30. Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty
With a month’s notice, the party planner made the club even more opulent for this event.
Fresh floral arrangements displayed orchids on every table.
A glittering onyx walkway, the edges dotted with crystals, showed guests the path between the entrance and the bar.
And this month, a jazz band played softly as the night began.
The guests arrived on time, lined up around the building as the bouncer checked their invitations one by one. Rook had arrived an hour early, and while I sat at my place at the bar, Rook took up Gray’s role—watching, calculating, reporting back to me.
Rook: He’s here
He texted me when Wesley Lake arrived, but I had already spotted the smug blonde making idle small talk and holding up the line. No one complained, and I wondered how many supporters he had in this room.
I see him.
Rook: I’ll distract the rest of the party. Get him alone.
How do you intend to do that?
Rook: With my good looks and charm, obviously.
Our eyes met across the room and I swear I could see his mischievous little smirk from all the way over here.
The charcoal suit he wore this evening fit him immaculately and made me wonder what it would look like on the floor of my penthouse, though he’d replaced the awful camo bowtie with a tie that might have been sewn from the leftovers of a Hawaiian shirt.
He’d delighted in the look on my face when it assaulted my eyes.
Behave yourself.
Rook: Never.
A woman in a sequined floor-length gown sashayed in my direction.
Rook made a beeline for her, and I didn’t know what he said to her, but moments later, she fawned over him as he motioned over a server so they could both get a glass of champagne.
As she stroked her hand down his forearm, I contemplated how much I could sell her rings for if I chopped the fingers off, but the blood wouldn’t be worth the trouble.
I turned to the bar and smiled at Helen, who was arranging more trays of champagne for the servers.
Light glinted off my new chandelier as I tracked Wesley from the corner of my eye.
His walk along the path to the bar was stilted as people stopped him to schmooze and ask questions.
His smile was infinitely patient, though I suspected underneath it, he didn’t give a shit about any of them beyond their value as voters.
When he finally reached me, he ordered a cocktail before greeting me.
“You throw quite a party,” he said, turning on his barstool to face me.
“I try to entertain,” I said.
“I actually hate these things,” he said, “but they are good for my campaign. Thank you for the invitation.”
“Of course.” I didn’t mention that I’d invited Graves first—maybe he already knew—or that his invitation was now an excuse to keep tabs on him all night long.
He leaned against the bar on one elbow as his drink arrived and we both watched the line of people shrink at the door. “Have you considered your stance on my policies?” he asked.
“You have my vote,” I lied. One candidate wanted to exterminate my business like a cockroach and the other wanted to threaten me into submission. I wouldn’t mind if both of them ended up dead. I needed someone to dig up enough dirt on them to bury them with it, however the election ended.
That was Gray’s job. I swallowed the sharpness of it that lodged in my throat. I hadn’t even thought about needing a new assistant.
I held out a hand and Wesley shook it.
“Jesus. Your heart must be colder than I thought,” he laughed when our fingers touched.
“You know, magicians used to run this whole area—before we dragged the fae into our business, before the shifters wanted more power, before we decided to pander to the poor, defenseless humans. It can be that way again, and people like you? You have everything to gain from it. Excuse me, I have more voters to win.” He rose and flashed me another one of those sparkling, insincere smiles, then disappeared into the throng.
Rook sauntered over a minute later, having disentangled himself from whoever he was impressing. “I’ve never seen someone radiate so much bullshit.”
“People are eating it up, though.” I scowled in the direction Wesley had gone and jumped when Rook’s fingers brushed against mine for one moment where my arm hung by my stool. When I glanced over, he smiled with just his eyes, blue and sparkling.
The night passed in polite conversation and well-placed compliments.
Rook moved through the room with an amount of social grace I hadn’t realized he possessed.
As I watched him enthrall my guests like he was born for it, I yearned for him.
He always returned to my side, even talked me into a glass of champagne.
“To the things that surprise us,” he said, lifting his glass.
“To the things that surprise us.” Our eyes met over the rims of our glasses and my heart ached for him to say it back—I love you.
