"No," I said. "We weren't involved in anything except a nice little chat. Owen and I are old friends."
That's what I'd introduced myself as to her before, and that's what I was going with now, since it was far less complicated than the truth. I'd hoped that would be enough to satisfy her, but Jillian kept staring at me, her brown eyes dark and thoughtful.
"So I'm not encroaching on your territory, then?" she asked in a blunt tone. "Because I'm not the kind of woman who goes around trying to poach men who are already involved with someone else. And I especially don't like being anybody's rebound fling."
I arched an eyebrow. "Well, that's a colorful way of putting things."
She shrugged, but she lifted her chin and kept her eyes steady on mine. I admired her for that - I admired her a lot for that. It took moxy to confront your date's ex, or whatever I was these days, and ask her point-blank what was going on. So I decided to be polite about things.
"Owen's a big boy," I said. "His actions are his own - and so are mine."
Jillian frowned, clearly not understanding my words, but I didn't feel like explaining them to her. I wasn't quite sure what I meant myself. But if she wanted to make a play for Owen and he decided to move on with her, I wasn't going to stand in their way. I owed Owen that much - her too. No matter how much it hurt.
"What I'm trying to say is that I hope you have a nice night," I said. "With or without Owen."
She nodded, accepting my words. What she really thought about them and me, I couldn't tell, but they seemed to ease her mind.
"Well, I guess I should be getting back to the party," she said. "I believe Mr. McAllister is about to start his speech."
"Oh," I drawled. "You certainly wouldn't want to miss that."
Finn had told me that sometime during the evening McAllister and a few of the muckety-mucks who were on the Briartop board were going to talk about what a wonderful benefactor of the arts Mab had been, how much she'd supported the museum throughout the years, and how generous it was of her to endow Briartop with her art collection postmortem. Lies, lies, and more lies, all the way around. The only things Mab had ever generously dished out had been pain, misery, and suffering, courtesy of her Fire magic.
If that was what was next on the agenda, I'd be quite happy staying in the bathroom until all the pretty speeches were over with. I'd rather scrub my hands until they were red, raw, cracked, and bleeding than listen to people prattle on about how damn noble the Fire elemental had supposedly been. And I certainly wasn't going to raise a glass of champagne and toast Mab with it. Especially not now, when I'd discovered that she'd had my mother's and Annabella's rune necklaces all these years -
"Anyway, it was nice seeing you again, Gin," Jillian said, cutting into my dark thoughts. "You have excellent taste in clothes. And men."
She was trying to make a joke and lighten the mood, so I forced myself to laugh, hoping she wouldn't notice how tight and hollow the sound really was. "You too."
Jillian smiled at me a final time, then opened the bathroom door and headed out into the powder room. But the door didn't quite shut behind her, and I watched her through the wide gap. Jillian walked through the powder room, opened the exterior door, and stepped through to the other side. That door was just swinging shut behind her when she jerked and let out a small, startled gasp, then -
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
The sounds were soft, no more than harsh whispers, but they made me reach for one of my knives all the same.
Because unless I was mistaken, someone had just been shot with a silenced gun.
Chapter 6
The first thing I did was toe off my shoes so the heels wouldn't clack against the marble floor. At the same time, I reached through a slit in my skirt. I'd just stepped out of my second shoe when my hand closed around one of the two knives I had strapped to my thighs. I slid the weapon free and pulled open the interior door just wide enough for me to slip into the powder room. Then I tiptoed over to the exterior door. I stood there, head cocked toward the heavy wood, but I didn't hear anything else.
But there was a pane of glass that served as a vent in the top of the door, so I picked up one of the white velvet chairs, carried it over to the door, and climbed up onto the seat so I could see through the glass.
Jillian Delancey lay on the floor right outside the bathroom door - dead.
At least, I assumed it was Jillian. It was kind of hard to tell, since most of her face had been blown off.
But she wasn't alone. A giant stood over her body. He was on the small side, a few inches short of seven feet tall, but he made up for it by having a ripped, chiseled figure that would have put any bodybuilder to shame. His biceps bulged so big I doubted that he could rest his arms down against his sides. His skin was exceptionally tan, bordering on orange, the sort of fake, unnatural color you got out of a bottle. Everything else about him was pale, though: his hazel eyes, his curly blond hair, even the wispy soul patch that clung to his chin like puffed-up peach fuzz.
But the most interesting thing about him was the fact that he was wearing the dark blue uniform of one of the museum's security guards - one that didn't quite fit. The pants legs stopped an inch short of his black socks, and the chest and sleeves of the shirt threatened to split open with every breath he took. It almost looked like he was playing dress-up in someone else's clothes.
He clutched a silenced gun in his right hand, the weapon trained on Jillian as if he thought she was suddenly going to come back to life with that much of her face missing. Not even Mab could have survived something like that.
For a moment, sorrow washed over me. I hadn't known a thing about Jillian Delancey, other than that she'd come here with Owen and had been interested in him, but she hadn't deserved to die like that.
But the real question was, why had the giant killed her? Why here? Why now? All around me, the marble whispered as Jillian's blood oozed across it and the giant's ugly, violent actions soaked into it. I'd thought the stones had sounded upset before, but now they practically hummed with tension and whined with worry. Whatever was going down, it was happening now.
Lucky for me, there was a guy standing right outside the door who could tell me exactly what that was - and how I could stop it before anyone else got hurt.
I started to get down from the chair so I could yank open the door and confront the giant when another sound caught my ear - clack-clack-clack-clack. Footsteps, hurrying this way. The giant's head snapped up, and he moved away from Jillian's body so the new arrival could see his gruesome handiwork.