Bitter Bite (Elemental Assassin #14) Read online

  Gone. Santos was gone.

  Again.

  * * *

  I stood on the porch for the better part of a minute, fuming at myself for letting Santos get away twice in one night. But there was nothing I could do to bring him back, so I moved on to what I could do: learn more about the bastard.

  I went inside, wrapped a blanket from the couch around my shoulders, and shoved my cold, bare feet into a pair of snow boots. Then I snapped on the porch light, stepped back outside, and peered at the front door, trying to figure out how Santos had gotten into the house.

  Silverstone bars covered all the windows and side doors, so he had to have come in through the front door, a solid slab of black granite shot through with thick veins of silverstone. It wasn’t the sort of door that a giant could pound through or that an elemental could blast through with magic. Not without a lot of effort and a whole lot of noise—much more noise than Santos had made.

  There was no damage to the door, so I bent down, examining the lock. A few scratches gleamed in the metal, so small that I wouldn’t have noticed them if I hadn’t been looking. Santos had picked open the door instead of trying to punch his way through it. Smart and not something I would expect from a giant, since most of them relied on their great strength to solve whatever problems came their way.

  I frowned. Santos was seeming less like a common robber and more like a highly trained thief, especially given his acrobatics with the ceiling fan. You didn’t develop slick, nimble moves like that by knocking over convenience stores. At the bank, I’d thought he was a professional, but he was a far higher class of thief than I’d given him credit for. I wondered what other skills he had—and how deadly they might be.

  I went back inside, locked the front door behind me, and wedged a heavy chair under the knob for good measure. Then I turned on more lights, going through the rooms one by one to see if anything was missing.

  But the rest of the house was undisturbed, and the only mess was the one we’d made fighting in the den. It seemed as though Santos had come in through the front door, gone straight down the hallway, and headed into the den to wait for me. No doubt, he would have stayed in there all night, then casually stepped up to the doorjamb and shot me as I went into the kitchen for breakfast. It was a good plan, and it would have worked, if my nightmare hadn’t already startled me awake enough to hear his faint creeping through the house.

  I frowned again as another, more troubling thought occurred to me. Fletcher’s house was a labyrinth, given all the rooms and additions that had been tacked onto the original structure over the years. So how had Santos known exactly where to go? How had he realized that the den was the closest room to the kitchen and the best place for him to wait to kill me? Santos had never been in here before.

  But Deirdre had.

  She’d certainly spent many hours with Fletcher here, both before and after Finn was born. Even if her memories were fuzzy, which I doubted, it would have been easy enough for her to draw a crude map for Santos and suggest where he might lie in wait to murder me.

  Deirdre could have done this. But had she?

  Santos hadn’t looked to her for help when the bank robbery went sideways, and he hadn’t hesitated to shoot her. Not exactly the actions of a minion. Sure, he’d never been inside the house before, but he could have easily walked the perimeter and peered in through the windows, scouting out the best place to lie in wait for me. Maybe my bias against Deirdre was clouding my judgment and making me think that she was at the center of some grand conspiracy when she wasn’t.

  Because I was biased against her. Even if Fletcher hadn’t left me that warning letter, I still would have questioned any person who just showed up out of the blue after thirty-some years. People didn’t do things for no reason. Especially not in Ashland, where practically everyone had at least one ulterior motive, along with two angles they were working from at any given time. Deirdre had to want something. I just had to figure out what it was.

  Too bad I had absolutely nothing to help me do that.

  I didn’t have Santos, much less a confession about whom, if anyone, he might be working for. I didn’t have anything, not so much as a single scrap of proof linking him to Deirdre. All I had were smashed picture frames littering the floor, muddy boot prints from where Santos had stepped on the coffee table, and a ceiling fan drooping down at a sad angle from where his weight had pulled it loose.

  I waded through the shards of glass and melting bits of elemental Ice and picked up one of the rune drawings—a pig holding a platter of food. The same sign hung over the front door of the Pork Pit, and the sketch was my way of memorializing Fletcher and everything that the old man and his restaurant had meant to me.

