I drew in a breath, ready to spin my story. "Sebastian came into the restaurant right as I was closing up."

That was enough to make him look up from his book. "What did he want?"

"To say that he was sorry that he didn't keep our date last night."

I told Fletcher everything that Sebastian had said, from his talk of his father's funeral to trying to make sure that Charlotte was okay to his need to escape from all of the mourners who had gathered at the Vaughn mansion. The only thing I edited out was the fact that Sebastian and I had kissed. The old man definitely did not need to know about that. He'd claim that I was getting too emotionally involved with Sebastian. Maybe I was, but I could handle it.

I could handle anything as the Spider.

"He asked me out again," I finished up. "For Monday night."

Now came the tricky part. "I thought that I would go out with him, just to see if I can find out what he knows about the police investigation into his father's murder and to make sure there's nothing that can lead back to us. But I wanted to talk to you about it first."

A half-truth, at best. I would carefully nose around and see what information I could get out of Sebastian about the investigation, just to make sure that Fletcher and I were in the clear. But sometime between leaving the Pork Pit and walking into the den, I'd decided that I was seeing Sebastian again, with or without Fletcher's approval. I wanted to make sure that Sebastian was okay. I wanted to see him smile and laugh. But most of all, I wanted him to look at me again the way he had right before he'd kissed me tonight, like he was as desperately consumed by this bright flare of attraction between us as I was.

Still, I kept my face schooled into a calm, bland mask, as though it didn't matter to me whether I went out with Sebastian. Even though it very much did.

Instead of looking at me, Fletcher dropped his green gaze to his book. Thinking. I curled my hands into loose fists, pressing my fingers against the spider rune scars in my palms, to keep from fidgeting. The marks might be the symbol for patience, but having them branded into my hands didn't automatically give me that particular skill. Not even close.

Being patient was something that I still struggled with, whether it was as Gin Blanco, waiting on a customer to finally make up his mind about his order in the Pork Pit, or as the Spider, holding my position until my target was in exactly the right spot. It was probably the thing that Fletcher and I argued about the most. He said that patience was one of the most important skills for an a.s.sa.s.sin to have, and he was always telling me to slow down, wait, and let events unfold in my favor, to be absolutely sure of what I was doing before I went all in and committed myself wholeheartedly.

Well, I was sure now, so I dug my nails into the silverstone in my skin and held my tongue, waiting for him to say his piece.

After about three minutes, Fletcher finally nodded. "That might be a smart idea," he said. "You going out with Sebastian and seeing what he knows."

I blinked. That wasn't what I'd expected him to say-not at all. I'd thought that he would warn me to keep my distance from Sebastian. Maybe Fletcher finally realized that I could keep my emotions in check. Maybe he was finally fully trusting me to see a job through to the end, despite the unexpected complications that had come up. Maybe the old man finally understood that I was all grown up and capable of making my own decisions. That I was my own person now and not just the lost little girl he'd trained in his own image.

"Especially since I still haven't been able to find out what was in that file that cop gave Vaughn," Fletcher finished his thought. "I got my hands on a copy of the evidence logs, but there's no mention of it being in the safe at Vaughn's office or of the police cataloging it as part of their investigation. In fact, there wasn't any mention of anything being in the safe. It's like the file just . . . disappeared."

Ah, so that's what he was up to. His sources hadn't been able to come up with the information he wanted, so he was willing to let me see if I could get it from Sebastian instead. Nothing bothered Fletcher more than loose ends and unanswered questions. I might not be as patient as he thought I should be, but he was more curious than a basket full of kittens exploring the world for the very first time. Still, I didn't mind him wanting me to track down the file, since I was going to use it as an excuse to see Sebastian again.

"But you found the cop, right?" I asked. "The one who gave Vaughn the file? Can't you just bribe him and ask him what he found?"

Fletcher shook his head. "Yeah, it wasn't too hard to locate him, since you got his first name and his hometown, but I'm afraid it's a little more complicated than that. The cop, Harry Coolidge, isn't from around here. He works down in a town called Blue Marsh, near Savannah. From what I know, Coolidge is a smart, honest, decent cop. He won't take any sort of bribe, and he'd start asking questions about how I even knew about the file. So that option is out."

Fletcher hesitated, as if he was choosing his next words carefully.

