Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

his chair. “You can dowhatever you want to me. I know that I deserve it, for spying on Roslyn like I did, for setting you up like I did. But please, leave Natasha out of it.
Please
. I’ll do anything you want, tell you anything you want, give you anything you want, if you’ll just let her go.”
    I shook my head. “I hate to disappoint you, Vinnie, but I don’t have your daughter. I have no idea where Natasha is.”
    Vinnie’s face fell. “But you—you killed those men at the park. The giants. I saw you do it. And you brought me here, you healed me. Surely, you must have Natasha here too.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said and meant it. “But we just found you. We didn’t get your daughter as well. Given what I heard the men in the park say, I’m pretty sure that Mab has her now.”
    Vinnie closed his eyes. His face took on a greenish tint, and a tremor shook his body. He ran a hand through his hair. More sand fell out of his dark locks and dusted the salon floor. After a moment, Vinnie put his face down in his hands again. His shoulders shook, and even though I couldn’t see them, I knew that tears ran down his face. He tried to muffle a sob and couldn’t. He just
couldn’t
.
    Nobody spoke, and the only sound was Vinnie’s low, anguished cries.
    “Gin?” Roslyn finally asked in a soft voice.
    I glanced over at the vampire. She looked so cool, calm, and professional in her suit, but that wasn’t the image of her I was really seeing. Instead, I flashed back to that night at Slater’s cabin when I’d found her beaten and tied down to the giant’s bed, about to be raped andmurdered. All of that had been horrible enough for Roslyn, a former hooker who knew what the score was and just how twisted things could get in Ashland. I could only imagine the damage that sort of thing would do to an innocent young girl like Natasha.
    “Gin?” This time, Jo-Jo was the one who murmured my name.
    Gin
. The shortened, bastardized version of my real name, the one I’d adopted for myself so many years ago when Fletcher had first taken me in. Three letters, one syllable. A simple name. But now, somehow, full of so many questions, so many things asked, and so much hanging in the balance—including Natasha’s life.
    I sighed and nodded at the other two women.
    Then I leaned forward and put my hand on Vinnie’s shaking shoulder. “Vinnie, I know that you’re upset right now. That you’ve been through a lot, but I need you to focus for a little while longer. Do you think you can do that?”
    I didn’t know if it was fear of me or something else, but Vinnie flinched at my touch. I dropped my hand, wondering if he’d even heard me. But after a moment, his shoulders quit shaking. He wiped the tears out of his eyes and slowly raised and nodded his head.
    “Good,” I said. “Now, I want you to think back. This new club that Mab’s opening, the one the vampire said that Natasha could be the star of. Did you hear the men say anything else about it? Where it was going to be? When it was going to open? Anything at all?”
    “Why do you care?” Vinnie said. “She’s not your daughter. You don’t even know her—or me.”
    No, I didn’t know Vinnie or his daughter. Didn’t know them the least little bit or really care to. But I knew exactly what the Ice elemental was going through right now. All the emotions that he was feeling—and how helpless they all made him.
    Instead of telling him that I understood what it was like to lose your family, I just stared at Vinnie, my mouth a flat line in my face. “Humor me.”
    Still, something of my pain must have flickered in my eyes, because after a moment, Vinnie slowly nodded his head.
    “All right,” he said. “Two nights after LaFleur first approached me, she told me to meet her at Underwood’s before my shift started. She was there eating dinner with a couple of giants, Mab Monroe, and Jonah McAllister.”
    Underwood’s was one of Ashland’s most exclusive restaurants—a place that Mab liked to frequent, along with her lawyer, Jonah McAllister. Someone else I’d been having problems with recently.
    “Anyway, I went inside, but LaFleur didn’t want to see me right away, so I had to hang out by the bar for a while. But their table was close by, and I heard them talking. It’s true. Mab is opening up her own nightclub. Some kind of underground place where anything goes—
anything
. Kids, cutting up women, whatever sick things that people would pay for. Mab