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.

14

At precisely seven o’clock Monday evening, Sebastian Vaughn strolled into the Pork Pit, carrying a dozen roses. He grinned, crossed the storefront, and made a gallant bow before straightening back up and handing the flowers to me.

Instead of the typical red, these roses were a deep, dark color. At first, I thought they were black, but then, as I held them up to the light, I realized that the petals actually had a rich blue sheen. The stems were unusual too, milky white instead of the normal green. The thorns were the same pale color, although they seemed to be sharper and longer than usual. All put together, the flowers were beautiful, vibrant, and striking, just like Sebastian.

“Roses!” I exclaimed, playing the part of a girl who was thrilled by such things. It wasn’t too much of a stretch. Secretly, I was delighted that he’d brought me flowers. No one ever had before.

“I know most folks like red roses, but I thought that I would bring you something really special. They’re called Blue Velvet, and they’re from my family’s greenhouse,” Sebastian said.

I buried my nose in the roses, breathing in deeply and inhaling their scent. They smelled much sweeter than I’d thought they would, given their dark blue color, as though someone had distilled the petals down to their purest, most intense essence. Truth be told, the scent was a bit overpowering, almost cloying, and I had to scrunch up my nose to keep from sneezing. Not exactly the aroma I would have picked if I’d been giving myself flowers, but I appreciated the gesture.

I was standing behind the counter, close to where Fletcher sat behind the cash register, reading. Beaming, I held the flowers out to him.

“Aren’t they lovely?”

“Exquisite,” he echoed back in a wry voice.

“Is this your . . . father?” Sebastian’s eyebrows drew together as he looked back and forth between me and Fletcher, as if he was puzzled by the lack of familial resemblance.

“My cousin, actually,” I said. “He . . . adopted me after my family died . . . in a car accident.”

That was more or less the cover story that we’d developed long ago to explain my connection to Fletcher and Finn. Funny, but I’d never had a problem telling the lies before.

Sebastian nodded, his face clearing, and he stretched out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. . . .”

“Lane,” the old man said in a reluctant voice. “Fletcher Lane.”

He took Sebastian’s hand and shook it, even though I could tell that he didn’t want to. Despite his desire to learn more about Vaughn’s mystery file, Fletcher wasn’t all that happy about me going out with Sebastian. Then again, he rarely liked any of the guys that I brought around the restaurant, not even the ones that we had no reason to be wary of. Fletcher’s dislike of my dates was yet another way in which he was overprotective of me.

He stared at the younger man, his green eyes sharp and thoughtful. Sebastian smiled back at him, although his expression seemed a little uneasy around the edges. Then again, Fletcher’s hard, laserlike stare was enough to make anyone nervous, even me.

Fletcher turned to me and held out his hand. “Let me put those in some water for you, Gin. You don’t want to keep your young man waiting.”

“Thanks,” I said, handing the roses over to him. “Ouch!”

Fletcher took the flowers from me, and I pulled my hand back, wincing. I watched a bit of blood well up out of my right thumb, which I’d stabbed into one of the pale thorns.

Sebastian gave me a chagrined look. “Sorry. I should have warned you. They have bigger, sharper thorns than most roses. I think it has something to do with the color of the stems.”

“It’s okay,” I said, grabbing a paper towel and wiping the scarlet drop off my thumb. “It’s just a little blood. Nothing to worry about.”

“If I could kiss it and make it better, I would,” Sebastian said in a low voice that only I could hear.

His gaze locked onto my mouth, as if he was thinking about the soft kisses we’d shared the other night. I certainly was. Sebastian caught me staring at him. He grinned, then flashed me a quick, sly wink. I blushed and dropped my gaze from his.

While Fletcher grabbed an old jelly jar to use as a vase and filled it with water, I untied my work apron, pulled it over my head, and hung it on a hook on the back wall. Then I grabbed my purse, which contained two of my knives, from its slot under the cash register and stepped around the counter. Sebastian reached out and took my hand, careful of my injured thumb.

“So what are we doing tonight? Dinner and a movie?”

He shook his head. “Nothing so predictable as that. I thought you might like to see the greenhouse where your roses came from, along with the rest of my estate.”

I glanced at Fletcher, who gave me a tiny nod as he kept arranging the flowers in the jelly jar. Getting invited to the Vaughn estate was too good an opportunity to pass up. Maybe Sebastian would give me a full tour, including a peek at his father’s office. If I was extremely lucky, he might even leave me alone in there long enough for me to search for the mystery file.

But more than that, I wanted to see the estate for myself, inside and out. You could tell a lot about someone from his home and the furnishings, photos, and knickknacks that adorned it, and I wanted to learn more about Sebastian. I wanted to know everything about him.

I flashed him another smile. “So what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

Sebastian grinned and tugged me toward the door.