The woman slid onto the stool next to Silvio, four down from where I was sitting behind the cash register, reading a copy of The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum for my spy-literature class.

“Sorry I’m late,” she murmured to him. “You wouldn’t believe the parking outside. You can’t even get within three blocks of this place right now.”

“That’s quite all right, Ms. Jamison,” Silvio said. “Ms. Blanco was taking a brief break.”

“Call me Jade.” She stared at me. “But she’s going to help me with my problem, right? I mean, that’s what she does now.”

My eyebrows shot up in my face as I looked at Silvio, but he ignored me and sent out one more text before he set his phone aside. “You can explain your situation to Ms. Blanco. It’s up to her to decide if she wants to help you or not.”

Jade Jamison sighed, then slid the sunglasses up so that they swept her blond hair away from her face . . . and revealed the truly spectacular black eye that she was sporting. Somebody had ground his fist into her face—repeatedly.

“So look, I run some girls out in the suburbs,” she started. “A couple of guys too. For the last year, I’ve had a mutually profitable arrangement where all the pimps up there leave me and my folks alone as long as we don’t poach clients from their territory. Only now, one of them, Leroy, says that I have to start paying him protection money. You can see the what else on my face that he gave me when I told him no way.”

“And what do you expect me to do about it?”

Jade rolled her eyes. “You’re Gin Blanco,” she said as if the answer should be obvious. “You kill people.”

I looked at Silvio, but he shrugged. “I’ve been getting calls and texts like this for days now. I thought that I would at least wait until you had reopened the restaurant before we started addressing them.”

“How considerate of you.”

“Listen,” Jade said, leaning forward against the counter, her suit jacket straining to keep from popping open. “People say that you’re the big boss in town, now that Madeline Monroe is dead. I was dealing with her before, trying to get Leroy off my back, but she wasn’t exactly doing anything, you know? So Silvio told me to come on down here, and you’d help me out. I don’t want to make any trouble. I just want Leroy to hold up his end of our agreement. He’d have to do that if you told him to. . . .”

She kept talking about the specifics of their deal, but I was focused on the two most important words she’d said.

Big boss.

Big boss? I wasn’t anybody’s boss, except for the folks who worked at the restaurant. But it sounded like some people had made it seem otherwise. My eyes cut to Silvio, who gave me another what-can-you-do? shrug of his thin shoulders.

I had told everyone in the underworld not to mess with me, and it looked like they’d finally decided to listen. But an entirely different consequence had arisen, one that I hadn’t even seen coming, much less dreamed would ever happen.

My hand crept up to the spider rune necklace around my throat. I’d been wearing it openly, over my T-shirts and other clothes, ever since my duel with Madeline. More than a few folks had stared at the pendant, but no one had dared to comment on it, and I hadn’t thought much about it—or the message others might think that I was sending.

As my fingers curled around the familiar symbol, my gaze locked on the blood-spattered copy of Where the Red Fern Grows up on the wall, and I thought of Fletcher. I wondered if the old man had ever imagined that this would happen. If he’d ever dreamed that it would come to pass. If he’d known all along that this was where the road would take me. That, in a way, I’d set myself up to become the very thing that I’d hated for so long.

Mab fucking Monroe.

The thought punched me in the gut, but that didn’t make it any less true. Mab had been the queen of the underworld, and now it looked like I was too. It wasn’t something that I’d wanted or had strived for or had ever even hoped for. I had enough worries of my own. I didn’t need to mediate others’ problems too. Or whatever Mab had done to solve disputes.

But this wasn’t the time for such philosophical musings, so I forced myself to relax my fingers, let go of my spider rune, and drop my hand back down to the counter.

“So are you going to help me or not?” Jade snapped, realizing that I wasn’t paying attention to her.

I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what to say right now.

She looked back and forth between me and Silvio, let out a disgusted snort, and hopped to her feet. “Terrific,” she snarled. “So I drove all the way down here for nothing and left my folks alone and defenseless. You’re just as useless as Madeline was.”

Jade whirled around to stomp away.

Silvio arched his eyebrows at me. “Somebody has to step up,” he said in a soft voice. “Or things will get worse. People will die.”

And you’ve been elected. He didn’t say the words, but we both knew that they were true. Just like I knew that if Jade Jamison confronted Leroy again, he would most likely beat her to death, when all she was trying to do was protect the people she cared about. And that made my decision for me, the way it always did.

“Wait,” I called out. “Come back, sit down, and tell me what happened.”

Jade stopped and gave me a suspicious look.

I pointed at the stool she’d just left. “Please.”

That made her eyes narrow a little more, but she slowly walked back over and resumed her seat. I touched my spider rune pendant one more time, then leaned my elbows down on the counter, giving her my full attention.

As she started telling me about her problem, I realized that the Pork Pit wasn’t the only thing open for business again.

The Spider was too.