Jennifer Estep - Web of Lies

A cold smile curved my lips. “Can’t blame a gal for dreaming, can you?”

I stared at the folder, and my smile flipped into a frown. “I just don’t understand why Fletcher did it. I was there. I lived through it. Nothing in that file tells me anything I don’t already know.”

“Except that your sister’s alive,” Finn said in a soft voice.

Bria. Blond hair. Big, blue eyes. A child’s soft, sweet, innocent face. A delicate primrose rune hanging from the chain around her neck. She’d been eight the last time I’d seen her, the night I found her blood in the hiding place where I’d left her. The night I thought she’d died.

“Fat lot of good it does me to know she’s alive, since I can’t find her. That picture could have been taken anywhere, and Fletcher wasn’t kind enough to scribble a location on the back of it.” Emotion tightened my throat, and I had to force out my next words. “I don’t — I don’t even know if I want to find her.”

“Why not?” Finn asked. “She’s your sister.”

“She was my sister,” I replied in a husky voice. “I have no idea what she’s like now. If she remembers me, if she’d even want to see me. Hell, she probably thinks I’m dead, just like I thought she was. Then there’s the small fact of what I’ve been doing with my life. Call me crazy, but I doubt anyone would want an assassin for a big sister.”

Finn was silent a moment. Then he raised his head and stared at me with his bright green eyes — eyes that were so similar to Fletcher’s it made my heart crack. “You might not have been his biological daughter, but Dad loved you just as much as he did me. You said it yourself. He loved knowing other people’s secrets. He probably started digging at first just to see who you really were and whether or not he could trust you.”

“And then?”

Finn shrugged. “And then you became his daughter, his protégé, and he loved you. Maybe Dad wanted to find the Fire elemental for you. Maybe he realized Bria hadn’t died that night. Maybe he wanted to make up for everything that had been done to you and your family.”

I’d wondered those same things myself. Because that’s exactly the kind of man Fletcher Lane had been. Live and let live, had been his motto. After all, assassins didn’t have a lot of moral high ground to stand on and cast stones and aspersions down at others. But if you fucked with somebody Fletcher Lane cared about, you might as well cut out your own heart with a rusty spoon — before he did it for you. The old man had taught me to be the same way. Loyalty, love, whatever you wanted to call it, it was the only thing as important as survival — and the only thing truly worth dying for. Which is why I’d hunted down Alexis James, the Air elemental bitch who’d killed Fletcher and had Finn tortured, even though I’d almost died in the process.

I rubbed my palm over my forehead. The silverstone metal in my skin felt as hard and cold as my heart. “I don’t know what Fletcher wanted me to do. Now I’ll never know.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Finn said. “And I’ll help you.”

Spoken like a true brother, blood or not. I smiled at him. “I know you will—”

Click-click. Click-click .

Finn’s laptop spit out a different sort of noise, as though the hard drive had caught and snagged on something. I raised my brows. Finn leaned forward and hit a button.

Numbers popped up on his laptop monitor, along with what looked like a driver’s license photo. Frizzy blond hair. Dark eyes. Dusky skin. Black glasses.

“Got her,” Finn said. “Violet Elizabeth Fox. Credit card records, bank accounts, school transcripts. Read all about her.”

I joined him on the sofa and read the information on the screen. Violet Elizabeth Fox, age nineteen, parents deceased. A straight-A student on a full scholarship, getting her business degree at Ashland Community College.

A couple hundred bucks’ worth of charges on her credit card, a couple thousand in a savings account. A small check deposited every two weeks into her checking account from some business called Country Daze. Probably a part-time job of some sort. Nothing out of the ordinary and nothing to suggest why she’d come into the Pork Pit looking for the Tin Man.

“Violet Fox commutes to school,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Finn asked.

I tapped the screen with my fingernail. “Because she’s got an ACC parking permit and assigned slip. And look at her home address.”

“Ridgeline Hollow Road?” Finn asked. “That’s up in the mountains.”

“In the coalfields,” I added.

Folks had been carving coal out of the Appalachian Mountains for decades, and rich seams of it ran through the mountains just north of Ashland. Coal mining was dangerous, dirty, hard work, not for the claustrophobic or faint of heart. But it paid well enough for generations of men and women to risk life and limb digging the fossil fuel out of the ground. For some, mining was the only job the members of their family had ever known. For others, the mines were the final resting places of their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. Dark, silent tombs no machinery and no light would ever be able to penetrate again.

Click-click. Click-click . The computer sounded once more, and a new screen popped up, overwriting the info we’d been looking at.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Finn grinned. “I flagged Violet Fox’s credit card, which she just used to make a purchase at the campus bookstore.”

“What did she buy?”

Finn stared at the monitor. “Two iced teas, two candy bars, and a copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.”

“Two drinks? Sounds like she has a study date with somebody.” I got up off the sofa. “Let’s go.”

“To the college?” Finn asked. “What if she leaves before we get there?”

I pointed to a clock on the wall. “It’s not even four thirty yet. The bookstore is inside the student center, and the building doesn’t close until six. Violet will probably stay put until then. ”

“You’re the expert when it comes to the college,” Finn said. “Seeing as how you spend so much of your free time there reading books by dead white guys and getting busy with the young studs in your classes.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And your jealousy is unbecoming. Now, get your lazy ass off the sofa. It’s time for you to show me just how fast that Aston Martin of yours can go.”

——

“This is pointless,” Finn said. “She’s not coming back here tonight.”

We’d arrived at the college just after five and had walked through the student center, looking for Violet Fox. I knew the center well, along with the rest of campus, since I’d been auditing classes at Ashland Community College for years. Cake decorating, yoga, charcoal drawing, watercolor painting. I’d taken all those and more, as part of my cover as an eternal college student and cook and waitress at the Pork Pit.

This semester, I’d signed up for a course in classic literature, hence the fact I was currently reading The Odyssey.

I’d always liked learning new things and saw no reason to stop taking classes just because I wasn’t killing people anymore. Besides, you just never knew when a new skill might come in handy. Especially given my past.

And I was thinking of taking several classes next semester, because, truth be told, my retirement was turning out to be rather, well, boring. During the day, I worked at the Pork Pit, of course, just as I always had. But at night, I didn’t know quite what to do with myself since I wasn’t reviewing files, trailing marks, and plotting the best way to kill someone. I could only watch the Food Network for so many hours a night. Most of the time, I ended up staring blankly at the television, wondering if eight o’clock was too early to go to bed. On the bright side, I was always extremely well rested now.