The Spider

Page 22

Coolidge stepped forward. “Sebastian.”
“Harry.”
They shook hands, but Harry obviously wasn’t happy about it. He kept frowning at Sebastian, as if the sight of the younger man greatly upset him for some reason.
I forced myself to focus on Sebastian and put the girl out of my mind. I even went so far as to turn so that I was facing him instead of her. This night was about Sebastian, not me dwelling on ghosts from my past. Besides, this wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone who looked like Bria, even if this girl did resemble her a bit more than most.
“Once again, I want to tell you how sorry I am about your father,” Harry said, his blue eyes dark and serious. “If the police and your investigators don’t come up with something soon, I hope that you’ll consider letting me take a crack at things.”
Sebastian’s mouth puckered. The lack of leads into his father’s murder remained a sore spot for him. I tensed too, but for another reason entirely. From what Fletcher had told me, Harry Coolidge was a dedicated cop, the sort who wouldn’t stop digging until he found out the truth about Vaughn’s murder—and my part in it.
“Where’s Charlotte?” the girl asked, interrupting the two men.
I let myself take another quick glance at her. For the first time, I realized that she was carrying a small white box in her hand, tied with a pale pink ribbon. Tonight was Charlotte’s birthday, and a pile of presents had accumulated on a table off to one side of the room. Charlotte had come down to the ballroom when the guests started arriving, but I’d been so focused on Sebastian that I hadn’t paid much attention to her. I hadn’t seen her in a while, though. I wondered if she was back in the library, hiding under her father’s desk again. The thought saddened me, since I was the cause of her grief.
Sebastian waved his hand. “Oh, I’m sure that Charlotte’s around here somewhere.”
The woman held out her hand to the girl. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go find Charlotte so you can give her the present you brought her. Sebastian, thank you for inviting us tonight.”
He tipped his head at her. “Of course, Henrietta. You know that you guys were like family to my father.”
Harry gave Sebastian one more hard stare before moving off into the crowd with his wife and daughter.
“Arrogant ass,” Sebastian muttered under his breath.
“Him?” I asked, focusing on Harry again instead of his daughter. “What’s wrong with him? He seemed okay.”
For a cop who would haul me off to jail if he ever learned what I’d done to his friend.
Sebastian shook his head. “He’s an old friend of my father’s, and he’s been sniffing around ever since Papa’s death. I think that Harry blames me because the cops haven’t found my father’s killer yet. As if it’s my fault that the police in this town are so incompetent. As if he could do any better.”
No doubt Coolidge could do better. He would at least try, which was more than could be said for most of the cops in Ashland.
Still, I wondered at the venom in Sebastian’s voice and the seeming bad blood between the two men. From what little I’d seen and heard, Harry Coolidge had appeared to be a loyal friend to Vaughn. He was certainly doting on his wife and daughter. He’d already braved the crowd at one of the bars to fetch his wife a glass of white wine and his daughter some ginger ale. The girl giggled as her father made an exaggerated bow and presented her with the soda, while the mother looked on with a smile on her face. Such a nice, happy family. For a moment, I felt achingly envious of Bria’s look-alike.
Sebastian moved in front of me, cutting off my view of the Coolidge family.
“Well, that looks like the last of the guests,” he said. “I’m going to go find Charlotte and welcome everyone properly. After the party gets started up again, we’ll slip away and have our own private celebration. Okay?”
I smiled, once again feeling that peculiar mix of longing, desire, guilt, and sorrow thrumming through my chest. “It’s a date.”
He nodded. “Wish me luck.”
“Good lu—”
But Sebastian had already turned and was striding away.
18
Sebastian moved through the ballroom, shaking hands and greeting his guests again. He disappeared from sight but reappeared a few minutes later in the center of the floor, his arm around Charlotte’s shoulder, his head bent down as he whispered something in her ear. I wondered where she’d been hiding.
