“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.”