A scream drowned out the jazz and stopped every conversation in the room. Bright blue flames erupted from the other side of the dance floor and people scattered, glasses dropping and shattering.
I looked at Rook.
“Not me this time,” he muttered. We moved toward the flames and I searched for the source.
“I don’t know where it’s coming from!” I shouted over the noise of the blaze.
My security team had dispersed to evacuate the building, and a fire alarm blared all around us. People pushed each other and women nearly broke ankles to get to the doors in their heels.
“Austin.” Rook shook my shoulder and pointed at something.
A face staring straight at me from the other side of the flames. The eerie eyes of an owl mask watching back. The man wearing it was tall, a bit thin, and dressed in a black suit, still as a predator. He raised a gloved finger to his lips.
“Where’s Wesley?” I asked Rook. “Find him.”
“On it.” By the time he ran off to search, the masked man had turned and walked away, the flames barring me from chasing him.
Eventually the sprinkler system released water overhead, pouring over the flames and everyone left in the room. Rook came running back, hair plastered to his face and suit drenched, as he caught up with me. The man in the owl mask was long gone.
“I couldn’t find Wesley,” he said, water streaming over his forehead and cheeks.
I shoved my hair out of my eyes. “Then it could have been him.”
But why here? Why now? He wasn’t trying to murder anyone in my club. The flames weren’t that out of control, and he had to know I’d have safety measures in place for a fire. He’d simply stared across the blaze, letting me know he was watching.
“He was fucking with you,” Rook said, stepping toward the scorch marks on the floor. It seemed I’d never get a break from repairing this place. The marks were black and winding, and along the edges was a strange residue.
“What’s that?” I said to no one in particular.
Rook crouched down to look at it and swiped some of it up on his fingertip.
“Don’t touch it!”
He rolled his eyes and brought it to his nose. “Some kind of accelerant and…a weird smell. I don’t know what it is.” He extended the finger to me, like I was supposed to sniff the mystery residue from the floor.
“I’ll take your word for it.” I motioned over someone from security and pointed to the residue as Rook wiped it on his wet pants. “Take a sample of that and find out what it is,” I said.
“We should get out of here.” Rook turned to me, his face grave.
“I can’t. I have to make sure this mess gets cleaned up.” Something else Gray would have done. The weight of all the ways he helped me was almost as heavy as his death, and suddenly I felt much more alone than I had five minutes ago.
“They’ll clean up the mess. That’s what you pay them for.” He touched my elbow, just briefly enough to get me to look at him. “Go home and get cleaned up. I’ll text you tomorrow.”
I nodded, and after a few minutes of instructing my staff, I did as he asked.
When we were outside, he pulled me into the shadows and kissed me.
“Be careful. Please. I don’t care that you’re borderline invincible.
It won’t stop the killer from taking another one of those lives, and I…
don’t like the idea of you dying. Promise me. ”
“I promise.”
His tongue slid along my lower lip, then danced with mine before he shoved me back into the light to meet my driver. He didn’t say goodbye, and being alone in the penthouse that night was agony.
I sat by myself in bed, reading the email report on the warehouse from Owen.
The fire had swallowed the building quickly, aided by magic that consumed three of the four walls in minutes.
Gray must have been trapped. The report also included that he’d died from smoke inhalation, but I knew that already from kneeling next to his unburned body.
The damage to my inventory was worse than I imagined—two thirds was destroyed, utterly unusable.
Books and dark artifacts, expensive jewelry and taboo trinkets.
All gone. The hit my business would take financially made my stomach turn in front of my computer screen.
That’s why the masked man was in my club tonight. He wanted to rub it in my face that he’d destroyed a large part of my livelihood. He wanted me to know how easy it was to take from me.
I wished Rook were here to tell me not to freak out about it, to help me breathe through the rage, disappointment, and despair. But there was no one with a level head to help me process it all, no one to hold me so that I would sleep in spite of it.
A sleepless night meant today turned into tomorrow with no rest in between, no pause to get my bearings, and tomorrow there were so many things to do.