McAllister drew off first one of his black leather gloves, then the other, tucking them into the pocket of his long coat before striding toward me. His walk was just as slick and smooth as everything else about him, designed to impress and intimidate at the same time.
"Jonah McAllister," I drawled, still holding my silverstone knife out of sight below the counter. "To what do I owe this honor?"
McAllister gave me a cold, thin smile that didn't even come close to stretching his tight features or reaching his brown eyes. "Gin Blanco. So lovely to see you again. As for what I want, well, I thought that I'd show my lady friend here some of the sights of Ashland. She's new in town and trying to get the lay of the land, so to speak."
LaFleur stepped up next to McAllister, and I got my first close-up look at the assassin. She wore a pair of tight, black leather pants, topped with an expensive flowing silk shirt done in a dark green. Thin ribbons laced up the front of the shirt, giving it a bit of old-fashioned elegance. A matching green pea coat completed the stylish ensemble, along with a pair of black stiletto boots. A headband made of emeralds kept her short, black hair back off her face. An expensive bauble. I could tell that the gems were real and not just glass, because I could hear the stones whispering of their own proud beauty. A smug, arrogant sound that perfectly matched what I knew of their owner.
LaFleur had a heart-shaped face that was almost as beautiful as Roslyn's. The assassin's skin was as smooth and pale as marble-perfectly flawless. Her eyes were a bright, vivid green-the same color as the lightning that I'd seen her use to blast the dwarf on the docks the other night. Even now, her electrical magic sparked in the depths of her green gaze. Just a hint of elemental power surrounded her, the kind of faint static charge that you felt in the air right before a lightning storm, but it still made the silverstone embedded in my hands itch and burn.
As for her figure, LaFleur was petite, with a trim, athletic build. She might be thin, but there was a lean, coiled strength to her body that her expensive clothes just couldn't hide.
But the most curious thing about her was the tattoo.
It started at the hollow of her throat as a simple vine that curled up her neck until it unfurled into a single, perfect orchid. The faintest hints of green, peach, and cream-white inked in the tattoo. The artistry was exquisite in its detail, and given the petal-soft quality of LaFleur's skin, it was almost like looking at a real flower. The steady thump of her pulse in her throat made the orchid's leaves and petals twitch ever so slightly, like it was constantly blossoming.
Well, it looked as if Fletcher had been right about LaFleur's having some sort of tattoo. And now that I'd seen it, I knew that it was even more than that. The orchid was also LaFleur's rune, the symbol for delicate grace. That's why she always left a single white orchid behind at the scene of her kills. Because it was her mark, just the way my spider rune was to me, or Mab Monroe's sunburst necklace was to her. LaFleur left an actual flower behind instead of just drawing the complicated rune somewhere. Maybe she didn't have the artistic skill to re-create the rune, or maybe she just didn't want to take the time. After all, most assassins didn't stick around too long after their hits. That was a good way to get caught or get dead.
Still, something about the orchid tattoo bothered me. Maybe it was the way it was placed on her neck, how it curled up her skin, but I knew that I'd seen one like it somewhere before. On someone that I'd killed before-
"It's so nice to meet you, Gin," the assassin said, interrupting my thoughts. Her voice was lower than I thought it would be, with a faintly sibilant, seductive tone. "I'm Elektra LaFleur."
I kept my face smooth, as though the name LaFleur meant nothing to me. Elektra, either, even though it was an obvious play on her electrical power. What a cliche. I wondered if that was her real name or one that she'd just chosen for herself, given her elemental magic. Didn't much matter either way. She was still going to die.
I nodded my head at her, even as my thumb traced over the hilt of my silverstone knife.
At this point, Sophia had gotten interested in things. The Goth dwarf knew all about my problems with Jonah McAllister and had actually stopped stirring her pot of baked beans long enough to stare over her shoulder at the three of us. Sophia made a questioning sort of growl low in her throat, telling me that she was up for whatever I wanted to do, however I wanted to handle McAllister and LaFleur.
I met the dwarf's black gaze and made a flat, level, slashing motion with my hand, the one still holding the knife down out of sight. No, I was telling her. Stay cool. There was no real problem here-yet.
Besides, I wanted to see exactly what McAllister wanted, exactly why he'd brought LaFleur here to the Pit, before we got into anything ... messy.
"So do we seat ourselves or is there somewhere ... special that we need to go?" McAllister asked.
My eyes narrowed. "You came here to eat? In my restaurant?"
That was one of the very last things I'd ever expected him to say.
McAllister gave me another cold smile. "That is what one does here, is it not? I was under the impression that you were running a restaurant." His brown eyes roamed over the clean, but well-worn, interior once more. "Such as it is."
The arrogant sneer in McAllister's bombastic voice might have made a lesser woman cower. Instead, below the counter, my hand tightened around my silverstone knife.
But instead of bringing up my weapon and ending the arrogant lawyer's miserable existence, I tucked it into a slot under the cash register. There was nothing I could do but seat them. Not without creating a whole lot of trouble for everyone in the restaurant.
If it had just been me and Sophia, well, I might have brought up my hidden knife and slit Elektra LaFleur's throat with it before turning my deadly brand of attention to Jonah McAllister. But there were innocent people in here, people who had nothing to do with my feud with McAllister.
Even when I'd been the Spider full-time and assassinating people for money, I'd never killed innocents, no matter what. There were certain rules that you just didn't break, even if you were a cold-hearted bitch of an assassin like me. No kids, no pets, no bystanders. It was a code that Fletcher had taught me, one that I'd lived by for years. One that I still adhered to today-and one of the few things that was keeping McAllister alive right now.
Besides, I wanted to see exactly what kind of game the lawyer was playing, what he thought he was doing here, other than being a dick. So I leaned over, picked up a couple of stray menus, and stepped around to the other side of the counter.