Deadly Sting

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 her. She should have put you down just for that.”

“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 too-smooth skin.

“Then there was Owen,” I continued. “Since you were in charge of the gala, you knew exactly who was coming. When you saw his name on the guest list, you realized you could force him to help Clementine open the vault. Plus, you would never pass up a chance to hurt my friends and family. No doubt, you told Clementine to kill Owen immediately after he opened the vault for her.”

McAllister shrugged. “You’d taken away my son. So yes, I wanted you dead, but I wanted the rest of your band of miscreants to suffer too. Killing Grayson seemed like an ideal way to do that, and I was going to make it look like he was working with Clementine the whole time. Just think of the problems that would have created for that sister of his. Everyone in Ashland would have been pounding on her door, demanding to know what her brother did with all of that stolen art. It would have been amusing to watch.”

The brandy really must have bolstered his courage, because he was actually bragging—bragging about how he’d planned to hurt the people that I loved. Rage pulsed through my body. It had been bad enough that he’d put Owen in the line of fire, but to frame him after the fact . . . it almost made me rethink my plan for McAllister.

Almost.

“But the most interesting thing is exactly why you hired Clementine and her crew to break into the vault,” I continued. “That’s the really fascinating thing about all of this—what you wanted her to steal.”

I reached down. McAllister tensed, but I wasn’t going for one of my knives. Instead, I pulled the ebony tube out of a pocket on the front of my vest. I set it on the desk and scooted it forward, then turned it so he could see the sunburst rune glinting on the side.

“When I first went into the vault, I had no idea what Clementine was after,” I said. “There were lots of treasures in there. Art, jewelry, paintings worth tens of millions. But all she wanted—all you wanted—was this. You didn’t want anything else from the museum, not even the jewels that Clementine took from the partygoers. No, all you were after—all you needed—was this one little tube.”

McAllister’s face pinched even tighter than before, the flush in his cheeks taking on a fiery tomato tint, and I could tell that he was struggling to control himself. So I decided to be a good guest and answer his silent questions.

“It took me a few minutes, but I figured out how to open it,” I said. “And I know what’s inside. In fact, I’ve spent the last few days reading and rereading Mab’s will. Quite a bit shorter than I thought it would be. But fascinating all the same for what it says—and what it doesn’t.”

“And what do you think you’ve figured out from it?” he sneered.

“Why you wanted Mab’s will so badly,” I replied. “I must say I’m a little shocked that she didn’t leave you a little something-something for all your years of loyal service. But you aren’t mentioned in the will at all. She didn’t leave you a nickel’s worth of anything. No cash, no land, no personal property. Not even so much as a silverstone pen or a cheap gold watch. No wonder you were so pissed.”

McAllister stared at the tube, his cold, furious gaze locked onto the sunburst rune. “You have no idea what it was like working for her. Being at her beck and call night and day for years—years. Constantly knowing that one wrong word, one wrong move, and she’d kill me with her Fire magic right where I stood with no warning and no sympathy. Mab wasn’t even particularly clever. She was just strong. All that power, all that magic, all that money. She could have done so much with it. But she never could think big enough.”

I’d thought Mab had dreamed plenty big, since she’d practically run Ashland, but I didn’t contradict McAllister. Even he had a right to rant here at the end.

“But you know what the really ironic thing is? Mab actually had me draw up that will. I guess she thought she’d be around a lot longer than I would. Elementals.” He snorted. “They all think that they’re so much better than the rest of us. So much stronger, so much more powerful. But they die just like everyone else does.”

He let out a dark laugh. “You definitely proved that to Mab.”

I shrugged.

He raised his brandy glass to me. “I should thank you for that. For killing that bitch. For finally freeing me from her. I would have been content to do just that. Live and let live, if you will—if you hadn’t killed my son.”

McAllister moved to the end of the bar, reached down, and picked up a photo from a nearby table. A younger, larger, beefier version of himself stared out from beneath the glass—his son, Jake. McAllister stared at the photo a moment before setting it back down on the table. He nudged it with his index finger, making sure it was in exactly the same spot as before.

“Admittedly, Jake was an idiot and a colossal screwup. He wasn’t worth all of the money I wasted bailing him out of one scrape after another over the years. But nobody fucks with a McAllister—not even you.”

I tipped my head, telling him that I understood his sentiment. You didn’t have anything, you weren’t worth anything, if you couldn’t protect your friends and family. But if you did fail them, the only thing left to do was get retribution. And in a place like Ashland, that was only paid out in one way: in blood.

“I have to admit that I was still a bit confused after I found the will,” I said. “I wondered who would hire Clementine to steal it. At first, I thought that maybe it was the mysterious M. M. Monroe who was mentioned in it, but then I realized that he or she had no reason to swipe the will, since Mab had left everything to him or her already. That led me back to you, Jonah. Although I wondered at the show you had Clementine put on. Why not quietly break into the vault after hours and steal the will? But then I remembered something Finn had said about the will being made public during the gala. You had to get the will before that happened, but you didn’t want anyone to know what you were really after. The heist was the perfect cover for that. I imagine part of it was also payback.”

