She didn’t bother to answer.

“Knowing that I have to be vigilant, that I have to be on my guard every single minute of every single day for the rest of my life,” I snarled. “I have to be prepared. I have to be ready—always. But the people who want to kill me? They just have to get lucky once, for one measly second, and it’s lights out for me. So forgive me for trying to get out of one situation without some bloodshed today.”

Bria looked at me, anger still pinching her face, before she glanced at Finn, who was making yet another mojito.

“You’ve been awfully quiet through all of this. Don’t tell me that the great Finnegan Lane doesn’t have something to say.” Her voice took on a mocking note.

Finn looked back and forth between Bria and me. He shook his head, not wanting to take sides. I didn’t blame him. No one was going to win this argument.

Bria snorted in disgust before turning her attention back to me. “Well, do you know what I’m tired of, Gin? The fact that you never trust me to do my job.”

“You’re a good cop. I’ve never said otherwise.”

“No, but you don’t think that I can protect Catalina from Benson,” she accused. “You’ve definitely said that.”

“Only because Benson won’t fight fair. You know he has other cops on his payroll, cops who will sell you out to him in a heartbeat.”

“And you don’t think I can handle them or Benson. Not like you can.”

“No,” I said, my voice as soft as hers was loud. “Not like I can.”

Bria gave me another disgusted look. She opened her mouth, but her phone started ringing, saving us both from whatever harsh thing she’d been about to say. She pulled it out of her jeans pocket and looked at the screen. Her mouth twisted.

“Well, duty calls,” she said, holding the phone up to her ear. “Detective Coolidge.”

Then my baby sister whirled around and stormed out of Northern Aggression without another word.

14

Finn drained the rest of his mojito, grabbed his jacket, and mumbled something about checking in with his contacts, since he was still digging into several things for me, including Catalina, where her money was coming from, and the two mystery women from the Pork Pit. I slugged down my own gin and tonic in response. Finn squeezed my shoulder, and then we both left the club. Neither one of us was in the mood for conversation right now.

I walked over to the alley where I’d parked my car, got in, and started driving, trying to clear my head.

I wound up in the mountains above Ashland, in a park that was part of the Bone Mountain Nature Preserve, sitting on top of a blue fiberglass picnic table and staring out at the sweeping view of the rocky slopes. And I wasn’t alone. Several couples were picnicking at the other tables, while others stood behind the stone wall that cordoned off the grassy park from the steep drop, their cameras click-click-clicking away as they snapped shots of the glorious mix of red, orange, and yellow leaves that painted the mountainsides.

The last time I’d been here, the police had been using the park as a staging area so they could hike up to the camp where Harley Grimes, his sister, Hazel, and their gang of miscreants had lived before the Deveraux sisters and I had killed them. I thought about that day at Jo-Jo’s salon, when Bria had said she wanted to talk to me about something right before Grimes and his men had stormed inside. I’d been so distracted by rescuing Sophia that I’d forgotten all about my own sister. I should have remembered that Bria had been trying to tell me something. I should have asked her about it after things had calmed down.

Maybe if I had, Bria wouldn’t be hurting, and I wouldn’t be so angry at her.

Yeah, she’d lost her informant, but that was no excuse to lash out at the rest of us. Bria was being all pissy with us when all we were trying to do was get her to take a breath and think about things. But she was so hell-bent on going after Benson that she couldn’t see that. Well, if she wanted me to stay out of her way, then fine. I was out. Done. Finished. She could go after him however she saw fit, law or no law. I didn’t care anymore.

At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

Despite the lovely view of the mountains, I was too restless and too worried about too many things to sit still for long, so after about half an hour of brooding, I got into my car and headed home, hoping that a hot meal would improve my mood, if not my situation.

Thirty minutes later, I crested the ridge that led up to Fletcher’s house, expecting the driveway in front of the house to be empty, but a car was sitting in my usual spot—a black Audi.

My eyes narrowed, and I thought back to the Audi I’d seen on the street outside the parking garage last night. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t the same car, since this one was actually a dark navy instead of a true black. Also, the windows weren’t tinted, letting me glimpse something very familiar, distinctive, and slightly disturbing dangling from the rearview mirror: one of the sparkly blue and pink pins shaped like the Pork Pit’s pig logo that Sophia had ordered for the waitstaff to wear.

But the most interesting thing wasn’t the pin or the car but who they belonged to. At the sound of my vehicle rumbling up the driveway, a figure got up out of the rocking chair he’d been perched in. His hand went to his gray tie, smoothing it down as he stepped to the edge of the porch.

Silvio Sanchez.

I was so surprised that I lifted my foot off the gas, and the car stalled in a thick patch of gravel. I let the tires churn, my gaze snapping from the woods to the left of the house, across the yard, and over to the ridge at the far right side of the clearing. But I didn’t see any other vamps lurking in the trees, waiting in the Audi, or peeking around the corners of the house. If Benson had ordered his men to take me out, there would have been at least a dozen of them here, too many for all of them to hide, but I didn’t spot so much as a shiver of movement. Silvio appeared to have come alone, which only made me more curious—and wary—about what he wanted.

So I put my foot down on the gas again, breaking free of the gravel pit, and parked. I palmed a knife and got out of my car.

I approached him slowly, my eyes sweeping over the porch where he’d been sitting, wondering if he might have planted a bomb there, if this was in fact some sort of half-assed assassination attempt. But the chairs and tables were exactly as I had left them, except for the one Silvio had gotten out of, which was still rocking—a chair that now had a fat manila file folder lying on the seat. He must have brought that with him, although I couldn’t imagine what sort of information it might contain.

I stopped a few feet away from the porch and stared at the vampire. He lifted his chin and returned my gaze with an unreadable expression of his own. I had a good poker face, but Silvio’s was even better than mine. Then again, it wouldn’t be smart to let your emotions show around Benson, lest he rip them right out of you.

