackened Xavier’s eyes, and worry tightened his face. “She has good days and bad days, you know? It’s still too soon to tell, I think.”

I still remembered how Roslyn had looked the night that I’d found her tied to a bed at Slater’s mountain mansion. Slater especially liked beating women, and he’d already reduced Roslyn’s beautiful face and body to pulpy mush by the time that I got there. Not to mention the damage that he’d already done to the vampire’s psyche by stalking and terrorizing her beforehand. Roslyn had been bruised, bloody, and utterly broken — and about to be raped by one of Slater’s men. It was a horrible, sickening image that I’d never, ever forget.

I’d killed the man assaulting Roslyn, cut her free, and then used some of Jo-Jo Deveraux’s healing supplies to patch her up enough so she could walk out of Slater’s bedroom. Killing the bastard who’d been about to rape the vampire had been easy. But putting my hands on Roslyn that night, even if it had been only to rub healing ointment on her, had been one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Because I knew that being touched was probably the last thing in the world that Roslyn had wanted then, especially since I was the reason she’d been beaten in the first place. But it had to be done to save her, and I’d made myself do it.

The way that I had so many other cold, black, hard, ugly things over the years.

“And how are you holding up?” I asked Xavier in a soft voice.

The giant gave me a small smile, but it didn’t even come close to reaching his eyes. “Good days and bad days, right along with her.”

I knew about those too, and I put my hand on his arm. Xavier nodded and looked away.

After a moment, Xavier cleared his throat. He stepped back over to the club, lowered the red velvet rope, and gestured for me to go inside. I nodded my thanks and stepped through the door.

It was like walking into another world. While the outside of Northern Aggression might have been bland and featureless, the inside was all rich, elegant decadence. Everything was meant to provide as much visual pleasure as possible, from the bamboo floor, to the crushed red velvet drapes that covered the walls, to the elaborate Ice bar that hugged the dance floor. The men and women who made up the nightclub staff circulated through the crowd, bearing trays filled with chocolate-dipped strawberries, fresh oysters, and tall glasses of chilled champagne. They too wore as little as was legal, showing off their hard bodies and killer curves. Most of them were vampires, all of them were hookers, and every single one wore a necklace with the heart-and-arrow rune dangling from the end of the chain, letting clubgoers know that they were on the menu too.

One waiter put down his tray, took the hand of a giggling woman, and led her toward the stairs that ran up the back wall. The second floor of Northern Aggression featured rooms that could be rented out for however long you wanted, for those who were a bit shy about fucking in the booths or underneath the tables that filled the back of the club.

I skirted around the mass of people writhing on the dance floor to a rocking song by The Pretenders and headed deeper into the club, looking for Finn. After about three minutes, I spotted him sitting with Roslyn Phillips in a booth in the back. Finn was drinking a martini, while a glass of blood sat in front of Roslyn. It took me a minute to maneuver through the thick, gyrating crowd and slide into the opposite side of the booth from them.

Finn’s green eyes took in my jeans, fleece jacket, and T-shirt. “Geez, Gin,” he drawled. “Couldn’t you put on something a little nicer? We are at a club, you know. The finest club in all of Ashland.”

Unlike my casual attire, Finn sported a dapper suit in a smoke gray color with a silver dress shirt and a matching tie. His sharp clothes only made him look that much more handsome, as did his perfectly styled hair. Finnegan Lane didn’t believe in dressing down — ever. He would have happily worn a three-piece suit to bed, if only it wouldn’t have gotten in the way of his nightly seduction of whatever sweet young thing he was currently romancing.

“Sorry,” I said. “Unlike you, I plan on getting my hands dirty before the night is through, along with my clothes. Unless you’d prefer to be the one who talks to Vinnie?”

“Are you kidding? This is a Fiona Fine original suit.” Finn smoothed down his designer tie and shuddered at the thought of blood marring the slick, expensive fabric.

Beside him, Roslyn let out a soft laugh at our bickering. I turned my attention to the vampire.

It always struck me how very beautiful she was. Even in the semidarkness of the club, she was easily the most striking woman here. Her eyes and skin were a rich, toffee color, and her black feathered hair just brushed the edge of her strong jaw. Silver glasses perched on the end of her perfect nose, and she wore a fitted pantsuit in a mint green color that showed off her exceptional figure. Great breasts, flat stomach, toned legs. The vampire had a body that most women would kill for, and she knew how to make the very most of it.

For years Roslyn had worked as a hooker on the mean Southtown streets before saving enough money to open up her own gin joint here at Northern Aggression. The madam had retired from hooking herself and was now strictly in management. She ran her own string of high-end call girls and guys out of the club and made wads of cash doing it. Still, even though she was out of that part of the business, more than a few men and women stared in Roslyn’s direction, hoping to attract her gaze to their own hungry eyes.

