Elemental Assassin 03 - Venom

salon. Sophia Deveraux, Jo-Jo’s younger sister. Where Jo-Jo was all sweet pink sunshine, Sophia was the heart of darkness—as in Goth. Sophia wore her usual black jeans and shit-kicker boots. Her T-shirt was actually a girly pink tonight, although images of decapitated doll heads dotted the light fabric. A black leather collar studded with plastic pink hearts ringed Sophia’s neck. A bright pink gloss covered her lips, but her cropped hair was as black as black could be. It stood out in stark contrast to her pale skin.
    Sophia was an inch or so taller than Jo-Jo and had a much more muscular figure than her big sister did. At a hundred and thirteen, the younger Deveraux sister was inher prime, instead of firmly entrenched in middle age like Jo-Jo was. Sophia plopped down in the chair to my left and nodded at me. I nodded back.
    And then the three of them stared at me. Finn, Jo-Jo, Sophia. Hell, even Rosco turned his head back in my direction. All of them looking steadily at me, expectation shining in their eyes. Oh, fuck. They actually expected me to
talk
about what had happened tonight. To share my
feelings.
I sighed again. I’d much rather have hacked and slashed my way through a platoon of Mab Monroe’s giants than explain how I was dealing with my emotions.
    But they were my family, for better or worse. They deserved to know what had happened tonight—and how it could affect them tomorrow.
    “All right,” I said. “Here’s the short version.”
    I recapped the events of the evening, starting with Jonah McAllister and Elliot Slater bracing me, Slater beating me, and Mab Monroe stepping in and leading her goons off into the dark night. And then there was the biggie—my unexpected meeting with Bria, my long-lost younger sister.
    “So Bria’s a detective? Working in Ashland?” Jo-Jo asked. “Why didn’t we know this before?”
    “Because she’s a new transfer, only started a week ago,” Finn said, taking another sip of his chicory coffee. “I did some checking while you were healing Gin.”
    In addition to (mis)handling other people’s money, Finn was also something of an information trader. If you wanted dirt on someone, Finnegan Lane could get it for you—in a hurry.
    “Bria has been working down in Savannah, Georgia,ever since she graduated from the police academy a couple of years ago. She moved up to Ashland a few weeks back.” Finn hesitated and stared at me. “She took Donovan Caine’s position in the police department.”
    My hands tightened around the padded arms of my salon chair. A man’s face flashed before my eyes. Black hair, hazel eyes, bronze skin, and a lean, hard body that had felt marvelous pressed against my own. Detective Donovan Caine. One of the few honest cops in Ashland who actually tried to fight crime, rather than taking a bribe to look the other way. Caine had also been my sometimes lover, until he’d left town a few weeks ago.
    Detective Donovan Caine had been upstanding to a fault, with a strict code of justice and morals that never, ever bent. He’d had a hard enough time dealing with the fact that I used to be an assassin—and that I’d killed his former partner, Cliff Ingles, for raping a thirteen-year-old girl. But when I’d gone after coal mine owner Tobias Dawson for threatening an old friend of Fletcher’s, Donovan hadn’t handled it well at all. He’d known I’d planned to assassinate Dawson, and he’d done nothing to stop me.
    After I killed Dawson, well, Donovan’s morals, his ideals, started eating away at him. He’d come down to the Pork Pit one night and said he couldn’t be the man he wanted to be and be with me at the same time. Donovan Caine had broken off our complicated affair and left town to get away from me and the attraction between us—and the fact that he still wanted to fuck me despite a) his precious morals and, b) all the bad things I’d done.
    I’d been willing to share my life, my heart, with Donovan, and he’d walked out on me. On the possibility of
us.
Maybe it was a good thing he’d left town. Otherwise, I might have been tempted to do something stupid. Like try to seduce him into giving us just one more chance. And be pissed off all over again when he said no.
    “Gin?” Finn asked. “Are you still with us?”
    I shook my head to banish my troubled, unwanted thoughts. “Yeah, I’m still here. So my mysterious sister took Donovan’s place in the department. What else do you know about her?”
    Finn