“You don’t like it?”
I shook my head. “Too sweet for me.”
“Take another couple of sips,” he urged. “You might discover that you like it after all.”
He polished off his Scotch. I brought the glass to my lips again, but I didn’t take another drink.
“Mmm,” I said, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “It does taste better than before.”
I quickly set the glass on the nightstand, sliding it behind the lamp so he wouldn’t notice how little I’d drunk. Then I reached up and pulled the few remaining pins out of my hair, since most of it had come undone already.
I lay back on the bed, thinking that Sebastian would come back over to my side, but instead, he moved around the room, getting rid of the used condom and cleaning himself up. When that was done, he grabbed his clothes from where they had fallen on the floor and started putting them back on.
One second, Sebastian was as naked as I was. The next, he was fully clothed again. I blinked, wondering where the last two minutes had gone and why I suddenly felt so tired. Sebastian had been an intense lover, but I wasn’t ready to conk out on him just yet—not when I’d have to leave him for good in the morning. But try as I might, I couldn’t make myself find the energy to get up off the bed. Instead, my elbows slid out from under me, and I hugged a pillow to my chest, even as I stared at Sebastian.
“Where are you going?” I finally asked, my voice sounding weak and far away to my own ears.
“Don’t you worry, sugar,” Sebastian said, shrugging back into his tuxedo jacket. “I’ve got a bit of last-minute business to attend to, and I have to make sure that all of the guests leave, but then I’ll come back for you, and we’ll spend the rest of the night together in bed. Okay?”
“Okay,” I mumbled, even though I knew that I needed to get up, put my clothes back on, go to the library, and search for the file while Sebastian was distracted with his other business.
But I couldn’t move. Every single part of me felt heavy and languid, as though it would take the greatest effort that I’d ever summoned simply to get off the bed.
Sebastian started to leave, but I made a small noise of protest, and he came back over to the bed. He let out an annoyed sigh, as if I was keeping him from something important, but he leaned down and started kissing my neck, his hands sliding over my breasts again, and I forgot about everything else. But after another minute, I couldn’t even concentrate on that, and my body grew slack and still under his.
“That’s right, sugar,” Sebastian murmured, his voice sounding strangely smug to my ears. “You stay put until I get back.”
“Okay,” I mumbled again.
And that was all that I remembered before the world went black.
20
A sharp poke in my shoulder woke me sometime later.
At first, I wondered who it was, but then I realized that it was probably Finn messing with me, trying to make me get up before I wanted to.
But wait . . . why would Finn be in my bedroom? We weren’t kids anymore, even though he still teased me like it. And he didn’t even live at Fletcher’s house anymore . . . I started to slide back into the darkness . . .
The poke came again, a little more insistent this time.
“Go away,” I mumbled.
All I wanted to do right now was drift back to the quiet, black place where I’d been. It was nice there. Warm, safe, soothing, peaceful.
The poke came a third time, followed by a small hand gripping my shoulder and shaking me. My head snapped to the side, causing an ache to roar to life in the back of my skull and pulling me out of the dream that I’d been in. Or was I still dreaming now? I couldn’t tell, but I finally managed to open my eyes.
Charlotte’s face loomed above mine.
I blinked and rose onto my elbows, the room spinning around at that small, simple motion. “Charlotte? What are you doing in here?”
A cool gust of air-conditioning hit my body, and I realized that I was still sprawled across Sebastian’s bed, completely naked. I quickly grabbed the sheet and flipped it over my body. More pain spiked through my skull at the movement. I groaned. My head felt so strange, so fuzzy, as if I’d drunk far too much champagne, although I’d only had one sip.
Charlotte stared at me another moment, then bolted into action. She moved around the room, grabbing my silver dress and throwing it at me, along with my panties, purse, and shoes. I watched her, wondering what she was doing, blinking and still trying to clear the fog from my mind.