"Coolidge has a reputation for being thorough and tenacious, a good investigator who can find clues that others miss. If Vaughn hired him to look into the terrace collapse, maybe even someone who was involved in the construction, it's because that person was dirty-and clever enough to hide whatever he'd done."

"Okay," I said. "I'll find a way to see if Sebastian has any information about the file. Maybe the cops let him go ahead and empty out the safe since he was next of kin. He might have the file buried in a stack somewhere and not even know it."

"Maybe."

Fletcher's lips puckered, his nose scrunched up, and his eyes grew dark and distant, as if he was working through some sort of mental jigsaw puzzle and trying to make the pieces fit together in his head. But he shook off his thoughts and focused his attention on me again.

"All right. Feel Sebastian out during your date, and see if he knows anything about the file, where it is, or what Coolidge was looking into for Cesar. I'll keep digging with my own sources."

"You got it."

His green gaze locked with my gray one. "But be careful, Gin. There's something about this whole situation that's still not sitting right with me. This thing could still go sideways on us."

"Always."

Satisfied for now, Fletcher went back to his book. Our powwow complete, I got to my feet and headed toward the hallway, ready to go upstairs, take a shower, and slip into bed. I reached the doorway and stopped, wondering if I should tell him that I had more than a casual interest in Sebastian, that finding out what he knew about his father's file wasn't the only reason that I wanted to see him again.

But I decided not to. It was one date, and Sebastian could still turn out to be a toad, like all the other rich guys who hit on me at parties. And if he wasn't, if he was the person he'd been so far, the one who seemed so genuinely interested in me . . . well, I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.

"Gin? You need something else?" Fletcher's soft voice snapped me out of my thoughts.

I glanced over my shoulder at him and shook my head. "Nah. I just realized that I forgot to say good night. So . . . good night."

"Good night."

Fletcher focused on his book again. I stared at him, ignoring the guilty twinges in my chest. If he had looked up at that moment, I might have spilled my guts about my feelings for Sebastian and confessed everything to him.

But the old man turned a page, thoroughly engrossed in his story.

So I let out a soft, relieved sigh, left the den, and headed upstairs for the night.

14.

At precisely seven o'clock Monday evening, Sebastian Vaughn strolled into the Pork Pit, carrying a dozen roses. He grinned, crossed the storefront, and made a gallant bow before straightening back up and handing the flowers to me.

Instead of the typical red, these roses were a deep, dark color. At first, I thought they were black, but then, as I held them up to the light, I realized that the petals actually had a rich blue sheen. The stems were unusual too, milky white instead of the normal green. The thorns were the same pale color, although they seemed to be sharper and longer than usual. All put together, the flowers were beautiful, vibrant, and striking, just like Sebastian.

"Roses!" I exclaimed, playing the part of a girl who was thrilled by such things. It wasn't too much of a stretch. Secretly, I was delighted that he'd brought me flowers. No one ever had before.

"I know most folks like red roses, but I thought that I would bring you something really special. They're called Blue Velvet, and they're from my family's greenhouse," Sebastian said.

I buried my nose in the roses, breathing in deeply and inhaling their scent. They smelled much sweeter than I'd thought they would, given their dark blue color, as though someone had distilled the petals down to their purest, most intense essence. Truth be told, the scent was a bit overpowering, almost cloying, and I had to scrunch up my nose to keep from sneezing. Not exactly the aroma I would have picked if I'd been giving myself flowers, but I appreciated the gesture.

I was standing behind the counter, close to where Fletcher sat behind the cash register, reading. Beaming, I held the flowers out to him.

"Aren't they lovely?"

"Exquisite," he echoed back in a wry voice.

"Is this your . . . father?" Sebastian's eyebrows drew together as he looked back and forth between me and Fletcher, as if he was puzzled by the lack of familial resemblance.

"My cousin, actually," I said. "He . . . adopted me after my family died . . . in a car accident."

That was more or less the cover story that we'd developed long ago to explain my connection to Fletcher and Finn. Funny, but I'd never had a problem telling the lies before.

Sebastian nodded, his face clearing, and he stretched out his hand. "Nice to meet you, Mr. . . ."

"Lane," the old man said in a reluctant voice. "Fletcher Lane."

