Lights burned at the corners of the warehouse, illuminating its plain façade, as well as the rows of cranes, forklifts, and other heavy-duty equipment that surrounded the building like metal soldiers just waiting to be called into action. Everything was quiet, and I didn’t see anyone lurking in the shadows farther out in the shipping yard, but for some reason, I still felt uneasy.
A shiver zipped down my spine, and I hurried over to the door and entered the access code on the keypad. The second the door buzzed open, I slipped through to the other side, making sure that the door shut and locked behind me. Clyde O’Neal might be my main problem right now, but Ashland’s many, many criminals were always looking for stuff to steal, and I wasn’t about to make it easy for anyone to try to rob me.
The warehouse was an enormous, open space with a metal roof high overhead, thick cinder-block walls, and a gray concrete floor streaked with black scuff marks from all the machinery that constantly rumbled across it. More forklifts lined the front wall, while pallets covered with wooden crates, cardboard boxes, and plastic-wrapped goods stretched out from left to right, as well as marching toward the opposite end of the warehouse. Wide lanes separated the various rows of pallets, while large white placards with bold black numbers hung from the ceiling, marking the different rows and sections of the building.
It was after eight o’clock now, so the warehouse was deserted for the day, and the only sound was my heels clicking against the floor as I strode down the main center aisle.
I used to be a smuggler, just like Mallory had been before me. Way back in the day, my grandmother had made her fortune running bootleg liquor and other illegal things throughout the Appalachian Mountains, from Ashland over to Cypress Mountain, then up to Cloudburst Falls, and all the way back down again. But a whole lot more things were legal now than they had been back then, so I wasn’t really a smuggler anymore, just a businesswoman who rented her shipping yard and equipment to companies that needed to move goods from point A to point B and all the places in between.
What I truly excelled at was finding and procuring items for wealthy, demanding clients. Rare wines, first-edition books, classic works of art, expensive sports cars, even more expensive jewelry. If it was valuable or collectible in any way, then there was a market for it, and I could discreetly obtain the special thing your heart desired most—for the right price, of course.
These days, I didn’t move drugs or have anything to do with those who did, which was one of the reasons I was having so many problems with Clyde O’Neal. The crime boss cooked and transported meth, opioids, and all sorts of other nasty things up and down the Aneirin River, and he probably wanted my shipping yard so he could increase his distribution pipeline. I had no interest in helping Clyde expand his evil empire, so he could either give up or get dead. The only question was how many more headaches he was going to cause me in the meantime. My guess? Plenty.
By this point, I was near the center of the warehouse. In addition to the numbered placards overhead, clipboards and tablets hung on metal racks at the ends of many of the aisles, and I stopped and checked several of the boards and electronic devices, pulling up manifests and making sure that all the crates, boxes, and goods were in their proper places.
Most of my employees had worked for me for years, like Dario, but random checks helped keep folks honest. Given the right circumstances, even the most decent person could be tempted to slip a box of designer handbags into the trunk of their car to resell on the sly. But mostly, I was concerned about the not-so-decent people I so often had to deal with.
A few weeks ago, Clyde had bribed a couple of my newer employees to swipe a crate that contained several rare bottles of wine that I’d spent months collecting for a client. The workers had loaded the crate on a forklift and thought no one would notice them trying to leave the shipping yard with it. Dario and I had caught them at the main gate, but the idiots had panicked and accidentally crashed the forklift into one of the shipping containers, destroying the crate and the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of wine inside. Which was yet another reason for me to eliminate Clyde O’Neal before he cost me any more time or money.
But according to my persual, everything was where it should be, so I moved past the pallets, goods, and racks and headed to the very back of the warehouse.
Dimitri Barkov, the previous owner, had only the most spartan and utilitarian of offices, but I preferred to be comfortable while working, so I’d cordoned off a large space and turned it into a suite of rooms, including a bedroom with an attached bathroom.
I entered the code on another keypad, yanked the door open, and moved into the space beyond. A wooden desk featuring a monitor and a landline phone squatted on one side of the room, while several chairs lined the other side. During the day, Karlotta Valdez, Dario’s wife and my personal assistant, would be sitting at the desk, taking calls and shepherding people in and out of my office. Karlotta was fond of orchids, and several of the delicate, colorful flowers perched in pots on her desk, as well as on the shelves that lined one of the walls.
I strode through that area, opened another door, and headed into my office. Actually, it was still Dimitri Barkov’s office, since the space hadn’t been remodeled yet. A metal desk, a couple of chairs, some battered filing cabinets. I was thoroughly sick of looking at the dead crime boss’s ugly, outdated furniture, but I only had to endure it for a few more days. Next week, Vaughn Construction, my renovation crew, would start working their magic on the office, as well as the waiting room outside—
Smack!
