Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

this time. She’ll have an army of men with her to make sure that doesn’t happen. Not just her giants, but the bounty hunters too. Folks like Gentry and Sydney. Dangerous people.”
    “And you’re going to have an army of folks with you,” Xavier rumbled. “You’ve helped us all too much for us to abandon you now, Gin. You know that. We all know that. You’ve put your life on the line for each one of us. Now it’s our turn.”
    One by one, the others all nodded their heads again, as if we were talking about having a spring picnic instead of going up against the deadliest woman in Ashland and all of her men. Didn’t they know that all of us taking on Mab was much more dangerous than just me facing the firing squad by myself? If one of them went down in the fight, the others would rush to help that fallen friend. Mab’s men would take advantage of their distraction, and then they’d all be lost.
    I didn’t want to accept their help. It was just too risky. One slip, one mistake, one tiny, minuscule miscalculation, and my friends could all wind up dead. Or worse, Mab could get her hands on them and torture them first before she killed them, just as she was probably doing to Bria right now. I didn’t want that. I’d never wanted that. I couldn’t fucking
bear
that.
    But no one ducked from my searching gaze. No one’seyes slid away from mine. No one wavered or showed any kind of doubt.
    I sighed. “I’m not going to change your minds, am I?”
    They all shook their heads.
    No, I didn’t want to accept my friends’ help, didn’t want to put them in any more danger than they were already in. But I also knew that having them with me was the only way that Bria might survive this thing. I needed someone there to make sure she made it to safety while I took on Mab. It made me sick, weighing my sister’s life against everyone else’s, using my friends this way, dragging them all down into the muck with me. But the truth was that I needed all the help I could get right now—and so did Bria.
    “All right,” I said in a quiet voice. “All right. Since I can’t hog-tie all of you—at least not all of you at once—tell me what you’re thinking.”
    A grin creased Finn’s handsome face. “I thought you’d never ask.”
    Finn put his coffee mug down long enough to go upstairs. He came back a minute later with what looked like five reams of paper clutched to his chest. Finn dumped everything onto the kitchen table. Sheets of papers swirled up into the air like snowflakes before settling back onto the table. Photos, maps, old blueprints.
    “What is all this?” I asked. “And how many trees did you kill printing it all out?”
    “This,” Finn said, sweeping his hand out over the mess on the table, “is every scrap of information that I was able to get my hands on concerning your childhood home. Or, at least what’s left of it, anyway. Maps, police and aerial photographs, deeds, everything.”
    With his massive network of spies and other shady sources, as well as his own computer skills, Finn had the uncanny ability to dig up dirt on the saintliest soul. So I imagined that compiling all the info on my old childhood home hadn’t been too much of a stretch for him. Still, the effort touched me because I knew that he was trying to give me the tools I needed to survive my confrontation with Mab. It was something his father, Fletcher, would have done, if the old man had still been alive.
    “Actually,” Finn said, “it wasn’t too hard to get the info, since, well, I sort of own the land now.”
    My head snapped up. “What? What do you mean you
own
the land now?”
    Finn winced. “Well, Dad left you quite a bit of money, his house, and the Pork Pit in his last will and testament.”
    “And…”
    “And he left me everything else, including all his other real estate holdings. Rental properties, safe houses, and the land where your childhood home was. According to the tax records I found, he bought the land six months after your family was murdered.”
    I arched an eyebrow. “And you’re just now finding out about it?”
    Finn shrugged. “You know how paranoid the old man was about paper trails. He knew more about how to fake documents, confuse creditors, and hide assets than even I do. It’s been months now, and I’m still trying to sort out which identity he used to purchase what property.”
    Everything that Finn said made sense. Fletcher had had dozens of identities and aliases, all with