Charlotte saw that I wasn’t doing what she wanted me to. She shook her head, stomped over to the bed, and shoved the gown into my lap.
“You have to get dressed,” she said, her voice stronger than I’d ever heard it before. “You have to leave. Now.”
“Leave? Why? Did something happen? What’s wrong?” My words slurred together, and my voice sounded faint and far away, as though I were standing in a cavern and listening to my own echo.
Exasperated, Charlotte reached over and dragged my champagne glass out from where I’d hidden it behind the lamp on the nightstand.
“Because Sebastian drugged you,” she whispered. “Because he’s planning to hurt you. I heard him talking to Porter about it earlier. That’s why you have to leave. Right now.”
What . . . ? Sebastian had drugged me? Well, that explained this strange, disconnected feeling and the raging headache I had. But why would he drug me? Why would he be planning to hurt me? He cared about me . . .
Didn’t he?
Charlotte grabbed my arm, but I shooed her away. Somehow I managed to slide out of bed and get to my feet. Despite the fact that I was wobbling like a newborn fawn, I turned my back to her and managed to shimmy into my panties and the slinky silver dress.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she whispered, helping me slide into my high heels. “His meeting won’t last much longer.”
“Where?” I croaked. “Where is he?”
“In the library. But you don’t want to go that way. You can still sneak out the front with the last of the guests. But you have to hurry. The party’s over, and everyone is leaving.”
I staggered over to the windows and peered outside. Sure enough, a long line of limos and town cars were coasting down the lighted driveway. I frowned, struggling to make sense of things through the thick fog that just wouldn’t leave my mind.
Why wasn’t Sebastian here? Whom was he meeting with in the library? And why would Charlotte think that he wanted to hurt me? As far as he knew, I was just a simple waitress, just the girl he’d been seeing the past few weeks. Sebastian couldn’t possibly know that I was secretly an assassin . . . he couldn’t possibly know about my being the Spider . . . he couldn’t possibly know that I’d killed his father . . .
Could he?
The thought chilled me to the bone.
Charlotte kept running around the room, this time grabbing my purse and shoving it into my hands. It took me a couple of tries, since my fingers felt as awkward, clumsy, and detached as the rest of me, but I managed to pop open the top. My silverstone knife lay nestled inside the bag, the one weapon I’d brought with me. I hadn’t thought that I’d need the rest of my knives, not here, not tonight, not with Sebastian.
He’d made me feel special . . . he’d made me feel safe . . . he’d made me feel loved . . .
I spaced out, and it took me a few seconds to blink away my confusion and focus on my knife again. Still, I hesitated, thinking that maybe Charlotte was jealous, that she was trying to get rid of me for whatever reason, and that was why she was saying all of these terrible things about Sebastian. It would be perfectly understandable, given the fact that she’d lost her father and everything that she’d suffered at his hands. Grief could make people do strange things.
But I couldn’t quite quiet the doubts that whispered in my muddled mind—or ignore the mutters that rippled through the stone, even blacker and more ominous than before.
So I reached into the bag and pulled out
my knife, feeling the hilt dig into the spider rune scar in my palm, silverstone on silverstone. The solid, familiar weight of the weapon helped ground me and cleared some of the fog from my mind.
Charlotte’s eyes widened when she realized that I was holding a knife, but I stepped forward and shoved my purse at her. The knife was the only thing I needed out of it.
“Here,” I said, staggering toward the bedroom door. “Hold that for me.”
I didn’t know what was going on, but I was sure as hell going to find out.
21
I made it over to the door, opened it a crack, and peered outside, but the hallway was empty.
“Come on! Come on!” Charlotte hissed, pushing past me, sprinting out into the hallway, and gesturing at me with her hand. “This way! This way!”
I looked at the open hallway in front of her, the one that I knew led to a set of stairs that would take me down to the first floor. Charlotte was right. I could still make my escape. But that old, nagging curiosity rose up in me, the one that Fletcher had instilled in me, along with the burning desire to find out what possible reason Sebastian could have had for drugging me.
