Black Widow (6 page)

I rolled my eyes. Like I hadn't heard that one a hundred times before. Folks really needed to be more creative with their death threats.

The woman let out a loud battle cry and darted forward, brandishing both the blade and the pan at me this time. No one had ever attacked me with my own cookware before, so it was a bit of a new experience to be dodging knives and skillets, instead of bullets and magic. But I managed it.

With one hand, I blocked her overhead blow with the skillet. With my other hand, I chopped down on the woman's wrist, making her lose her grip on the knife. For an extra punch, I grabbed hold of my Stone magic at the last second, using it to harden my hand so that it was as heavy as a concrete block slamming into her wrist. Her bones snapped like carrot sticks. The woman howled with pain and staggered back, giving me the chance to dart
forward and kick the dropped knife away, sending it flying up under the counter.

She swung the skillet at me again with her uninjured arm, but this time, I stepped up, turned my hip into her body, and jerked the heavy iron from her hand as she stumbled past me. But I didn't let her go too far. I darted forward, grabbed her shoulder, and yanked her back toward me, even as I brought the pan forward as hard as I could.

CRACK!

You could do a lot more than just cook with a cast-iron skillet, and that one blow was more than enough to cave in the back of the woman's skull. All of the movement in her body just
stopped
, and she dropped to the floor like a brick someone had tossed out a window.

Thud.

Blood poured out from the deep, ugly wound I'd opened up in her skull, like water spewing out of a freshly cracked coconut. Gravity lolled her head to the side, turning her empty hazel eyes toward the front door, almost as if she were still seeing it and wishing that she'd stayed on the other side, instead of venturing in here and meeting her death so bright and early in the morning.

I let the pan slip to the floor, then put my hands on my knees, trying to get my breath back. The fight hadn't been all that long, but the cast-iron skillet was heavier than it looked, and it had taken quite a bit of muscle to use it so viciously.

But even as I bent over, my gaze flicked to the windows, and I wondered if anyone had seen my fight to the death with the woman. But the commuters were already
at work, and it was still too early for most folks to be thinking about lunch yet. The few people who did pass by on the street had their heads down, more interested in checking their phones than paying attention to their surroundings.

So I straightened up, went over, and shut and locked the front door before closing the blinds on all the windows. Then I turned my attention back to the woman. Blood continued to ooze out of her skull, painting the blue and pink pig tracks on the floor a glossy, garish crimson. More blood had spattered all over the skillet too, along with the woman's hair, skin, and bits of bone and brain matter.

I sighed. Damn. Why couldn't she have just jumped me in the alley like usual? Now I'd have to wash all the skillets and knives and mop the floor—
again
.

Sometimes, it just didn't pay to come in early.

4

Normally, I would have hauled the woman's body out to the alley, piled some garbage bags on top of it, and waited for Sophia to come in so she could dispose of it during one of her breaks. But I didn't want to leave a corpse lying outside the restaurant, not now, with all my worries about Madeline. It would be just my luck that today would be the day that she finally put her grand scheme into motion. So I needed a better hiding place for the body. At the very least, it would be one less thing to worry about. Out of sight, out of mind, and all that.

So I grabbed the dead woman under the arms and dragged her into the rear of the restaurant, all the way over to the freezer against the back wall. Then I dropped to my knees and patted her down, but she wasn't carrying a wallet or any sort of ID, and no rune tattoos were on her hands, arms, or neck to tell me what gang she might
have belonged to, if any. She didn't even have a cell phone stuffed into one of her pants pockets.

I frowned. Weird. No one went anywhere without her phone these days. So I had no idea who she was or whom she might have been working for. But on the bright side, no ID and no phone meant that there wasn't anything else for me to get rid of.

So I opened the freezer lid, then hoisted the dead woman up and over the side into the frosty depths below. I even went the extra step of piling several bags of ice and a couple dozen boxes of frozen peas on top of her, to further hide the body. I absolutely
hated
peas, and I never, ever served them in the restaurant, but I kept the boxes around for just these sorts of occasions. Because, really, who would ever want to see what was underneath piles of frozen peas?

After the body was stowed away, I retrieved the knife that had slid under the counter and washed it, along with all the pots, pans, and skillets that the dead woman had dragged out.

I wiped down everything with bleach to destroy any minute traces of blood and was mopping the floor again when a key turned in the front-door lock, and Sophia Deveraux stepped inside.

I might be somewhat grungy and anonymous with my jeans-and-T-shirt ensembles, but Sophia always stood out in a crowd. She had on the same sort of black boots I did, although her jeans were actually white today, and paired with a black T-shirt with a pair of fuchsia puckered lips in the center of it. The words
Kiss off, fool!
arched over the lips in silver sequins. Matching fuchsia streaks shimmered in Sophia's black hair, along with silver glitter, while pale
pink shadow and silver mascara made her eyes seem even blacker than usual. Silver cuffs adorned her wrists, and a black leather collar studded with silver hearts circled her neck, completing her chic Goth look.

At the sight of me mopping the floor, Sophia stopped and eyed the pink water sloshing around in my bucket.

“Problem?” she rasped in her low, eerie, broken voice.

I shrugged. “Not anymore. She's in the freezer with the peas.”