He took Sebastian's hand and shook it, even though I could tell that he didn't want to. Despite his desire to learn more about Vaughn's mystery file, Fletcher wasn't all that happy about me going out with Sebastian. Then again, he rarely liked any of the guys that I brought around the restaurant, not even the ones that we had no reason to be wary of. Fletcher's dislike of my dates was yet another way in which he was overprotective of me.

He stared at the younger man, his green eyes sharp and thoughtful. Sebastian smiled back at him, although his expression seemed a little uneasy around the edges. Then again, Fletcher's hard, laserlike stare was enough to make anyone nervous, even me.

Fletcher turned to me and held out his hand. "Let me put those in some water for you, Gin. You don't want to keep your young man waiting."

"Thanks," I said, handing the roses over to him. "Ouch!"

Fletcher took the flowers from me, and I pulled my hand back, wincing. I watched a bit of blood well up out of my right thumb, which I'd stabbed into one of the pale thorns.

Sebastian gave me a chagrined look. "Sorry. I should have warned you. They have bigger, sharper thorns than most roses. I think it has something to do with the color of the stems."

"It's okay," I said, grabbing a paper towel and wiping the scarlet drop off my thumb. "It's just a little blood. Nothing to worry about."

"If I could kiss it and make it better, I would," Sebastian said in a low voice that only I could hear.

His gaze locked onto my mouth, as if he was thinking about the soft kisses we'd shared the other night. I certainly was. Sebastian caught me staring at him. He grinned, then flashed me a quick, sly wink. I blushed and dropped my gaze from his.

While Fletcher grabbed an old jelly jar to use as a vase and filled it with water, I untied my work ap.r.o.n, pulled it over my head, and hung it on a hook on the back wall. Then I grabbed my purse, which contained two of my knives, from its slot under the cash register and stepped around the counter. Sebastian reached out and took my hand, careful of my injured thumb.

"So what are we doing tonight? Dinner and a movie?"

He shook his head. "Nothing so predictable as that. I thought you might like to see the greenhouse where your roses came from, along with the rest of my estate."

I glanced at Fletcher, who gave me a tiny nod as he kept arranging the flowers in the jelly jar. Getting invited to the Vaughn estate was too good an opportunity to pa.s.s up. Maybe Sebastian would give me a full tour, including a peek at his father's office. If I was extremely lucky, he might even leave me alone in there long enough for me to search for the mystery file.

But more than that, I wanted to see the estate for myself, inside and out. You could tell a lot about someone from his home and the furnishings, photos, and knickknacks that adorned it, and I wanted to learn more about Sebastian. I wanted to know everything about him.

I flashed him another smile. "So what are we waiting for? Let's go."

Sebastian grinned and tugged me toward the door.

"Don't be too late," Fletcher called out.

I gave him a distracted wave of my hand, completely focused on following Sebastian out of the Pork Pit and into the hot summer night.

Sebastian had a sleek black town car waiting down the block.

"After you, madam," he said, opening the back door and bowing, as though he were a chauffeur.

I giggled and slid into the car. Sebastian shut the door, then went around and got into the other side. He gestured to the giant sitting in the driver's seat. The giant had forgone the usual black chauffeur's uniform in favor of a powder-blue suit that brought out the red color of his hair. Freckles were splattered across his nose and cheeks like brown blood drops, while his eyes were as pale as his suit.

"This is Porter," Sebastian said. "He's been the head of my father's security detail for years. He's agreed to stay on and work for me."

Oh, I knew all about Roy Porter, since Fletcher had included plenty of information about him in the initial file on Vaughn. Porter arranged the security at the estate, but more than that, he had acted as a sort of foreman for Vaughn, overseeing building-material deliveries, checking on crews, and generally making sure that everything ran smoothly at the job sites. He'd also been Vaughn's middleman, the one who actually doled out all the bribes necessary to keep his boss's construction projects chugging along.

From what Fletcher had been able to uncover, Porter went beyond dropping off bribes. Whenever there was a problem that Vaughn's money hadn't been able to fix, Porter had often taken care of it himself-with his fists. Like a couple of weeks before the terrace collapse, when Porter had found two Southtown punks spray-painting graffiti at one of the job sites and had beaten them both to death. A third guy who'd been waiting for his friends in the car had said that Porter had toyed with the punks, breaking their legs so they couldn't run away, then their arms so they couldn't fight back, before finally caving in their skulls with his fists.