  I picked the rest of the broken glass out of the frame and tossed it aside, then ran my fingers over the paper.

  “I’m going to get to the bottom of this, Fletcher,” I whispered. “I promise you that.”

  As soon as I finished speaking, a gust of winter wind howled around the house, hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames. Just as quickly as it started, the wind died down, and a still, heavy silence settled over the house again. I didn’t much believe in omens, but I was going to take that as a sign of Fletcher’s approval.

  But there was nothing else I could do tonight, so I placed the rune drawings back on the mantel, snapped off the lights, and went to bed.

  12

  The next morning, I cleaned up the mess in the den and went to work at the Pork Pit as usual. All the while, I kept stewing about Santos and how he’d escaped. If only I’d been quicker, faster, stronger, I could have nabbed him and cut him open for answers about the bank robbery and why he’d tried to kill me in my own home. Instead, I was back to square one, with no clue to what was really going on.

  At least, until Deirdre showed up this afternoon.

  I got started on the day’s cooking by whipping up a batch of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce. Smelling its rich blend of cumin, black pepper, and other spices bubbling away was my own sort of aromatherapy, and it soothed me, the way it always did. While I stirred the sauce, I thought about all the angles I could work and how I could get to the bottom of things.

  Silvio came in early, an hour before the restaurant was set to open, knowing that I would want to have a private chat with him. A great assistant in addition to being a good friend.

  I gave him a few minutes to fire up his phone and tablet, then finished wiping down the counter, put my elbows on top of the shiny surface, and stared at him. “Tell me what you found out. I want to hear everything, no matter how small the detail.”

  Silvio blinked, not used to me being so interested in our morning briefings. He pulled his tablet a little closer and began swiping through screens. I grabbed a knife and started slicing tomatoes while he filled me in.

  “By all accounts, Deirdre Shaw is a wealthy Ice elemental who hails from a prestigious Ashland family,” he began. “We’re talking old, old money and a lot of it. She’s the last of the Shaws, although she hasn’t lived in Ashland in years. She has a number of homes around the country where she divides her time, including a summer cabin in Cloudburst Falls, a town house in Cypress Mountain, and a penthouse in Bigtime.”

  “Let me guess. Deirdre spends her days flitting around the country on her private jet, staying in her swanky pads, guzzling champagne, and spending all of that old, old money.”

  “Naturally,” he replied. “But she also spends quite a bit of time raising money for charity. Supposedly, one of the causes near and dear to her heart is an after-school art program for kids from broken homes.”

  I snorted. “I just bet it is.”

  Silvio arched his eyebrows at the sarcasm in my voice. “Actually, her charity work is where it gets interesting. Ms. Shaw is involved with numerous charities, but they all fall under one corporate umbrella, Shaw Good Works, which she heads up. Other people actually run the charities so that Ms. Shaw can spend her time fund-raising and then deciding wher
e to put all that capital. So, really, she’s an investment banker, just like Finn.”

  I’d always thought that Finn must take after his mom, since he wasn’t all that much like Fletcher. The old man had been perfectly happy to bury his money in tin cans in the backyard, instead of buying and selling stocks, investing in bonds, and all the other financial shenanigans that Finn engaged in. Finding out that Deirdre was in the same business as her son was a bit disconcerting.

  I didn’t want to think that Finn was anything like her. But at the party last night, Deirdre had basically been an older, female version of Finn—suave, flirty, boisterous. It had been a little jarring just how much the two of them were alike. I supposed that nature had won out over nurture in this case.

  “Now, before you go and start thinking too highly of Ms. Shaw, you should know that not all the money she raises and then recoups from her investments goes into her charity foundation,” Silvio said. “In fact, a great deal of it—tens of millions a year—goes down the rabbit hole for expenses, operating costs, and the like.”