So I turned and started walking in the opposite direction, toward the library.
“No,” Charlotte said, following me and tugging on my hand, trying to get me to stop. “This way. You have to get away before he hurts you.”
I looked down at her. “How do you know that he’s going to hurt me? Why do you keep saying that?”
Charlotte stared at me, her dark eyes full of pain, pity, and utter misery—too much misery for someone so young. She slowly pushed up the right sleeve of her black dress.
A perfect handprint bruised her bicep in deep blues, as though someone had wrapped his hand around her upper arm as tight as it would go and had then given her a vicious shake.
All the air fled from my lungs, and white stars winked on and off in front of my eyes, as though I’d been sucker-punched in the throat by a giant. If only that were the case. It would have hurt less, so much less.
“Sebastian . . . Sebastian did that to you?”
“And more,” she whispered.
A sick, sick feeling filled my stomach, making me want to vomit up the drugged champagne. “Not—not your father?”
Charlotte gave me a puzzled look, then shook her head.
That sick, sick feeling intensified, and my knees threatened to buckle, but I forced myself to swallow down the bitter bile rising in my throat and stay on my feet.
“Why? Why did he do that to you?”
“Sebastian likes to hurt people, especially me,” Charlotte said in a voice that was far too old, knowing, and matter-of-fact for a teenager. “He always has, ever since I was little. He hides it, though. From everyone but me.”
“Did you—did you ever tell your father what Sebastian was doing to you?” I could barely croak out the words.
She hesitated. “No. I wanted to, but Sebastian told me that he would hurt Papa if I ever said a word to him.”
All along, I’d thought that Cesar Vaughn was the bad guy, a dirty, rotten, low-down, despicable villain who’d been abusing his own daughter. But it wasn’t him. None of this had been his doing or his fault. Charlotte hadn’t been suffering because of him. Which meant . . . which meant . . .
I killed an innocent man.
The thought slammed into my gut like a sledgehammer, and I almost got sick right then and there. But once again, I forced myself to choke down the bile in my throat, even though it burned me like acid from the inside out.
My head was spinning in a hundred different directions, and not only because of the drugged champagne, but I bent down so that I was at eye level with Charlotte. “You go to your room, and you stay in there. You don’t come out until morning, no matter what you hear. Do you understand me?”
“Promise me that you’ll leave,” she said, pulling on my arm and trying to drag me toward the staircase again. “Don’t go talk to him. Just leave. Please. Please, please, please, just leave.”
I shook my head. “I can’t do that, sweetheart. But don’t you worry about me. Sebastian might like to hurt people, but I know how to do it too. See?”
I held my knife up where she could see it again. Charlotte gasped. Her face paled, and a spark of understanding began to burn in her dark gaze.
“You’re the one who killed Papa, aren’t you?” she whispered in a harsh, accusing voice.
I thought that my heart couldn’t possibly break any more, but the hurt, miserable, devastated look in her eyes made what was left of my black, brittle, rotten core shatter into a thousand sharp, splintered shards, each one shredding me from the inside out.
“Yes,” I said simply. “I did.”
I didn’t tell her that I was sorry, even though I was. I didn’t tell her that it was what I did as an assassin. I didn’t tell her that it was simply my own way of surviving and trying to quiet the screams in my own soul. Of trying to protect her the way that I’d so miserably failed to protect Bria all those years ago. In the end, my reasons didn’t matter. All that did matter was that I’d killed her father and that she hated me for it.
But she couldn’t possibly hate me as much as I loathed myself at this moment for taking an innocent man away from the daughter he’d been trying to protect.
Charlotte slowly backed away from me, as if she thought I was going to lunge forward and stab her with my knife. Then she whirled around and darted down the hallway, running away from me as fast as she could, each soft footfall stabbing into my chest like a red-hot poker. I watched her go, my stomach churning, churning, churning with guilt and my heart aching for how much pain I’d caused her.