Charges had been filed, but nothing ever came of them, because the last guy had been found dead a week later, beaten to death in an eerily similar manner. That time, Porter had been smart enough not to leave any witnesses behind.

I wondered if Sebastian knew what kind of vicious, violent, ruthless man Porter was. Probably not. He hadn't seemed to know about his father either. But seeing Porter cooled some of my enthusiasm for my date with Sebastian and reminded me that I still had work to do tonight.

Porter gave me a polite nod in the mirror. "Ma'am."

I nodded back at him. "Mr. Porter."

"Take us back to the mansion, Porter," Sebastian ordered.

Porter steered the car away from the curb. Sebastian kept up a steady stream of conversation all the way from the downtown loop up to Northtown, where his family's estate was located among Ashland's other mansions. In fact, the Vaughn estate was down the block from Mab Monroe's place. Well, perhaps that was a bit of an understatement. Given Mab's sprawling compound and the thick woods that surrounded it, Sebastian's home was a good two miles away, but he seemed to be the Fire elemental's closest neighbor.

Finally, after about thirty minutes of driving, Porter turned off the road. He reached down into the console between the front seats and picked up a small black clicker, which he used to open the gate that led into the estate. The giant steered the car through the opening and up a long driveway that curved to the top of a hill.

Even though I'd seen the Vaughn estate in the surveillance photographs that Fletcher had given me, I still peered out the window, as though I'd never seen the grounds or the house sitting in the middle of them before.

The mansion was impressive, even by Northtown standards. Six stories of stone towered into the air, old, solid, st.u.r.dy gray granite that had easily weathered the wear and tear of the years and would continue to do so for decades to come. The house had three separate wings, each sporting a variety of balconies and patios, while white trellises climbed from floor to floor, all with roses of different colors winding through them-red, white, pink, and even a pale green. The only shade that I didn't see was the dark blue of the flowers that Sebastian had given me earlier.

"Well," Sebastian said, grinning. "Home sweet home. What do you think of it?"

"It's gorgeous."

He squeezed my hand. "Just wait until you see the inside." He leaned even closer to me. "Especially my bedroom."

I knew that he was teasing me, but I couldn't help the blush that crept up my cheeks. Kissing Sebastian was one thing. So were raging hormones and getting caught up in the moment. But I wasn't going to be foolish enough to sleep with him-even though it was all that I could think about right now. His lips on mine, his warm skin flush with my own, his fingers slowly trailing down my body as he pulled me even closer . . .

I realized that Porter was staring at me in the rearview mirror, a flat, measured look on his freckled face as though I were an ant under a magnifying gla.s.s, one that he was thinking about burning with the lens. The soft smile slid from my lips, while the pleasant heat evaporated from my cheeks. A bucket of ice water couldn't have been more effective.

Porter kept looking at me, his own expression cold and level. What was his problem? Was he p.i.s.sed that Vaughn was dead and he was working for his son now? Or did he not like playing chauffeur? I didn't know, but it made those whispered doubts rise up in my mind again.

"Come on," Sebastian said. "Let me show you around."

We got out of the car, which Porter then drove behind the house, probably to park it in the garage there. Sebastian threaded his fingers through mine and led me up the main steps and into the house.

The mansion was even more impressive on the inside than it was on the outside. High vaulted ceilings, crystal chandeliers, gleaming hardwood floors, marble staircases, exquisite antiques everywhere you looked. Everything was expensive, elegant, and polished to a high gloss, and the interior could have easily been featured in a magazine.

Still, something about the furnishings bothered me. Mainly because they didn't match up with the rather spartan decor I'd seen in Vaughn's office. In fact, the only thing that was similar was the thick Persian rugs that covered the floors.

"It's lovely," I said. "Everything is so fine."

Sebastian beamed. "Do you like it? The staff just finished putting everything together this morning. I've been doing a little redecorating since my father . . . pa.s.sed away. He was never much for comfort, but after my mother died, he didn't want to add or change anything about the house. I think we've had the same curtains in every room for fifteen years now. But I wanted . . . a fresh start."

I nodded. I knew all about fresh starts, so I could understand his sentiment, despite the guilt that it stirred in my chest.