I carefully examined her lovely features, but no marks of Slater’s final, vicious attack on her remained, thanks to Jo-Jo Deveraux’s healing magic. But I knew that Roslyn had scars on the inside — raw, ugly, fresh scars that might never, ever heal. Just like the spider runes on my palms would forever remind me of the night that my family had been murdered.

I stared at Roslyn a moment longer before turning and gesturing at the closest waitress. “Gin and tonic. And go easy on the tonic.”

The waitress nodded and moved off into the crowd.

Finn took a drink of his martini. “About time you showed up. I’ve been here almost an hour already.”

I shrugged. “I had to work late at the Pork Pit. We were slammed with party orders.”

A few days before Christmas, and every business in Ashland was rushing to cram in their office party before everyone took off for the holiday. Sophia Deveraux and I had been cooking nonstop today, whipping up dozens of barbecue beef and pork platters, gallons of beans, mounds of French fries, buckets of coleslaw, and more. In addition to serving our regular walk-in customers.

I loved cooking, loved playing with the never-ending combinations of sweet and salty and sour. The simple process of stirring ingredients together to create something new soothed me the way that mixing bright colors would a painter. But as much as I enjoyed cooking and running the restaurant, even I was a little sick right now of peeling potatoes, shredding cabbage, and making vats of Fletcher Lane’s secret barbecue sauce.

The waitress came back with my drink. I tasted the gin, feeling the cold liquor slide down my throat before it started its slow, sweet burn in my stomach.

Finn, Roslyn, and I sipped our drinks. The music of the club thumped around us, and the smell of smoke, sweat, and sex filled the air.

“So,” I said after I’d drained the rest of my gin. “How are you, Roslyn?”

The vampire arched one of her perfect eyebrows. “You’re actually pausing and making small talk first? Instead of immediately demanding to know everything that I know about Vinnie Volga? You’re getting soft in your old age, Gin.”

I winced. I hadn’t always been kind to Roslyn in the past, mainly because I’d been too upset about Fletcher Lane’s murder to cut the vampire much slack. The vamp talking about my being an assassin to the wrong people was one of the things that had led to the old man’s death. But we’d bonded while I’d been plotting on how best to kill Elliot Slater, and I’d started thinking of Roslyn as a friend. I didn’t have many of those, so each one was important to me. Looked like she didn’t feel the same way, though. The knowledge stung a little more than I thought it would. So did the sharp bit of longing that went with it. It wasn’t an emotion I often experienced, mainly because it always made me feel weak and needy — two things that I absolutely hated.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “If you want to get right down to things …”

A small smile lifted Roslyn’s lips. “Relax. I’m just teasing you, Gin.”

Her soft voice somehow made me feel even worse than before.

The vampire took a sip of her blood and leaned back against the booth. “As for how I’m doing, okay, I guess. Still trying to figure things out. Some days, I’m fine. Others, I can’t even breathe. And nightmares. I’m having a lot of nightmares. Most of them involve Slater walking through the front door of the club, grabbing me, and beating me to death on the dance floor.”

Roslyn’s voice was cold, flat, and calm, just the way it had been the day that she’d told me that Slater was stalking her, that the giant was making her pretend to be his girlfriend while he worked himself up to raping and killing her. It made my heart ache for her that much more.

I knew all about nightmares. I’d had more than my share over my years, but especially since Fletcher’s murder a few months ago. Living on the streets, Fletcher taking me in, my earliest days with the old man and Finn. I’d dreamed about all that and more. It was like the old man’s death had opened up a floodgate of emotion deep inside me, one that I could close during the day but still had problems dealing with at night — at least until I woke up in a cold sweat, my mouth open in a silent scream.

“It’ll get better.” An easy lie that I’d told too many times to too many people over the years — especially myself.

“Really?” Roslyn whispered, doubt filling her toffee eyes.

I shrugged. “Well, Slater’s dead and burning in hell right now. He’s never going to bother you again, so it’s not going to get worse. I can promise you that much.”

She gave me another small smile. “I guess that will have to do for now.”

It always did in Ashland.

We sat there for a few more minutes. My eyes scanned the crowd, looking through the faces, before moving on to whom I was really here to see tonight — Vinnie Volga.

One of the main features at Northern Aggression was the elaborate Ice bar that took up a good portion of one of the walls. The bar was a single, solid sheet of elemental Ice with a variety of runes carved into the frosty surface. Suns and stars mostly, symbolizing life and joy. The runes glittered like diamond chips in the Ice, making it seem more like a beautiful work of art than a functional, working bar. But the Ice more than held up to all the people who sat next to and leaned on it, and the others who clustered three deep in some places waiting to get their latest round of liquid courage.

My gaze locked onto the man standing behind the bar — the Ice elemental responsible for making sure his creation stayed in one piece for the night.

Vinnie Volga had swarthy features — tan skin and a mop of curly hair that could only be described as dirty brown. A neat, trimmed goatee covered his pointed chin, although his mouth and forehead both had a pinched look to them, as though he was constantly worried about something. Vinnie was short for a guy, only about my height, five seven or so, with a thin, wiry body.

