Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(12)

Owen’s hand slid down my stomach, and I opened my legs. He eased a finger inside me, drawing those slow, deliberate patterns that he knew drove me crazy. He pulled back ever so slightly, his tongue darting in and out of my mouth in time with his finger. I moaned with each glide of him against me.

I didn’t want to wait any longer, and neither did he. I put my hands on his shoulders and rolled us both off the coffee table and onto the floor. The pillows broke our fall, and we crashed together once more. I locked my legs around his waist and pulled him deep inside me, moaning at how good he felt sliding against me.

Back and forth, we rolled on the floor, kissing, caressing, and thrusting against each other, trying to wring as much pleasure out of this moment as possible. Our movements became more and more frantic, our kisses longer, our thrusts harder and deeper, until finally we both reached the peak of our pleasure and went over the edge together.

Bow-chicka-wow-wow indeed.

? ? ?

I woke up a couple of hours later, my arms still wrapped around Owen, the two of us cuddled together in the mounds of pillows on the floor. He was snoring, the sound vibrating out of his chest like a low, rolling drumbeat. I lay there for a minute, enjoying the feel of his warm, strong body next to mine and the steady, soothing thump-thump-thump of his heart under my fingertips.

But as wonderful as tonight had been, I was too restless and had too many things on my mind to just relax and lie there next to Owen. So I slipped out of his arms and covered him with a blanket from the couch. Then I grabbed another blanket, wrapped it around myself, and left the den.

I headed into Fletcher’s office—my office now—snapped on the lights, and went over to his battered wooden desk. Ever since the old man’s murder more than a year ago, I’d slowly been going through several decades’ worth of papers, photos, and other information that he’d collected and squirreled away in here. Now, finally, everything was organized and neatly filed away, and I could find info on just about anyone in the Ashland underworld in a matter of minutes. I’d even been updating and adding to the files myself, with Silvio’s help. But tonight I only had eyes for the bottle of gin and the glass perched on the center of the desk.

I plopped into Fletcher’s chair, poured myself a healthy amount of gin, and drank it down, relishing the sweet burn of the liquor sliding down my throat. I poured a second glass, leaned back in the chair, and eyed the photo of the old man that I had placed on the corner of the desk.

Walnut-brown hair, green eyes, tan wrinkled features. Fletcher smiled as he looked out over the scenic landscape of Bone Mountain, where we’d gone hiking together so many times over the years. This photo was one of my favorite shots of him, and now that I’d cleaned out his office and made it my own, I often found myself coming in here and looking at the picture for guidance, even if he was dead and buried.

“Did you know about Tucker and my mother?” I asked. “Did you have any clue about the two of them? Because it was certainly news to me.”

Of course, Fletcher didn’t answer. He just kept looking out over the mountain view and grinning his sly grin, as if he knew all these secrets and was silently telling me that I’d have to find the answers myself.

Fletcher had set this whole thing up like an enormous treasure hunt, with one clue leading to another clue, all of them slowly revealing more and more information about the Circle, its members, and my mother. Not for the first time, I wondered why he’d done things this way, instead of just leaving all the information in one place for me to find. Specifically, why he hadn’t included a photo of the leader of the Circle with all the other pictures that had been in his safety-deposit boxes. What was so special, terrifying, or horrifying about this man that Fletcher had deliberately left him out?

It was almost like Fletcher was building up to something—some secret that he knew would further rock my world—and he was trying to get me ready for it, trying to prepare me for the shocking truth, trying to soften the blow by only giving me small dribs and drabs of information along the way. I had the sinking feeling that my mother and Tucker being involved wasn’t the worst of it. Not by a long shot.

The old man might have thought he was protecting me, but it was damn frustrating to always have more questions than answers.

“Well, Fletcher?” I asked, still staring at his picture, the office walls soaking up my soft words. “Care to tell me what you were thinking? What am I going to find out when I finally get to the bottom of this crazy rabbit hole?”

Just saying the words made me feel better, like the old man was sitting here with me, like we were discussing a new assignment, a new mission, the way we had so many times in the past. And it also calmed some of my turbulent emotions, although it left more questions in their wake.

If Damian Rivera’s mocking works were true, then Hugh Tucker had been sweet on my mother. At some point, he had cared about her, enough for other people to notice and remember it, even now, all these years later. Maybe the two of them had even had a romantic relationship before my mother met and married my father, Tristan. I could accept all those possibilities, although they still boggled my mind. Try as I might, I just couldn’t picture Eira, who’d always been so warm, caring, and considerate, with someone like Tucker. Someone so cold, heartless, and ruthless.

Someone so much like, well, me.

Then again, it had taken me years to get to this point. I hadn’t started out as a stone-cold killer. Once upon a time, I’d been a sweet, innocent little girl without a care in the world. But that little girl had burned to ash right alongside Eira and my older sister, Annabella, the night Mab Monroe murdered them and tortured me.