The Spider

13

Sebastian finished his food, seeming a little happier than before.

As he ate, I finished shutting down the restaurant, forcing myself to calm down and rein in my racing heart and raging hormones. I’d never considered myself the kind of person to be swept away by either pure emotion or physical attraction, much less give in to either one of them—unlike Finn and his constant, endless, shameless parade of girls—but I’d been in real danger of doing that with Sebastian. It was a bit troubling, how much he affected me. And how much I longed to just give in and enjoy everything he could offer me.

When he was done, I gathered up the dirty plates and stuck them into one of the sinks to wash in the morning. Sebastian insisted on paying me for the meal, and I tucked his money into a slot under the cash register.

Then we stood by the counter, not sure what to do.

“Thank you,” Sebastian said. “For everything, but especially for listening.” He ran his hand through his hair again. “With my dad and everything that’s been going on, I’ve just felt . . . numb the last few days. Lost, alone, adrift. I wanted to feel, I needed to feel something tonight. Like somebody cared about me and what I was going through.”

“And you came here? Why?”

He looked at me. “Because I had more fun talking with you at that dinner and then here again at the restaurant than I can remember having with anyone in a long time. I think it’s your smile. When you look at me, it feels like . . . your smile just lights up something inside me.”

My heart swelled with pleasure at his words—even as my stomach clenched with guilt.

“I know tonight wasn’t what either one of us had in mind—” he began.

“It was perfect,” I cut in. “Absolutely perfect.”

Sebastian’s eyes crinkled with warmth and gratitude. He nodded at me, then dropped his gaze from mine and cleared his throat, as if he was feeling all of the same emotions that I was.

Well, all of them except the guilt.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I’d still like to take you out on that date. If you’ll have me.”

Once again, my mouth gaped open in surprise. He was hurting, he was grieving, and he was still considerate enough to think about a promise that he’d made to me, a girl he barely knew. More emotion surged through me, even softer, warmer, and more intense than what I’d felt when we’d kissed. Because that sort of thoughtfulness was rare, something to be admired and treasured.

There were so many reasons I should say no to him. So many reasons I should have shown him the door the second he’d arrived. So many reasons I shouldn’t have kissed him. But none of them seemed to matter right now—nothing did but the hope shining in Sebastian’s eyes.

“A date would be great,” I said in a soft voice.

He sighed in relief, as if there had been some doubt about my answer. “Great. Pick you up here Monday night at seven? Just like we planned before?”

I nodded, too unsure of myself to say anything.

He reached out and squeezed my hand. “It’s a date, then. But right now, I should be getting home. Charlotte’s probably wondering what’s happened to me.”

“Of course.”

He tightened his grip on my hand. “But there’s one more thing I need to do before I go.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“This.”

Sebastian grinned and drew me into his arms for another kiss.

I didn’t get home until late that night, and I couldn’t keep the small, silly grin off my face or quiet my soft, nonsensical hums of happiness as I parked my car in the driveway, got out, and headed for the porch. After we’d kissed again, Sebastian had left the restaurant, promising to pick me up Monday evening for our date. I couldn’t wait to see him again.

All I had to do in the meantime was sell Fletcher on the idea.

Seeing the house rising up out of the dark and knowing the battle that waited for me inside finally dampened my good mood. The front door was stuck again because of the humidity, annoying me even more, and I had to put my shoulder into it to shove it open. The resulting screech made me wince. Maybe Fletcher should replace the door with that black granite one he wanted. It would be worth it not to blast my own eardrums every time I tried to get inside.

I locked the door behind me, dropped my keys into a crystal bowl on a table inside the foyer, and toed off my boots. Then I headed to the back of the house, where a couple of lights burned. Looked like Fletcher had waited up for me. I sighed. More often than not, he wouldn’t go to bed until I was home, despite the fact that I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself—and killing anyone who was stupid enough to try to rob me when I was working late at the restaurant.

Sure enough, I found Fletcher sitting on the sofa in the den, with his blue work clothes still on and his white-socked feet stretched out on the battered coffee table in front of him. He was reading a book, although the TV was also on, tuned to some old western that he’d turned the volume down low on.

I plopped down onto one of the recliners. Fletcher kept right on reading his book. For the better part of a minute, the only sound was the steady creak-creak-creak of my chair, punctuated by an occasional crack-crack-crack of gunfire from the cowboys on TV. But for once, I didn’t mind waiting for him to speak. It gave me time to shore up my own arguments.

“You’re late,” Fletcher finally said, and turned another page in his book. “I thought you’d be here an hour ago.”

I drew in a breath, ready to spin my story. “Sebastian came into the restaurant right as I was closing up.”

That was enough to make him look up from his book. “What did he want?”

“To say that he was sorry that he didn’t keep our date last night.”

I told Fletcher everything that Sebastian had said, from his talk of his father’s funeral to trying to make sure that Charlotte was okay to his need to escape from all of the mourners who had gathered at the Vaughn mansion. The only thing I edited out was the fact that Sebastian and I had kissed. The old man definitely did not need to know about that. He’d claim that I was getting too emotionally involved with Sebastian. Maybe I was, but I could handle it.

I could handle anything as the Spider.

“He asked me out again,” I finished up. “For Monday night.”

