31
Jonah McAllister blinked and blinked, as if he couldn’t quite believe that I was sitting in his office—in his own chair, no less.
I gave him a lazy grin, tilted back the chair, and propped my boots up on top of the desk. My shoes were not particularly clean, and McAllister’s left eye twitched with fury as he realized that I was mucking up his pristine workspace. I crossed one leg on top of the other and leaned back a little farther, getting even more comfortable in his chair.
“What are you doing in my house?” he finally demanded.
“What?” I asked. “No ‘Hello, Ms. Blanco’? No, ‘You’re looking well this evening’? Why, Jonah, wherever are your manners? I bet you were never this rude to Mab.”
The lawyer’s eye twitched again, but he stayed by the wall. I could almost see the wheels turning in his mind as he debated making a break for the door. Couldn’t blame him for that. Late-night visits from the Spider tended to involve only one thing: blood, and a lot of it.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “You locked the front door behind you, remember? And I have no doubt that I can run faster than you.”
He stared at me for several moments. Thinking.
“You’re right. But since we both know that you’re going to kill me, will you at least allow the condemned man one last drink?”
I gestured at the wet bar. “Be my guest.”
McAllister moved behind the bar, his body stiff with tension, but he kept sneaking glances at me, wondering how he could get the upper hand and get out of this alive. Fool. He should have known by now it was far, far too late for that.
McAllister poured himself a brandy. I had to hand it to him, his fingers didn’t shake at all as he fixed the drink. Then again, he’d worked for Mab for years. His nerves were probably as good as mine were—maybe even better.
McAllister carefully sipped the brandy, savoring each and every mouthful, instead of slugging it down the way I thought he might. It took him a few minutes, but he finished that first brandy and poured himself another one, adding more amber liquor to the snifter this time around. I wondered if he thought getting drunk would ease the pain of what I was about to do to him. Not the worst strategy, but it wasn’t going to help him. Not tonight.
“What do you want?” he finally asked. “Or are you just here to kill me?”
“Well, as tempting as that thought is, I thought we might talk first,” I said. “Chitchat a little bit.”
He gave me a blank look. “And what do you think that we would have to talk about?”
Instead of answering his question, I asked one of my own. “You didn’t really think you’d get away with it, did you?”
He tensed before he could stop himself. “And just what do you think it is that I’ve gotten away with?”
“Nothing much,” I drawled. “Just hiring Clementine and her crew to rob the Briartop museum.”
His eye twitched again, his shoulders shot up to his ears, and his lips pressed together so hard that they disappeared into the rest of his face. For a moment, I thought he might try to deny it, but McAllister had an entirely different reaction: he laughed.
He choked on that first laugh, trying to smother the harsh, barking sound, but he couldn’t, and after a moment, he quit trying. It was like that one sound opened the floodgates of his emotions, because he just kept right on laughing, louder and louder, harder and harder, until tears streamed down his cheeks and he was almost bent over double from the force of his own mirthless chuckles.
I sat there and waited until he’d calmed down. It didn’t take long. McAllister was a lawyer after all, used to tense, high-pressure situations. It didn’t get any more tense or high-pressure than having an assassin appear in your office late at night.
“Forgive me,” Jonah said, pulling a white silk handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his blue suit jacket and dabbing away his hysterical tears. “It takes a lot to surprise me, but you managed to do it. In fact, you’ve surprised me quite a bit since we first met last year, Ms. Blanco.”
“Please. Let’s not stand on formality tonight. Call me Gin.”
“Very well, Gin,” Jonah said. “As I said, it takes a lot to surprise me. I’ve been expecting you to be waiting for me in here for a long while now.”
I shrugged. “I’ve been busy. Although you have been on my to-do list for quite some time.”
He shrugged back.
We stared at each other, jaws tight, lips flat, eyes cold.
Finally, he sighed. “How did you figure it out? At least tell me that much.”
“You made a couple of mistakes. Small things, really, but they added up to point the finger in your direction.”
“Like what?” he asked, seeming to be genuinely interested in what I had to say. I supposed there really was a first time for everything.
“Your first mistake was when you confronted Clementine right after she took everyone hostage. It wasn’t something I expected from you.”
He raised an eyebrow, although the rest of his face didn’t move with it. “How so?”
“One thing I admire about you, Jonah, is your sense of self-preservation,” I said. “So why in the world would you confront a bunch of giants with guns? Oh, I could imagine you doing it if Mab had still been alive. You would have had to put on an indignant show to keep her from roasting you because someone ruined her exhibit. But she’s dead, so why not let the museum director huff and puff instead? But no, you immediately shoved your way to the front of the crowd and faced down Clementine all by your lonesome. It just didn’t make any sense.”
“That’s it?” he asked. “That’s what you based your grand conclusion on?”
“Oh, no. There’s more.”
McAllister gestured with his brandy, graciously telling me to continue.
“Then there was the fact that Clementine didn’t shoot you for standing up to her. Instead, she just slapped you around a little bit. It didn’t make any sense that she wouldn’t kill you, especially since I’d heard her talk about shooting someone in the face like it was no more important than getting her nails done. Sure, she wanted to keep the hostages calm, but you directly challenged
“So she didn’t shoot me. So what?”
“So why didn’t she just go ahead and kill you and make everyone else fall into line that much quicker? There was only one reason she wouldn’t: because you were her boss. She wouldn’t kill the person who’d hired her to pull the heist, or she wouldn’t get paid the rest of her fee,” I replied. “You really should have at least let her wing you with a bullet or two. But instead, you got away with only a bitch slap. Now, that seems to be something you excel at, so I didn’t think too much of it at the time. But later on, it was just one more thing that didn’t quite add up.”
He eyed me. “And what were these other things that you found so troublesome?”
“Well, for starters, there was the fact that a woman was murdered—a woman who was wearing the exact same dress as I was,” I said. “That made me think that I was the intended target, which I was. Now, I have more enemies than most, but there were a lot of bad people at the gala. So why come after me and not someone else? Because you knew that I was a threat to your plans to steal Mab’s will. And, well, killing me would have been a nice bonus. You’ve wanted me dead for a long time now, and you saw a chance to finally make it happen at the museum.”
“It would have worked too,” he muttered. “If not for that damn dress.”
This time, I nodded, agreeing with him. “Maybe. Although I imagine you were quite happy when Clementine dumped that body in the rotunda and you thought it was me.”
“Ecstatic, actually. Too bad it didn’t take. It never seems to, with you.”
I grinned. He gave me a sour look, finished off his brandy, and poured himself another one. The first two rounds had already given his cheeks a ruddy flush—or perhaps that was just his anger finally showing through his
