Jennifer Estep - Web of Lies

I smiled at him. “Fletcher’s gone, so you’re my handler now. I want everything you’ve got on Tobias Dawson. You know what to do with it.”

Finn nodded.

And then there was one. I stared at the detective, who still wore a stricken look on his face. “What are you going to do, Donovan?”

He stared at the carpet underneath his muddy shoes.

The detective knew what I was asking — if he was going to try to stop me or worse, warn Tobias Dawson that I was coming for him.

“Nothing. I’m not going to do anything. Not a damn thing.” Donovan scrubbed his hands through his black hair and let out a bitter laugh. The detective had just sided with an assassin, with the Spider. He’d just condemned another man to death, and he knew it.

“Good,” I said. “Then let’s get to work.”

——

An hour later we were all set. While Finn slid his laptop into its leather case, Violet gave her grandfather a long, tight hug. Eva Grayson had been thrilled her best friend wanted to crash at her place a few days, and Violet had already packed a bag. Now we stood in the foyer of the house, saying our good-byes.

“You could come with me,” Violet told her grandfather.

Warren put a speckled hand on her cheek and shook his head. “You know I can’t. That’s just not me. The only way I’m leaving this land is when they cart me off in a pine box. Besides, Gin might need me for something. I want to be around if she does.”

Violet nodded and tried to smile. Tears filled her dark eyes.

“We need to get you to Eva’s,” I said in a low voice.

Violet gave her grandfather another hug and picked up her bag. Finn held open the door for her, and the two of them stepped outside.

I went over to Sophia and Jo-Jo. “If anything happens, if Tobias Dawson or his men come back, you kill first and ask questions later, understand?”

The Goth dwarf grunted at me. Jo-Jo nodded her head.

“We know, Gin,” Jo-Jo said. “This isn’t the first time Sophia and I have done this sort of thing.”

I frowned. “It’s not?”

The dwarf smiled. “No. We watched out for folks for Fletcher a time or two as well.”

Again, there was that mention of Fletcher Lane helping out other people. That secret part of him that I hadn’t known about. I don’t know why the thought unsettled me, but it did. Or maybe it was just because I was off the edge of the map here. I’d spent seventeen years of my life killing people, and here I was trying to save an old man and his granddaughter from a greedy miner — for free, no less. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Only one thing was certain. It was a hell of a lot more entertaining than my retirement had been so far.

I left the dwarves to watch over Warren and stepped outside. Violet waited with Finn on the porch. Donovan Caine leaned against the porch railing, still brooding.

“Take Violet straight to Eva Grayson’s house,” I told Finn. “No stops.”

Finn pouted. “Would I do something like that?”

“Yes.”

He stuck out his lip a little more. Violet laughed at his expression. Finn’s green eyes swept over her. He grinned.

“Shotgun, Finn,” I murmured to him. “Remember Grandpa Fox and his shotgun.”

That dulled Finn’s smile, but it didn’t completely erase it. Few things could ever do that. Finn had pulled his Cadillac over to the house. He opened the passenger’s side door for Violet, who gave him another shy smile, then slid inside.

After a moment, Finn tore his gaze away from her long enough to glance at me. “Hope you don’t mind sitting in the back,” he said in a very unapologetic tone.

“I don’t mind at all because Donovan’s going to drive me home,” I announced.

Finn blinked. “He is?”

“I am?” Donovan chimed in.

“Yeah,” I said. “You are.”

Donovan’s face tightened a little more in the darkness.

——

Finn and Violet headed back toward Ashland, and Donovan and I did the same in his sedan. We didn’t speak, except when I gave him directions to Fletcher Lane’s house.

We pulled up about thirty minutes later. Donovan Caine peered through the windshield at the rambling, mismatched structure.

“So this is where you live now?” he asked.

“Yeah. It was actually Fletcher’s house, the old man who ran the Pork Pit.”

“Finn’s father, your former handler. The one who was tortured and murdered by Alexis James.”

I nodded. Donovan said nothing.

I stared at the detective, my eyes tracing over the rough planes of his face. “You could come in,” I suggested.

“Spend the night. With me.”

Donovan turned his gaze to mine. Heat. Desire. Guilt.

All that and more flashed in his eyes, but after a moment, he shook his head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Gin.”

“Why not? A bed would certainly be more comfortable than the backseat of your sedan.” I glanced at the mud we’d left everywhere in our frenzy. “Cleaner now, too.”

He shook his head again. “I’m not coming inside, Gin.”

“Why not? Is it because of what I plan to do to Tobias Dawson?”

Donovan ran his hands through his black hair. “That’s part of it. I still can’t believe I’m going along with that.”

“And the other part?”

He blew out a breath. “Do you remember that night in your apartment, before we went to the rock quarry to rescue Finn and Roslyn Phillips? Do you remember what I said to you about my partner, Cliff Ingles?”

“I remember. You wanted to kill me for assassinating him.”

He nodded. “Mainly, though, I wanted to know why you killed him. And since you wouldn’t tell me, I did some digging on my own.”

I tensed. Damn and double damn the detective and his tenacity.

“A lot more people were willing to do me favors after the Alexis James incident,” Donovan continued. He stared out the windshield at the rain instead of looking at me. “One guy who worked vice was particularly helpful. He told me that I should talk to a hooker, one of Roslyn Phillips’s girls, strangely enough.”

Roslyn Phillips was the vampire madam who ran Northern Aggression, a trendy, upscale nightclub that catered to the rich folks of Ashland and serviced their every need and twisted desire. She was also one of Finn’s friends with benefits. I’d killed Roslyn’s abusive brother-in-law several months ago, after he’d almost beaten her sister and young niece to death. Roslyn, in turn, had told one of her girls about my services. Loose lips get people dead, and Roslyn’s furtive whispers had eventually led to Fletcher Lane’s murder. Something I wasn’t going to let the vampire forget — ever.

But if Caine had talked to the hooker I had in mind, he knew exactly why I’d killed his partner — and what the bastard had done to the woman’s thirteen-year-old daughter.

“I know Cliff raped and beat that girl,” Donovan said, confirming my suspicion. “I know that’s why you killed him, so he’d never do that to another girl.”

No use denying it now. “Yes. That’s why I killed him. Because of the girl. When did you find out?”

“Two weeks ago.”

Pain deepened the grooves on Donovan’s face. The detective reminded me of a mythological character out of one of my literature books, of Atlas, bearing the heavy, heavy burden of others’ evil, perverted actions upon his lean shoulders.

“All that time you let me blame you for Cliff ’s death,” Donovan said. “All that time you let me think you were a monster. And you weren’t.”

I shrugged. “That’s debatable. I still killed him. And slicing off a guy’s balls isn’t exactly the action of a normal person.”

Donovan barked out a laugh. “Do you know what the funny thing is? If I’d known about Cliff, about the hookers he was beating, about that girl he raped, I might have killed him myself. But you got there first.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And somehow I feel indebted to you, Gin. Grateful, even. Because you killed him, and I didn’t have to.”