Sophia nodded, knowing exactly what I was talking about. After she got rid of the body, I'd have to defrost the freezer and scrub all of the bloodstains and smears out of it, as well as order some more frozen peas. I sighed. Sometimes, killing people just wasn't worth cleaning up the mess afterward.

While I finished mopping, Sophia started cooking, and we opened up the restaurant. Catalina Vasquez came in to wait tables and help with the lunch rush, followed by her uncle.

Silvio Sanchez was a short, lean, quiet man who tended to blend into the background with his subdued gray suits and ties. Unlike Jonah McAllister, Silvio's silvery hair was cut short and neatly brushed, and he didn't try to erase the faint lines that had grooved into his middle-aged bronze skin. I thought that the vampire was still a bit too thin, given how much of his blood and emotions Beauregard Benson had drained out of him a few weeks ago, but so far Silvio was resisting all of my attempts to fatten him up with the Pork Pit's home cooking.

As was his custom now, Silvio perched on a stool three spots down from the cash register, opened his silverstone
briefcase, and pulled out his cell phone and tablet. He was always texting, typing, and making notes about something, although I couldn't imagine what he found so interesting about the comings and goings at the restaurant to so thoroughly record them all daily.

“Hello, Gin. I'm here for the morning briefing,” Silvio said, swiping through several screens on his tablet.

I bent down and grabbed a dish towel from a slot under the counter so he wouldn't hear me sigh. I didn't think that my life was busy or complicated enough for a morning briefing, much less the afternoon briefings that Silvio had been making noises about adding to our so-called
schedule
, but I perched on my stool and listened as he told me about all the various information he'd gleaned from his contacts. Who was looking to expand into running drugs, guns, and other illegal products; who was trying to muscle in on a rival's territory; who had threatened to kill the competition in retaliation for some perceived slight.

When he finished, I shared the information I'd overheard in the woods yesterday about the name Dobson and the party Madeline was throwing.

“See what you can find out about it please,” I said. “Especially when it is and who's been invited. I want to know if it's another flower-themed tea for the society ladies or something more important.”

He gave me a sharp look. “And where did this information come from? I haven't heard a peep about Madeline hosting or attending any kind of party, not counting that library dedication later today.”

I waved my hand. “Oh, a little bird told me.”

Silvio frowned, his gray eyes narrowing in accusation.
“You haven't taken it upon yourself to spy on Madeline, have you? Because that would be a very foolish thing to do, Gin, directional microphone or not. I believe we addressed this during last Friday's morning briefing.”

He might have found that microphone for me, but he'd also realized exactly what I wanted it for. Last Friday before the restaurant opened, Silvio had made me turn off the lights so he could set up a projector and give me a presentation, listing bullet point by bloody bullet point all the ways I could get captured and killed if Madeline caught me spying on her.

I'd smiled and nodded through the whole thing, but I hadn't told him about my tree house in the woods outside the Monroe mansion. I didn't want to add to his lecture about what a foolish risk I was taking—and how he should be the one doing the spying instead. Silvio took his self-assigned duties rather seriously that way. He'd even offered to help Sophia get rid of bodies, although the Goth dwarf had just snickered and gone on about her business solo as usual.

Apparently, Silvio didn't want to have to find a new boss because he was always chiding me about spying, proper body disposal, and other things like that, as if I hadn't spent my entire adult life being an assassin and careening from one dangerous situation to the next. His concern was touching, really, it was, but I'd been on my own for so much of my life that it also felt a bit . . .
smothering
. Most of the time, I felt like a wayward baby duck that Mother Silvio was trying to wrangle back in line.

“Of course I wouldn't spy on Madeline,” I chirped in a bright voice. “Like you said, it's far too big a risk to take.”

The vamp kept eyeing me, so I escaped his steady, suspicious stare by going over to a table Catalina was clearing.

“Did he tell you to be careful again?” she asked in a soft, amused voice, having overheard more than one of my conversations with her uncle.

I sighed and took a stack of dirty dishes from her. “Something like that.”

She chuckled. “Well, I'm glad that he finally has someone else to worry about besides me. Takes some of the pressure off.”

I stuck my tongue out at her, but Catalina just laughed again.

*  *  *

The lunch rush came and went with no problems, although I had to stop one of my waiters from opening the freezer with the dead body in it. He mistakenly thought something else was in there besides blood, ice, and frozen peas.

A little after one o'clock, the front door opened, and the bell chimed, signaling a new and most welcome customer—Owen Grayson.

I focused on him, taking in the rough, rugged beauty of his black hair, violet eyes, and slightly crooked nose, as he strolled over to me. Owen leaned across the counter, brushing his lips against mine. I returned his kiss and inhaled, drawing his rich, metallic scent deep down into my lungs, before he drew back.

“It's good to see you,” I murmured.

He grinned. “It's good to be seen.”

Owen had been busy with some big business deal the past week, so we hadn't spent a lot of time together. On one hand, I didn't mind the separation, as it gave me more
time to spy on Madeline. But I always missed Owen when he wasn't around. Of course, we'd talked on the phone a couple of times a day, but it wasn't the same as being with him, watching him smile, hearing him laugh, feeling his arms around me. So it was good to see him, and it meant more to me than he knew. Because when he was here with me in the restaurant, I knew that he was safe.