My knee clipped the edge of one of the filing cabinets. Pain shot up my leg even as a curse spewed out of my mouth. I hopped around, trying to walk off the injury, and glared over at the offending piece of furniture. For some reason, that filing cabinet jutted out from the wall a few inches farther than all the others, and I’d banged my knee into it more than once. Yet another reason I couldn’t wait to start remodeling, get some new furniture, and finally turn the office into my own space.
I hobbled over to the desk, dropped down into the chair, and massaged the sting out of my knee. A mountain of manila folders was stacked in a neat pile in the center of my desk, along with a pink sticky note from Karlotta:Next round of interviews scheduled!
I groaned at the reminder of yet another thing on my never-ending to-do list.
Jack Corbin had been my right-hand man for several years, until he’d taken a bribe and set me up to be murdered by Raymond. I’d killed Corbin for betraying me, but I hadn’t hired anyone to take his place in my organization yet. Hard to bring someone new into the fold when the last guy had stuck the proverbial knife in your back. Then again, I’d always had a difficult time trusting folks, thanks to my issues with my father and my brother.
I didn’t have the patience to review the résumés tonight, so I shoved the folders off to the side and cracked open my laptop. I didn’t consider myself to be a night owl, but I almost always got more accomplished in the evening, rather than during the day when people, phone calls, and emails constantly interrupted me. So I dove into the actual paperwork littering my desk, as well as the electronic files on my laptop.
Maybe it was weird, but I actually enjoyed bidding on auction items, tracking shipments, and all the other dozens of little details that made up my business. Clicking through online catalogs and dealing with calm, quiet numbers was a nice respite after a day of listening to outrageous demands by my clients, many of whom had far more money than common sense.
Like the woman in Snowline Ridge, Colorado, who wanted me to buy and then ship her some exotic animal that she’d seen in a tourist attraction in Cloudburst Falls, West Virginia. Or the man in Bigtime, New York, who wanted a rare mythology book from a private academy in Cypress Mountain, North Carolina, even though the academy’s library wasn’t open to the public and didn’t lend or sell its books to anyone. Or the folks at the mysterious Section 47 Corporation in Washington, D.C., who wanted a dozen of the biggest, strongest silverstone safes that money could buy. And those weren’t even the craziest things people had asked me for this week.
Sometimes I thought I should become an assassin like Gin Blanco. Because killing people like the Spider did would be a whole lot easier and much less stressful than trying to make themhappy.
My thoughts drifted back to my father. Like many of my clients, Renaldo Pike had had more money, houses, and cars than he knew what to do with, but he’d still never been happy—unless he was hitting my mother and me.
I’d never understood what had driven my father to abuse us. Renaldo didn’t drink or do drugs, and his own childhood growing up in a wealthy family had seemed normal enough. Renaldo had certainly never wanted for food or shelter or money or anything else that might make someone do such hurtful, hateful things to the people he supposedly loved. No matter how many times I thought about it, I always came to the same conclusion: my father had just been a mean, sadistic bastard who liked to hit people. Maybe it had made him feel powerful or strong or something like that. I didn’t know, and most of the time, I didn’t care. Not anymore.
Not since Gin had killed him.
I still remembered the exact moment when Gin had shoved Renaldo and he’d fallen backward onto the old-fashioned mace that was his favorite weapon. The wet, heavythwackof the spikes punching into his back. The scream and the blood that had spewed out of his mouth. The shock and disbelief on his face. The dark, malicious satisfaction that had filled my heart when I realized that he wasdead, that he could never hurt me ever again—and the deep, aching bitterness of knowing that my mother was still gone, that he’d already taken her away from me, and that nothing could ever bring her back.
I’d felt the same mix of emotions when I’d killed Raymond, my half brother.
Raymond had come to Ashland to murder me with his powerful metal magic, but Gin had helped me get the better of him. Together, along with some of our other friends, Gin and I had lured Raymond to the Ashland Botanical Gardens, where there wasn’t very much metal he could use against us. But my brother had escaped our trap and almost killed Gin before I’d shot him with an elemental Ice gun.
The thing I remembered most from that night was the overwhelming sense of relief that it wasfinished. That Raymond was as dead as Renaldo was and that he could never come after me, Mallory, or anyone else I cared about ever again. For the first time in my life, I had finally beenfreeof both my father and my brother, if not all the awful things they’d done to me and my mother. Then again, just about everyone in Ashland had something in their past that haunted them. My memories were just making me a little more melancholy than usual tonight—