“You’re damn right it was payback,” McAllister muttered. “Ever since Mab’s death, everyone in the underworld’s been thumbing their noses at me. Well, they weren’t laughing at the museum, were they?”

“No. Nobody was laughing.”

McAllister brooded into his brandy for a few seconds before raising his head to me again. “So tell me the rest of it. Why do you think I wanted the will?”

“Oh, the answer to that is simple: because you’ve been embezzling money from Mab for years.”

He froze, shocked that his dirty little secret was finally out in the open after being buried for so long. For a moment, panic flared in his eyes, and his gaze flicked toward the doorway as if he expected Mab to storm inside and roast him on the spot for his betrayal. After a moment, he seemed to snap back to reality, because he laughed again, the sound even darker and harsher than before. But there was another emotion mixed in with all of the ugliness: relief. I wondered if it was because Mab was dead and couldn’t hurt him or that he could finally share his secret with someone—even if that someone was me.

When his laughter finally faded away, I continued with my story.

“You see, when I started putting it all together, it only made sense that you would steal the will. You were Mab’s lawyer, so of course you drew up it for her. That also meant that you knew exactly what was in it,” I said. “So after I read it, I figured there was something you didn’t want M. M. Monroe to find out about Mab’s estate—something you’d done. Embezzlement seemed like just the sort of thing you’d want to cover up, so I had Finn do some checking. He said you hid your tracks very well but not quite well enough. Exactly how much have you skimmed from Mab over the years?”

He sighed. “Close to thirty million. With my investments, I’ve grown it into more than fifty. And it wasn’t easy—it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. That woman watched her money like a hawk, wanting to know where every little penny went. She had hundreds of millions at her disposal, and I still had to send her receipts for every dime I spent. Miserly bitch.”

I wanted to point out that Mab had had good reason to be suspicious, given how much he’d swindled from her, but I graciously kept that thought to myself.

And now came the final question I had, the one thing that I most wanted an answer to. But I kept my voice light and casual. No sense in tipping him off about how important it was to me. It would be just like the lawyer to pick up on that and decide to mess with me, especially since he thought he had nothing to lose now.

“So who is the mysterious M. M. Monroe?” I asked. “The one you’ve gone to so much trouble to avoid.”

For several seconds, the only sound was the tick-tick-tick of the grandfather clock. McAllister stared into the amber depths of his brandy. Brooding again. Just when I was about to ask the question a little more forcefully, he frowned and finally raised his eyes to mine.

“That’s the problem,” he grumbled. “I don’t actually know. Mab kept whoever it is a secret even from me.”

I watched him, studying his body language and listening to the tone and inflection of his words, but McAllister seemed to be telling the truth. His voice would have been sly instead of shaky, his eyes bright instead of dark, his posture confident instead of defeated, if he’d been lying. He really didn’t know who Mab had left her millions to. Troubling, to say the least.

“But now you know why I had to act,” he said. “Because if this person is anything like Mab, well, things will not go so well for me.”

“No,” I said. “I imagine the theft of millions of dollars would greatly upset anyone who came to Ashland looking to lay claim to his or her inheritance.”

He sniffed. “Theft? Please. It wasn’t like Mab didn’t owe me that money anyway, given the pittance she paid me. Not as hard as I worked for her. Not after all the things I did for her. Not after all the things she made me watch her do.” He shuddered at that last thought and the memories that came with it.

I didn’t feel sorry for McAllister—not one little bit. Yes, he had worked for a monster, had seen Mab do terrible things, and had been afraid that she might take her fiery wrath out on him at any moment. But like he’d said, he’d also done terrible things himself along the way. Besides, he could have always walked—or run—away. Left Mab, left town, gone someplace where nobody knew who he was or what he’d done. But instead, he’d stayed in Ashland all these years, enjoying all the bloody benefits of being Mab’s lackey. McAllister wasn’t upset that I’d killed the Fire elemental. He’d had no real affection for or loyalty to her. No, he was just pissed that people didn’t kowtow and cower when he walked by these days.

McAllister didn’t like the fact that no one was afraid of him like they had been of her.

“Well, I have to admit that it was a good plan,” I said. “Rob everyone who’s been thumbing their noses at you, tie up Mab’s estate for as long as possible so you could steal even more from it before you finally skipped town, murder me on the side. I’ll give you credit, Jonah. You always give it your all. Why, in your own way, you’re even more devious than Mab was.”

“I would have gotten away with it too,” he muttered again. “If not for that damn dress. Who the hell in Northtown sells two dresses exactly alike? Don’t they know how gauche that is?”

Well, I guessed Finn wasn’t the only man in Ashland who had a strange interest in women’s fashion. My lips twitched, but I held back my laughter. At least I wasn’t the only one who saw the irony of the situation. This time, it had actually worked in my favor.

McAllister pushed away his brandy glass and dropped his right hand down behind the bar. He straightened up to his full height and gave me a cold, sinister glare. “Very well done, Gin. Really. Quite impressive, how you put everything together. And all this time, I thought that you were just a coldhearted bitch. I didn’t realize that you actually had a brain in that ruthless little head of yours.”

I grinned. “What can I say? I’m full of surprises.”

He gave me a thin smile. “And so am I.”

McAllister raised his hand out from behind the bar, a gun glinting in his fingers.