Like her friend, Charlotte wore a simple dress, although hers was black with splashes of deep blue, almost like abstract roses blooming across the pouffy skirt. Her black hair was pulled back into another French braid, the end tied off with a blue ribbon.
Sebastian left Charlotte standing by herself while he went over, grabbed a champagne flute and a fork from one of the bartenders, and gently ting-ting-tinged the tines against his glass. Slowly, the orchestra’s classical music faded away, and the crowd quieted down.
Sebastian moved back to the center of the ballroom, putting his arm around Charlotte’s shoulder again.
“I want to welcome you all here tonight,” he said, looking from one side of the crowd to the other. “Thank you all for coming and helping Charlotte and me honor our father. Tonight is my sister’s fourteenth birthday, and it would have been his fifty-first. I can’t think of a more fitting tribute to him than being here with all of you, his friends, his family.”
Sebastian’s gaze flicked over to Mab. An amused smile flitted across her face, as though she were in on some private joke that no one else knew about. Maybe she was simply glad that Vaughn was dead, and some of the problems that he’d caused for her along with him.
“A lot of rumors have been going around about my father’s death,” Sebastian said. “The police are still investigating this horrible crime, but I wanted to make all of you a promise here tonight. His killer will be brought to justice. My father wouldn’t accept anything less, and neither will I.”
The crowd clapped heartily at his words. This time, Sebastian looked straight at Harry Coolidge, who had his arms crossed over his chest and a sour look on his face. I wondered what the cop knew that I didn’t. But like Fletcher had said, I couldn’t exactly ask him.
“My father is gone,” Sebastian continued. “And although we are here tonight to celebrate his birthday, his memory, his legacy, we all know that we cannot dwell on the past and that we must move forward. That is why I will be assuming control of Vaughn Construction, effective immediately.”
Sebastian straightened, and his voice boomed through the ballroom as he outlined how he wanted to continue the work and projects that his father had started. Truth be told, I tuned most of it out, since it was obvious that Sebastian was trying to reassure his business associates that everything with the company would proceed on time and on budget. I wondered if that was why he’d invited Mab. Fletcher had said that she owned a significant stake in Vaughn Construction, and she wasn’t the sort of investor you disappointed—not if you wanted to keep breathing.
Charlotte squirmed out from under her brother’s arm, although Sebastian caught her hand and kept her close to him. She stared down at the polished floor under her black sandals. I wondered if all the talk about what a great man her father had been upset her, if that was what she wanted to get away from. I wondered if she was thinking about all the times he’d hit her, all the times he’d abused her, all the times he’d hurt her simply because he could.
“And so tonight begins a new era, not only for Charlotte and myself but also for Vaughn Construction . . .” Sebastian went on with his speech.
“What a boring, pompous, long-winded jackass,” a snide voice murmured in my ear. “Some people just do not know when to shut up. What do you see in him?”
Startled, I looked over to my right at Finn’s grinning face. Not many people could sneak up on me, but he was one of them. Finn was lighter on his feet than a cat. Despite my annoyance with him over the past several days, I had to admit that he cut an impressive figure in his tuxedo, and his hair gleamed like polished walnut in the soft glow from the chandeliers. Not that I would ever tell him that, though. His ego was big enough already.
“When did you get here?”
He waved his hand. “Not important. Just like everything your boyfriend is spouting up there on his soapbox.”
“He’s thanking people for coming and supporting him and Charlotte,” I said, rolling my eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Give the guy a break. His dad just died a few weeks ago.”
“You mean, you just killed his dad a few weeks ago.”
Fury flashed through me like lightning striking the earth. My eyes narrowed, and my hands balled into fists. “Is that why you came here? To remind me of that? Because my memory’s not that short. I never forget them—any of them.”