  I realized what he was getting at. “You think her charity, Good Works, is a front for something.”

  “Absolutely. There’s no way those charities have that much overhead. But she’s clever, and she moves the money around faster than a street hustler doing a card game. I’m still researching, but I’ll figure out where all that money is going and exactly who’s getting it.” His gray eyes gleamed with excitement. There was nothing Silvio loved better than untangling puzzles. I supposed it fit in with his detail-oriented personality.

  I frowned. “Wait a second. Someone else is getting the money? Who? It sounds like Deirdre has a nice little scam going. Why would she want to share the money with anyone?”

  “I don’t know. Ms. Shaw might have come from old money, but she burned through it all years ago. Homes and private jets and champagne fountains cost money, you know. She started her charitable foundation about the time she was scraping the last few nickels out of her original trust fund. Even then, someone else bankrolled her and got her started.”

  “So maybe that’s where the money is going,” I murmured. “To pay back her investors, whoever they might be.”

  Silvio swiped through some more screens on his tablet. “That’s my theory. I’ll keep digging.”

  Maybe this was all about money. Maybe Deirdre had heard what a financial whiz Finn was and had come to Ashland to get his expertise to help increase the profits from her charity scam, without letting him know what a crook she really was. Finn had said that he’d been working on her portfolio. It made sense, but I still felt like something else was going on, something far more sinister than skimming money from good causes.

  I finished with my last tomato, grabbed a red onion, and started slicing it. “What about Tucker, her assistant?”

  Silvio shook his head. “Hugh Tucker. I’ve just started drilling down on him, but nothing suspicious so far. Although he and Deirdre have something interesting in common: the Tucker family has been in Ashland for generations, just like the Shaws, and Hugh is also the last one left of his family.”

  Not that unusual. Despite the sky-high crime rate, Ashland was a beautiful place to live, with its rugged ridges, lush forests, and mountain streams. My family, the Snows, had also been here for generations. So had the Monroes. Come to town, enjoy the mountains, start a blood feud with another family. It was practically the Ashland tourism motto. Still, it was a bit odd that Deirdre and Tucker would both be from Ashland and also be the last living members of their families. I wondered if Deirdre had known Tucker before he started working for her.

  “All right,” I said. “Keep digging into Deirdre and Tucker. And there’s one more person I need you to track down.”

  “Who?”

  “Santos. After his failed bank robbery last night, he decided to pay me a house call.”

  I wiped off my hands and grabbed a napkin and a pen. While I filled Silvio in about the attack at Fletcher’s house, I made a crude sketch of the snake-and-dollar-sign tattoo on Santos’s forearm.

  “Here,” I said, passing the sketch over to him. “See if you have more luck with the tattoo. People can change their names a lot easier than they can change their ink.”

  He took the napkin from me. “I’ll get right on it. And there’s one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Ms. Shaw has been visiting Ashland on and off for several months, even before she first approached Finn.” He grabbed his tablet again. “She’s been putting together an exhibit of fine jewelry and rare gemstones at the Briartop Art Museum. Ticket sales will benefit her charitable foundation.”

  Silvio turned his tablet around to show me the museum’s website. A photo of a diamond ring was front and center, the design a smaller version of Deirdre’s icicle-heart necklace.

  “Ms. Shaw has donated several of her own personal pieces to the exhibit,” he continued. “It’s the first big event the museum has hosted since—”

  “Since Jonah McAllister hired Clementine Barker and her giants to rob everyone and swipe Mab Monroe’s will from the Briartop vault,” I said, finishing his thought. “Do you think Jonah is involved with Deirdre?”

  Jonah McAllister was another thorn in my side. The smarmy lawyer had tried to have me killed multiple times, including that night at Briartop.

  Silvio shook his head. “I don’t think so. Jonah is holed up in his mansion, waiting for his trial to start. He hardly ever leaves it. As far as I can tell, he’s never had any contact with Ms. Shaw. Not so much as a phone call, text, or email.”

