“Good,” I said. “Now, I want you to think back. This new club that Mab’s opening, the one the vampire said that Natasha could be the star of. Did you hear the men say anything else about it? Where it was going to be? When it was going to open? Anything at all?”
“Why do you care?” Vinnie said. “She’s not your daughter. You don’t even know her — or me.”
No, I didn’t know Vinnie or his daughter. Didn’t know them the least little bit or really care to. But I knew exactly what the Ice elemental was going through right now. All the emotions that he was feeling — and how helpless they all made him.
Instead of telling him that I understood what it was like to lose your family, I just stared at Vinnie, my mouth a flat line in my face. “Humor me.”
Still, something of my pain must have flickered in my eyes, because after a moment, Vinnie slowly nodded his head.
“All right,” he said. “Two nights after LaFleur first approached me, she told me to meet her at Underwood’s before my shift started. She was there eating dinner with a couple of giants, Mab Monroe, and Jonah McAllister.”
Underwood’s was one of Ashland’s most exclusive restaurants — a place that Mab liked to frequent, along with her lawyer, Jonah McAllister. Someone else I’d been having problems with recently.
“Anyway, I went inside, but LaFleur didn’t want to see me right away, so I had to hang out by the bar for a while. But their table was close by, and I heard them talking. It’s true. Mab is opening up her own nightclub. Some kind of underground place where anything goes—anything. Kids, cutting up women, whatever sick things that people would pay for. Mab kept saying how it was time for Northern Aggression to disappear — for good.”
My gaze cut to Roslyn. The vampire sat on the couch, a hard look on her face, but I could see the worry flickering in her eyes. Northern Aggression was her livelihood, the way that she supported herself, her sister, Lisa, and young niece, Catherine, the way that Roslyn was providing a better life for them. Not to mention all the people who worked for her. All the vamps who might be hooking on the streets in the midst of all the dangers connected with that profession in Ashland, instead of being in the safer environment that Roslyn provided.
It wasn’t hard to realize what Mab’s reasoning was. Roslyn was at the center of Elliot Slater’s death, and the press has painted her as the tragic victim, the way that she really was. All that meant that the Fire elemental couldn’t touch Roslyn right now, not with the Ashland news media still focused on the incident. It would just be too messy, even for Mab, especially given the fact that she also had me, the Spider, to deal with. So the Fire elemental had decided to go after Roslyn another way — by destroying her business. And Vinnie and Natasha had been caught in the middle of it all.
“So you don’t know where the club might be?” I asked Vinnie.
The Ice elemental shook his head. “No. Only that Mab plans to start it soon. From the way things sounded, she’s hired LaFleur to run it, as well as oversee her men.”
So LaFleur wasn’t just in Ashland to find and kill me. It looked as though the other assassin was also coming on board as Mab’s newest top lieutenant — a position formerly held by the late, unlamented Elliot Slater.
“Finn?” I asked.
My foster brother leaned against one of the salon walls. He’d put his gun away, but he was still sipping his coffee. The warm, fragrant, chicory blend drifted over to me.
I thought of his old man then and how he’d helped people on the sly for years, even when he was working as the assassin the Tin Man. My mind had already been made up, of course, but thinking of Fletcher comforted me. I could almost see him behind the counter at the Pork Pit, nodding his head in approval of what I was about to do.
“Yeah?” Finn asked.
“Start digging and see what you can find out about this new nightclub. The name, where it might be located, anything useful.”
If there was anyone who could ferret out the information in a hurry, it was Finn. In addition to his banking skills, he also had a network of anonymous spies and sources that any clandestine agency would be proud of. And if his spies couldn’t find something out for him, Finn was more than capable of hacking into whatever computer system contained the knowledge he needed.
Finn nodded. “I’m on it.”
I turned to look at Roslyn and Xavier. “You two need to be extremely careful right now. We know about Vinnie, but there’s no telling who else Mab and LaFleur might have bribed on your staff. You need to discreetly nose around and figure out who you can trust and who you can’t.”
Roslyn and Xavier both nodded.
“Don’t worry, Gin,” Roslyn said. “After what Elliot Slater did to me, anybody who’s working on the sly for Mab is getting booted out on her ass.”
Next, I looked at Jo-Jo. “You know that Vinnie’s going to need a place to stay out of sight until we can get this thing sorted out.”
The dwarf smiled at me, the lines deepening on her middle-aged face. “It’s a good thing that I’ve got plenty of extra bedrooms then, isn’t it?”
Vinnie glanced at me, then the others. “What’s going on? What are you all talking about?”
I stared at him. “I’m talking about you staying here where you’ll be safe, Vinnie. I’m talking about getting you out from under Mab’s and LaFleur’s heavy thumbs. I’m talking about rescuing your daughter from whatever hellhole Mab has got her stashed in. That’s what I’m talking about.”
Vinnie’s mouth fell open in shock. He blinked several times, as though he was thinking about speaking but the words just wouldn’t come to him.
“Do you want me to do that?” I asked. “Do you want me to find your daughter? Because I was under the impression that you cared about her — a lot.”
“You — you would do that for me? Try to find Natasha?” Hope brightened Vinnie’s pale blue gaze.
Hope. An emotion that always kept suckering me in, time after time, despite my supposed retirement from the assassin business. Hope. The one thing that always seemed to get me into more trouble than just killing people for money ever had. Ah, hope. Sometimes, I really hated it.
“Yes.”
Vinnie blinked again, and suspicion darkened his eyes. “But why would you do that? Nobody does something like that for free, and I–I don’t have any money to pay you. But I can get some,” he hurried to add. “I can get however much you want. I promise you that I can.”
“I don’t want your money, Vinnie. I have more of my own than I can ever spend.”
The Ice elemental frowned at the harsh tone in my voice, but I couldn’t be any gentler with him. I couldn’t get his hopes up any higher than they were. Not until I found Natasha and saw exactly what had been done to her.
“As for why I would do something like this, well, there are a lot of reasons,” I continued. “But mainly, because it seems to be what I do now. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not promising you kittens and rainbows. Mab’s men have had Natasha for hours already. There’s no telling what kind of shape she’s in. Do you understand what that means? How hurt she could be? Inside and out? Even if we find her, even if we get her back, she might never be the same little girl that you knew and loved before. Can you handle that? Can you give her the help that she’s going to need?”
Vinnie closed his eyes a moment, but he slowly nodded.
“All right then,” I said. “I’ll find your daughter. I’ll find Natasha. And if I can’t do that or if she’s already dead when I get to her, then I promise you one thing — that the people who took her will wish for their own deaths long before I am through with them. How does that sound to you?”