My head spun around, as that languid fog threatened to take hold of me again, and I staggered back, bumping into the wall and rattling a photo there. Ironically enough, it was a picture of Sebastian in one of his business suits, smiling at the camera, although now his grin seemed more cruel than kind, his expression more smug than happy.
Sebastian . . . Sebastian knew what was going on. He was the one I needed to find, the one I needed to get answers from.
My hand tightened around the hilt of my knife—one way or another.
• • •
I pushed away from the wall and wobbled down the hallway until I reached the library. It wasn’t that far, but I didn’t pass a single soul. No guards, no housekeepers, no stuffy butlers, no one. Noise drifted up from the floor below, though. Clinking dishes, the scrape of furniture, the snap and rustle of garbage bags. The staff must all have been in the ballroom, cleaning up from Sebastian’s soiree.
I passed another set of windows. Through the glass, I could see that most of the cars had vanished, meaning that the party was over and everyone had gone home, like Charlotte had said. That fact only made me more curious about who had stayed behind to meet with Sebastian.
Well, I was going to find out.
It took me longer than it should have, since I was staggering around like a drunken sailor on shore leave, but I eventually reached the library doors. For a moment, I thought about sneaking out one of the windows and trying to cling to the side of the building like I’d done at Dawson’s mansion, but that option was foolish at best. I could barely keep my feet under me. There was no way that I had the strength to hang on to the outside of the building for any length of time, much less pull myself across the stone and over to one of the library windows.
But I didn’t have to, because the doors were wide open, the murmur of voices drifting outside to me. I recognized the deep timbre of Sebastian’s tone, but the voice that responded seemed a bit lighter.
I eased up to the doors and glanced inside, but whoever was in there with Sebastian was deeper in the library. They must be on the right side, gathered around Cesar’s desk—Sebastian’s desk now.
And I was the one who’d made it his.
I eased through the open doors and tiptoed over to the fireplace. I made sure to stay in the shadows as I peered around the corner
of the stone.
Sebastian stood next to the desk, one hip resting on the edge of the antique wood, his legs stretched out in front of him, looking as casual, relaxed, and handsome as ever—if the devil could ever be considered handsome. He held a snifter of brandy in his hand, slowly swirling the amber liquid around and around. He lifted the glass to his nose and drew in a deep, satisfied breath before taking a small sip.
Savoring his victory, in so many ways.
I forced my gaze to move past him to Porter, who was leaning against one of the bookcases in the back of the room, his arms crossed over his chest, standing by like the perfect bodyguard. The giant kept his gaze trained on the person sitting in a chair in front of the desk, his bulky body tense, as though he was on high alert and expecting trouble at any moment.
“Well, I must admit that you’ve pulled this whole thing off quite brilliantly,” a low, throaty voice murmured.
I recognized the voice, and that strange, sinking sense of déjà vu swept over me again.
Mab Monroe stood up and walked over to Sebastian.
22
Mab moved over so that she was standing next to Sebastian. But instead of being intimidated by her, as he’d seemed to be in Dawson’s library, he gave her a smug grin.
“Well, that’s saying a lot, coming from you,” he replied. “Cheers to our new partnership. May it be fruitful . . . in so many ways.”
Sebastian held his glass out, and Mab clinked her brandy snifter against his. Sebastian sidled even closer to her, his smile widening when she tipped her head up instead of taking a step back. I knew that move; I knew that look. He’d given them both to me more than once over the past few weeks. The casual, slightly cocky saunter, the smoldering smile, the deep, dark, liquid stare. I thought I was the only woman Sebastian had ever looked at that way.
I was beginning to realize just how very wrong I was—about a great many things.
Sebastian leaned in even closer, like he was actually going to lower his lips to Mab’s, but she held up her finger, and a single red-hot spark shot up into the air between them like a firecracker. It was enough to make Sebastian flinch and step back.