I remembered all the assignments that Fletcher had sent me out on, all the random people who’d foolishly decided to mess with me, all the punks who’d wanted to hurt me when I’d been living on the streets—all the people I’d killed. I remembered the way they looked, talked, laughed, snarled, smelled, and I especially remembered how they’d died and that I’d been the cause of their sudden, violent demises. Maybe that was where my dreams, my memories, were coming from. The fact that I just couldn’t forget about all the bad things that I’d done, even if some had been necessary simply to survive.
Finn’s face softened at my harsh words. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to fight. I just don’t know what you see in that guy, Gin. Look at him, holding court in the middle of the ballroom, crowing about all the things he plans to do now that his father is gone. He’s trying too hard, yet again, like a prince who’s finally seized the king’s throne and doesn’t want anyone to know exactly how ill suited he is for the job.”
I glanced at Sebastian. Sometime while I’d been talking to Finn, Sebastian had let go of Charlotte, who’d disappeared into the crowd, and was now waving around his free hand and stabbing his index finger up to the ceiling in order to punctuate his points. Maybe he was being a little overly dramatic, but I knew how important it was for him to make a good impression tonight, now that he was the head of the Vaughn family.
“He’s doing the best he can,” I said, turning back to Finn. “You can’t blame him for that.”
“No, I suppose not.” Finn sighed. “Just . . . be careful with this guy, okay, Gin? I’ve seen the way you look at him.”
“And how is that?”
For once, Finn’s green gaze was dark and serious. “Like you’re halfway in love with him.”
I kept my face cold, calm, and expressionless, but he must have seen the uneasy agreement in my eyes, because he reached out and gently touched my arm, as if I were a piece of delicate glass. That’s exactly how I felt right now—brittle, fragile, and utterly exposed.
“You know that it can never work out, right?” Finn said in a soft voice.
“Of course I know that.” I sneered. “I killed his father. I might be an assassin, but I’m not stupid.”
Finn shook his head. “It’s more than just that. It’s what we do versus what he does. Our world versus his.”
“And here I thought that we all lived in the same world.”
“Not people like us. Our world is in the background, in the shadows, in the darkness, where few people dare to tread.”
“And his isn’t?”
Finn held out his hand, gesturing at the ballroom. “This is about as far from the shadows as you can get, Gin. And I think you know that deep down inside. You can be one thing or the other—you can’t be both.” He paused. “Except maybe if you’re Mab Monroe.”
Everything that he was saying was undeniably true. But I had just been so . . . so . . . happy with Sebastian, so thrilled with the way he made me feel like I was the most wonderful person he’d ever met. I’d never had that before.
Oh, Fletcher loved me like a daughter, Jo-Jo too, and of course Finn and I had our sibling rivalry going on. I supposed that even Sophia felt some sort of fond, grudging affection for me, although she would never go so far as to say it out loud. But the four of them had been a family long before I’d shown up like a lost puppy on the back step of the Pork Pit, and sometimes I still felt like an outsider looking in. I supposed that was one of the reasons that I’d trained so long and hard to be the assassin Fletcher had wanted me to be—so I could please him in one area that Finn never could.
So I could be the insider for a change.
But it wasn’t like that with Sebastian. Not at all. He made me feel important, he made me feel . . . special in a way that I never had, not even with my own family. Even when my mom and sisters had been alive, I’d always been the one in the middle. Not old enough to hang out with my mom and Annabella and too old for Bria and her dolls, even though I was the one who’d always ended up playing with her anyway, simply because I loved her so much.
I didn’t want to give up Sebastian and how he made me feel, but Finn was right. I didn’t have a choice. Because sooner or later, the sand would run out in the hourglass of my happiness, the carriage would turn back into a pumpkin, and my glass slipper would splinter into shards. Either I’d slip up and say something that I shouldn’t, or Harry Coolidge or some other investigator would get the bright idea to take a hard look at me and when and why I’d appeared in Sebastian’s life. I’d rather leave on my own terms, with at least a little bit of my dignity left—and my heart too. More important, I had to go out like that if only not to endanger Finn and Fletcher. I might be willing to risk my own safety but not theirs.