Now came the tricky part. “I thought that I would go out with him, just to see if I can find out what he knows about the police investigation into his father’s murder and to make sure there’s nothing that can lead back to us. But I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

A half-truth, at best. I would carefully nose around and see what information I could get out of Sebastian about the investigation, just to make sure that Fletcher and I were in the clear. But sometime between leaving the Pork Pit and walking into the den, I’d decided that I was seeing Sebastian again, with or without Fletcher’s approval. I wanted to make sure that Sebastian was okay. I wanted to see him smile and laugh. But most of all, I wanted him to look at me again the way he had right before he’d kissed me tonight, like he was as desperately consumed by this bright flare of attraction between us as I was.

Still, I kept my face schooled into a calm, bland mask, as though it didn’t matter to me whether I went out with Sebastian. Even though it very much did.

Instead of looking at me, Fletcher dropped his green gaze to his book. Thinking. I curled my hands into loose fists, pressing my fingers against the spider rune scars in my palms, to keep from fidgeting. The marks might be the symbol for patience, but having them branded into my hands didn’t automatically give me that particular skill. Not even close.

Being patient was something that I still struggled with, whether it was as Gin Blanco, waiting on a customer to finally make up his mind about his order in the Pork Pit, or as the Spider, holding my position until my target was in exactly the right spot. It was probably the thing that Fletcher and I argued about the most. He said that patience was one of the most important skills for an assassin to have, and he was always telling me to slow down, wait, and let events unfold in my favor, to be absolutely sure of what I was doing before I went all in and committed myself wholeheartedly.

Well, I was sure now, so I dug my nails into the silverstone in my skin and held my tongue, waiting for him to say his piece.

After about three minutes, Fletcher finally nodded. “That might be a smart idea,” he said. “You going out with Sebastian and seeing what he knows.”

I blinked. That wasn’t what I’d expected him to say—not at all. I’d thought that he would warn me to keep my distance from Sebastian. Maybe Fletcher finally realized that I could keep my emotions in check. Maybe he was finally fully trusting me to see a job through to the end, despite the unexpected complications that had come up. Maybe the old man finally understood that I was all grown up and capable of making my own decisions. That I was my own person now and not just the lost little girl he’d trained in his own image.

“Especially since I still haven’t been able to find out what was in that file that cop gave Vaughn,” Fletcher finished his thought. “I got my hands on a copy of the evidence logs, but there’s no mention of it being in the safe at Vaughn’s office or of the police cataloging it as part of their investigation. In fact, there wasn’t any mention of anything being in the safe. It’s like the file just . . . disappeared.”

Ah, so that’s what he was up to. His sources hadn’t been able to come up with the information he wanted, so he was willing to let me see if I could get it from Sebastian instead. Nothing bothered Fletcher more than loose ends and unanswered questions. I might not be as patient as he thought I should be, but he was more curious than a basket full of kittens exploring the world for the very first time. Still, I didn’t mind him wanting me to track down the file, since I was going to use it as an excuse to see Sebastian again.

“But you found the cop, right?” I asked. “The one who gave Vaughn the file? Can’t you just bribe him and ask him what he found?”

Fletcher shook his head. “Yeah, it wasn’t too hard to locate him, since you got his first name and his hometown, but I’m afraid it’s a little more complicated than that. The cop, Harry Coolidge, isn’t from around here. He works down in a town called Blue Marsh, near Savannah. From what I know, Coolidge is a smart, honest, decent cop. He won’t take any sort of bribe, and he’d start asking questions about how I even knew about the file. So that option is out.”

Fletcher hesitated, as if he was choosing his next words carefully.

“Coolidge has a reputation for being thorough and tenacious, a good investigator who can find clues that others miss. If Vaughn hired him to look into the terrace collapse, maybe even someone who was involved in the construction, it’s because that person was dirty—and clever enough to hide whatever he’d done.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll find a way to see if Sebastian has any information about the file. Maybe the cops let him go ahead and empty out the safe since he was next of kin. He might have the file buried in a stack somewhere and not even know it.”

“Maybe.”

Fletcher’s lips puckered, his nose scrunched up, and his eyes grew dark and distant, as if he was working through some sort of mental jigsaw puzzle and trying to make the pieces fit together in his head. But he shook off his thoughts and focused his attention on me again.

“All right. Feel Sebastian out during your date, and see if he knows anything about the file, where it is, or what Coolidge was looking into for Cesar. I’ll keep digging with my own sources.”

“You got it.”

His green gaze locked with my gray one. “But be careful, Gin. There’s something about this whole situation that’s still not sitting right with me. This thing could still go sideways on us.”

“Always.”

Satisfied for now, Fletcher went back to his book. Our powwow complete, I got to my feet and headed toward the hallway, ready to go upstairs, take a shower, and slip into bed. I reached the doorway and stopped, wondering if I should tell him that I had more than a casual interest in Sebastian, that finding out what he knew about his father’s file wasn’t the only reason that I wanted to see him again.

But I decided not to. It was one date, and Sebastian could still turn out to be a toad, like all the other rich guys who hit on me at parties. And if he wasn’t, if he was the person he’d been so far, the one who seemed so genuinely interested in me . . . well, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

“Gin? You need something else?” Fletcher’s soft voice snapped me out of my thoughts.

I glanced over my shoulder at him and shook my head. “Nah. I just realized that I forgot to say good night. So . . . good night.”

“Good night.”

Fletcher focused on his book again. I stared at him, ignoring the guilty twinges in my chest. If he had looked up at that moment, I might have spilled my guts about my feelings for Sebastian and confessed everything to him.

But the old man turned a page, thoroughly engrossed in his story.

So I let out a soft, relieved sigh, left the den, and headed upstairs for the night.