Since Silvio wasn’t giving anything away, I stepped even closer to him, turning my knife so that light glinted off the blade and flashed into his eyes, to see if that would crack his calm façade. He squinted, his lips puckered, and his gaze fell to my weapon. I started rubbing my thumb over the hilt of my knife, still trying to rattle him. But instead of looking concerned, he simply sighed and squared his shoulders, as if my carving him up was inevitable.

Maybe it was.

“Silvio.”

“Ms. Blanco.”

We stared at each other. In the woods in the distance, the chirp-chirp-chirp of birds hushed, and the rabbits rustling around in the underbrush stilled and burrowed down into the leaves. The animals could feel the tension in the air, and they didn’t want any part of it.

Silvio cleared his throat, and his hand smoothed down his tie again, lingering on the pin glinting in the middle of the fabric, a B with two pointed fangs sticking out the ends of it. Benson’s rune. I liked the Pork Pit pig logo far better.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” he said.

“Not at all,” I deadpanned. “I was expecting someone to show up to try to kill me today. Did you draw the short straw among Benson’s men?”

Silvio sighed again and raised his eyes skyward, as if he found my comments childish. Didn’t much matter to me. At this point, he was lucky that he was still breathing and not bleeding out all over the porch.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I wanted to apologize once again for what happened at Northern Aggression. Roslyn is an acquaintance of mine, and I deeply regret scaring her.”

“Oh, I don’t think it was you so much as it was your boss.”

A faint wince creased his middle-aged features. “I tried to persuade him to approach you some other way, but Beau enjoys the little dramas he creates.”

“Like what he did to Derrick? Because that was certainly quite the floor show.”

For the first time, true emotion flickered in Silvio’s eyes. And unless I was mistaken, it almost looked like . . . grief. His nostrils flared, his lip curled up, and his jaw clenched tight, indicating that there was more than a little anger and disgust mixed in with his pain. And I suddenly realized why Silvio had been so tense at the club when Benson had killed Derrick.

Silvio realized that I’d seen the chink in his armor. He blinked, and his face became perfectly blank once more.

“As I said before, Beau enjoys drama,” he said, his voice tight.

“You cared about him—Derrick.”

“We went out a few times. He was nice. Anyway, that’s all over with now.”

Silvio shrugged, as if to dismiss their relationship as nothing special, but his entire body stayed stiff and rigid. I sensed that there was a lot more to his feelings for Derrick than his casual words, but Silvio wasn’t about to share that with me. I doubted that he shared much of anything with anyone. He’d been around Benson too long and was too used to keeping everything he was really feeling buried deep down inside where the vamp wouldn’t sense it.

“It’s only over because Benson wanted to show off to me,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

And I truly was. Sure, Derrick had screwed up by letting me slip past him, but Benson had to have known the chance of that happening was high. Like he’d said, I didn’t have my reputation as the Spider for nothing. No, Benson had killed his own man simply because he’d wanted to. He’d wanted to rattle me, wanted to make me worry about what he might do to Bria, and me too, and Derrick had been unfortunate enough to be his demonstration, with Silvio being forced to witness the death of someone he cared about.

“Yes, well, you know quite a bit about loss yourself, don’t you?” Silvio murmured. “Murdered parents, murdered mentor, and then, of course, all the people you’ve killed yourself. Death seems to follow you around, Ms. Blanco.”

I grinned, but the expression was sharper than the knife in my hand. “Maybe because he knows that I’ll be leaving behind a lot of folks for him to escort over to the other side.”

Silvio’s mouth quirked in thought. “I wouldn’t take you for a believer in such mythology.”

“I read a lot.”

He studied me again, but I kept my face smooth and easy, waiting him out. I didn’t know what kind of game Silvio was playing, but I was determined to beat him at it. One minute ticked by, then two, then three . . . and still, neither one of us moved, spoke, or did anything other than breathe. Finally, Silvio blinked.

“I wanted to warn you not to trust Beau,” he said. “He may have offered you a truce today, but he won’t live up to his end of the deal tomorrow. He’ll keep sending men after you, trying to kill you.”

“No, really?” I deadpanned again. “Because he struck me as being so trustworthy when he murdered his own man right in front of me.”

Silvio’s lips twitched with something that might have been genuine amusement. I leaned against the porch railing and stabbed my knife at him.

“As scintillating as our conversation has been, it’s been a long day, and I would like to go inside my house and wash off the lingering stench of my encounter with your boss,” I said. “So the next words out of your mouth had better be the real reason you came here, or I’ll be sending Death someone else to collect tonight.”

Silvio’s amusement iced over and cracked away, leaving his features as cold as mine. “Very well. You asked me earlier why I didn’t alert Benson to your presence in the parking garage last night. I didn’t want to say anything at the club. Too many ears listening.”

“Including Benson’s, you mean. He wouldn’t be very happy if he realized that you were the reason he had to worry about leaving a witness behind.”

Silvio nodded. “Catalina is actually what I want to talk to you about.”

My fingers curled around my knife. How the hell did he know her name? “What about her?”

Silvio squared his shoulders again. “She’s my niece.”

•

Of all the things he might have said, that was about the last one I was expecting. No, scratch that. His confession had never even entered my realm of possibilities. I had wondered why Silvio hadn’t said anything to Benson about spotting Catalina and me in the garage. I had assumed it was because he had blackmail in mind, or even some nebulous dream of taking over Benson’s operation himself, and Benson going down for Troy’s murder would help him with that. But this . . . this changed everything.

“Catalina Vasquez is your niece?” I asked, my mind churning. “My Catalina? The student who works as a waitress at the Pork Pit?”

“One and the same.”