It wasn’t an unreasonable request, but his words pricked my heart like tiny thorns. Eva was nineteen. She knew exactly what Owen and I did when we were alone together. Still, maybe it was for the best. We’d all been put through the wringer in some way tonight. Eva had witnessed a murder; Owen had dredged up memories of how he’d loved and lost his fiancee; and I’d realized that my lover had more of a past and more secrets than I’d ever dreamed of.
“Sure,” I said.
I could hear Eva moving around in the bedroom next to mine, so I led Owen to the one at the end of the hall. I flipped the light on and showed him where the extra blankets and pillows were stacked up in the closet. When that was done, we stood beside the bed, neither one of us knowing quite what to say to the other about everything that had come out into the open tonight.
“I’m sorry, Gin,” Owen finally said in a soft voice, “for blindsiding you with all this. I never thought Salina would come back to Ashland, or that Phillip would drag you into the middle.”
I shrugged. “It’s my fault too for not telling you about Kincaid’s so-called catering job in the first place. I would have, if I’d known you had any kind of connection to him. So let’s just forgive and forget, okay?”
He nodded. “And what about Salina?”
“What about Salina?” I asked, careful to keep my voice neutral once more.
He hesitated again. “I’d like to talk to her—about a lot of things. I
I suspected Owen hadn’t failed Salina so much as she’d outright lied to him, but that was neither here nor there. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t say no. Not too long ago, Owen had given me the time and space I’d needed to come to terms with my lingering feelings for Donovan. The least I could do was let him speak to Salina—even if I thought she was far more devious and dangerous than she appeared to be.
“Of course,” I murmured. “We’ll talk more about that and everything else tomorrow. Right now, we both need to get some rest. It’s been a long day.”
“Thank you, Gin,” Owen said in a soft voice. “For believing me. For trusting me.”
I looked at him, at his black hair, his violet eyes, his rough, rugged features that were so appealing to me. All these emotions roared up in my chest. All my love for him, all my caring, all my worry—and all my fear of losing him.
It was that horrible thought, that terrible fear, that spurred me forward. I pressed my body flush again Owen’s, drew his lips down to mine, and kissed him for all I was worth, trying to put everything I was thinking, everything I was feeling, into that one single kiss. Trying to make it perfect, trying to make it everything he’d had with Salina—and more.
The fierceness of my kiss seemed to startle him, but Owen’s arms snaked around me, pulling me even closer. I kept right on kissing him, trying to tell him I understood the things he’d done and the decisions he’d made, even if I didn’t like everything I’d learned tonight about how much he’d once loved Salina.
Sometime later, we broke apart, both of us breathless and aching—for each other and for answers we weren’t quite sure of.
“I love you, Gin,” Owen whispered in my ear, still holding me in his arms.
For the first time since he’d said those words to me, I doubted them—and him—but I kept my troubling thoughts to myself.
“I know,” I whispered back. “And I love you too. We’ll figure this out, just like we always do—together.”
He nodded, dropped his arms from around me, and stepped back. I walked over and paused in the doorway.
“If you need anything tonight, I’m just right down the hall.”
“I know. Sleep well.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t quite make myself smile. “You too.”
I shut the door behind me, but I didn’t go to my room. Instead, I stood there, my hand still on the knob, brooding. I knew Owen loved me, that he loved me just as much as I did him.
But I couldn’t help but wonder if he still loved Salina as well—and if she’d always had more of a hold on his heart than I could ever hope to have.
15
I finally moved away from the door, but instead of taking a shower like I should have, I went back downstairs to Fletcher’s office.
I turned on the light and looked out over the familiar mess. Papers, books, folders, and pens covered the battered desk in the back of the room, and more of the same could be found on the shelves of the bookcases against the walls and on top of the filing cabinets that squatted on either side of the door.
The sight of the old man’s clutter brought a ghost of a smile to my face. I just hadn’t felt like cleaning it, or the rest of the house, up yet. I didn’t know when I would. Sometimes Fletcher’s murder and the knowledge that he was gone still hurt as much as if it had all happened just yesterday. Having his things around comforted me—or at least tricked me into believing that part of him was still here with me.
But it was late, and I was tired, so I put my sentiment aside and got busy. It took me about twenty minutes of digging through the cabinets before I found what I was looking for: the file on Benedict Dubois’s murder.
Even though he hadn’t killed Dubois, Fletcher, being Fletcher, had compiled all the information he could get his hands on about the murder and had organized it in meticulous detail. Besides doing recon on the people he assassinated, the old man was always digging into someone, always keeping track of who was moving up in the underworld and who was getting offed. There was probably more information on more murders in this room than in storage at police headquarters. Fletcher had claimed that his obsessive chronicling was a way to stay ahead of our enemies, but I just thought he liked knowing where all the bodies were buried in Ashland—a trait Finn had inherited from him.
Tonight, though, I just hoped the file told me more about Salina and what she might be up to. I took the folder over to the desk, flipped on a light there, sat down in Fletcher’s creaky chair, and started reading.
According to Fletcher’s notes, Benedict Dubois’s murder had been the talk of Ashland for months—if it could be considered a simple murder. Fletcher had chronicled the series of events that had led to his death, all the skirmishes and problems Benedict had had with Mab, all the things that had prompted him to plot against her, but I skipped ahead to the night it had all gone down. Even then, there were pages of information to go through, covering everything from the blueprints of the mansion to exactly where Dubois had died. Given Fletcher’s attention to detail, there was even a guest list of everyone who’d been there that night.
I put the list aside to give to Finn to see what connections he might be able to make between the guests back then and what Salina might be up to now. For all I knew, she was working with someone on the list besides McAllister.
Finally, I got to Fletcher’s recap of that fateful night. Benedict, an Ice elemental, had thrown an elegant dinner party at his mansion. Just before the soup course, he’d tried to take out Mab by stabbing her in the back with a silverstone knife—only he’d failed. Naturally, the Fire elemental had made an example out of him for his foolishness.
The more I read, the more I remembered that night, until it seemed like every line, every word, caused another image to pop into my mind.
Then I got to the photos.
Fletcher had somehow gotten his hands on police images of Dubois’s body. You couldn’t even tell that the ashy, smoking thing in the photos had once been a man. It just looked like a collection of blackened bones strung together, topped by a skull baring charred teeth.
I’d seen similar pictures before. Hell, I’d witnessed such things myself when Mab murdered my mother and older sister. My stomach twisted, and the phantom stench of seared skin filled my nose, making me gag, as if Benedict Dubois’s corpse were freshly burned and still smoldering at my feet.
I forced myself to flip past the photos and keep reading, but there wasn’t anything else to discover. After