  The fact that Deirdre and Jonah didn’t seem to know each other and probably weren’t working together was an unexpected bit of good news. But Silvio’s intel still didn’t tell me what Deirdre was really up to. If she was already skimming millions from her charity foundation, then why go to all the time and trouble to set up an exhibit here in Ashland? Why sashay into First Trust, give the bank access to her accounts, and run the risk of someone realizing where all that charity money was really going?

  It didn’t make sense, unless . . . unless Deirdre truly did want to get close to Finn.

  Could I be wrong? Could Deirdre be legit? Well, as legit as a charity scammer could be? Could she genuinely want to reconnect with her son?

  No—no way. I didn’t know Deirdre, but I did know Fletcher. If the old man claimed she was dangerous, then that’s exactly what she was. Besides, Deirdre had had thirty-plus years to reappear in Finn’s life. So why the sudden interest in her son now?

  Something was going on here, and I was going to figure out exactly what it was—and how best to protect Finn from whatever his mother might be planning.

  13

  The day passed by like any other, with the usual blur of cooking, cleaning, and customers. But as three o’clock crept closer, my friends started to appear.

  Owen was the first one through the door. He kissed me on the cheek, told me that he was here if I needed anything, and then sat in a booth out of the way. I was grateful for his strong, silent support.

  Jo-Jo arrived next, wearing a white cashmere cardigan over a pale pink dress patterned with tiny pink roses. Her usual strand of pearls hung around her throat, and she had white kitten heels on her feet, making her look every inch the Southern lady she was. Jo-Jo always looked elegant, but she had taken a little extra care with her appearance today, her white-blond hair curled just so, her makeup flawless, her nails gleaming with a fresh coat of pale pink polish.

  Jo-Jo slid onto the stool closest to the cash register. She murmured hello to Silvio, who returned her greeting, although he kept his eyes locked on his phone as he texted. Jo-Jo leaned forward and waved at Sophia, who was sliding a tray of sourdough buns into one of the ovens. Sophia turned, and I caught sight of her black T-shirt, which featured a white heart that had been broken in two and was dripping blood off both sharp, jagged ends. I grimaced. The image reminded me of Deirdre’s icicle-heart rune.

  I looked at Jo-Jo.
“How’s Finn?”

  She shrugged. “After you left last night, Bria, Sophia, and I all tried to talk to him, but he just took a shower and went to bed. He stayed shut up in one of the spare bedrooms until late this morning, then crept out after I was busy in the salon. He didn’t say good-bye, and he didn’t even drink any of the chicory coffee I made for him.”

  Finn had left without guzzling down his usual pot of coffee? Not good. I hadn’t texted or called him this morning, figuring that he might need more time to cool off after the whopper of a secret I’d kept from him. But it sounded like he was angrier than I’d thought.

  Bria arrived about five minutes later, telling the same story as Jo-Jo. She’d tried to talk to Finn last night and again this morning, but he hadn’t responded to any of her messages.

  There was nothing I could do until he showed up, so I kept on cooking, cleaning, and cashing out customers.

  Finally, right at three o’clock, the bell over the front door chimed, and Finn strolled into the restaurant . . . arm in arm with Deirdre.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  Jo-Jo wasn’t the only one who’d taken a little extra care with her appearance. Finn was sporting his snazziest charcoal-gray suit, his walnut-brown hair carefully styled, while Deirdre was decked out in another tight-fitted dress, this one an electric blue that was almost too bright to look at. Her blond hair was once again done up in pin curls and held back from her face with several long diamond pins, while her icicle-heart rune glimmered around her neck.

  Deirdre was laughing at some joke Finn had made, her voice as light and happy as wind chimes tinkling out a merry tune. Her carefree chuckles made me grind my teeth.

  Finn didn’t deign to glance at me or anyone else as he led Deirdre over to the booth in the front right corner of the restaurant and helped her sit down. Then he turned and snapped his fingers at me, as if he didn’t already have my full attention.