But the most striking thing about Vinnie was his eyes, which glowed blue-white in the semidarkness, thanks to his elemental magic. Vinnie held on to his Ice power at all times, even while mixing and serving up drinks. He had to keep feeding a small, steady trickle of magic into the bar, or his creation would start to melt, given all the bodies and heat packed into the club.

It’s rare that an elemental can use his magic without other elementals sensing it, and Vinnie wasn’t trying to hide what he was doing. Even across the room, I could feel the cool caress of his power call out to me. It made me want to reach for my own Ice magic and let the cold energy fill every part of my being, but I pushed the longing aside. I wasn’t letting the bartender know that I had any kind of magic — until it was too late.

“So tell me about Vinnie,” I asked Roslyn.

The vampire’s eyes tracked my gaze across the club to where the bartender stood, shaking up another round of martinis. She shrugged. “Not much to tell. He’s worked for me for a couple of years now. Emigrated here from Russia with his daughter. The mother died in Russia before they came to the States. Very quiet, keeps to himself. A hard worker. Always on time. Doesn’t seem that interested in my girls, but he’ll go out with one occasionally. I’ve never had any problems with him. He comes in, makes sure the bar is in one piece, mixes drinks, takes a few quick breaks to go check on his daughter, and leaves. He’s the best bartender that I’ve ever had. I’d really hate to lose him.”

I gave her a cool look. After a moment, Roslyn nodded.

“But if it can’t be avoided, I suppose that I can find another Ice elemental to take over for him,” she said. “What I really want to know is if Vinnie’s spying for Mab Monroe. If he is, he’s out. Nobody who works for Mab is going to be on my staff or welcome in my club — ever.”

Roslyn’s toffee eyes glittered with anger, and her mouth flattened into a hard, ugly slash in her beautiful face. The vampire had just as much reason to hate Mab as I did, because Mab had been Elliot Slater’s boss, the one who pulled all his crazy, twisted strings. The Fire elemental had known that Slater was stalking and terrorizing Roslyn, and she’d done nothing to stop it. As long as Slater had done Mab’s bidding, she hadn’t cared what he did to anyone else — or who got hurt in the process.

“What about Vinnie’s Ice magic?” I asked. “Will that be a problem?”

“He has enough to keep the bar in one piece,” Roslyn said. “But I think that’s about it. I’ve never seen him do anything else with it. He’s certainly not as strong as you are.”

I shifted in the booth. Everybody always said how strong my magic was, like it was something to be proud of. But I knew that I wasn’t that powerful. Alexis James. Tobias Dawson. Elliot Slater. Each one of them had come far too close to killing me in the last few months for me to believe that I was invincible. Death came to us all in the end, no matter how tough we thought we were.

Still, every time someone commented on my magic, I couldn’t stop this uncomfortable shiver that swept through my body. It was like they were all setting me up for the fall that I knew was coming up fast on the day that I went toe-to-toe with Mab with my magic.

And lost.

“So can we get on with this?” Finn asked, his green eyes locked onto a redhead gyrating on the edge of the dance floor. “Because if we hurry, we can still learn everything that Vinnie knows before closing. Which would leave me plenty of time to find someone to keep me warm for the rest of the night. You wouldn’t want me to be lonely, now, would you?”

I rolled my eyes. Finn’s propensity to think with his dick first was going to get him into deep trouble one day. Especially since he didn’t mind seducing women who were already taken. He saw a wedding ring as a challenge more than anything else. I always found it amazing that some angry husband hadn’t hired me to kill Finn long ago.

But my foster brother was right. It was time to get on with things. The sooner we squeezed Vinnie for info, the sooner I could start planning how to find and take out LaFleur — before she found me first.

I’d just started to slide out of the booth when a peculiar ripple in the crowd caught my eye. A wave of people parted for someone in their midst. A moment later, a woman stepped up to the Ice bar in the exact spot where Vinnie was serving drinks.

A petite, slender woman with a short bob of glossy black hair. A wide headband of flat emeralds held her hair back off her face, so that everyone could get a good look at her delicate features. The gems winked at me underneath the black lights of the club.

Unlike me, she was dressed for a night out on the town. A tight, black, sleeveless top showed off her creamy, muscled arms, while a lime green miniskirt hugged her bony ass. Black leather boots with stiletto heels crawled up to her knees. She didn’t appear to be carrying any weapons, unless she had a couple of knives tucked into her boots. But given what I’d seen her do with her electrical magic last night, she didn’t really need any.

She leaned against the Ice bar and said something to Vinnie, whose head snapped up from the martinis he was making. His jaw dropped open at the sight of her and, for a moment, the blue-white glow of his Ice magic completely vanished from his eyes before sparking and sputtering back to life. The bartender’s shocked reaction was understandable.

After all, he was talking to LaFleur.