“I never count on anything. Especially not promises from cute rich guys.”
He grinned. “Not just cute. Gorgeous, remember?”
Oh, yes. Sebastian Vaughn was far too handsome and far too egotistical for his own good. Still, I found myself grinning back at him before I shook my head and hurried around the corner.
I made it back to the dining room without running into anyone else, including Meredith, the event planner. The cocktail portion of the evening had come to a close while I’d been talking to Sebastian, and I had to hustle over to where the chefs were set up so I could get in line with the other servers.
Sebastian came strolling into the room a minute later. His gaze zoomed over to me, and he flashed me another cocky grin. A few of the other waitresses gave me sour looks, no doubt thinking that I’d been off f**king one of the guests instead of doing my job and jealous that it had been someone as handsome as Sebastian. I ignored their petty stares and disapproving sniffs. Let them think what they wanted to. It didn’t matter to me in the slightest.
But there was one person’s opinion that I did care about—Fletcher’s—and the hard set of his wrinkled features told me that he wasn’t too happy with me. He stabbed his index finger at me, then jerked it to the right. I sighed, knowing that I was probably going to get a lecture, but I followed him over to the far end of the serving line, out of earshot of the other chefs and waiters.
“Where have you been?” he asked, plucking the champagne flutes off my tray and replacing them with baskets of hot buttered bread. “I was getting worried.”
“Recon,” I murmured. “Vaughn snuck off to have a secret meeting with Mab Monroe in the library.”
I glanced around, but I didn’t see Mab in the dining room, although Dawson and Slater had both returned and taken seats at the head of the table. I wondered if the Fire elemental had left as soon as she’d delivered her threats to Vaughn. While Fletcher piled baskets of bread onto my tray, I quickly and quietly told him everything that Mab had said to Vaughn and all the shaky promises that he’d made to her in return. Fletcher would want to know, and I hoped that the intel would cut off any potential lecture before it ever got started.
“Do you think that Mab is behind the hit on Vaughn after all?” I asked when I’d finished.
Fletcher put a final basket of bread on my tray. “I’m not sure. I wouldn’t put it past her, but she usually prefers to do that sort of dirty work herself. She likes the message that it sends to all of her enemies about how powerful she is. Besides, if she really wanted Vaughn dead, she could have used her magic, killed him in the library, and gotten Slater and Dawson to dispose of his charred remains. I’ll see if I can find out any more information about who wants Vaughn dead. Now, scoot. You can tell me the rest of it on the drive home.”
“The rest of what?”
He arched his eyebrows. “Like why Sebastian Vaughn is eyeing you like you’re part of the dinner menu.”
I should have known that I couldn’t get anything past Fletcher. He could be annoyingly perceptive at times. I also knew better than to glance over my shoulder, but I did it anyway. Sebastian was staring at me. He raised his wineglass to me in salute before giving me another sly wink. Heat flooded my cheeks, and I had a difficult time looking Fletcher in the eye.
“It’s nothing,” I mumbled. “I ran into him in the hallway outside the library when I was heading back this way. He flirted with me, so I flirted back so he wouldn’t think too much about what I was doing there. That’s all.”
Fletcher didn’t say anything, but disapproval radiated off him like the heat from the bread. He didn’t tell me that I should have known better, that he had taught me better, because we both knew that he had. One of the keys to being an assassin was being as invisible as possible. Not only when you did the actual hit on your target but also in all the moments leading up to that final, fatal one.
More than one assassin had been caught because he’d made himself too visible in the target’s world. Like being the recently hired mechanic who’d worked on the target’s car hours before the brakes had catastrophically failed and the car had plunged off the side of a mountain road. Or being the new pool boy when the target had slipped, hit his head, and drowned in the shallow end. Or even being seen out on a date with the target the night he mysteriously got mugged and beaten to death walking home from dinner.
Killing someone was easy—getting away with it was what was truly challenging.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him. He probably would have thought it odder if I had completely brushed him off.”
I didn’t add that Sebastian had seemed to enjoy our conversation as much as I had or the promise that he’d made to track me down for a date. Fletcher would have pulled me off the job immediately if he’d known about any of that. But I was going to be the one to kill Vaughn, not him. I wanted to be the one to do the hit, for Charlotte’s sake.
“All right,” Fletcher replied. “You did the best you could. I know his type. A pretty boy who thinks that he’s entitled to whatever he wants. Just ignore him. He’ll move on to someone else soon enough.”
I nodded, picked up the tray of bread, and hurried over to the table with it. I moved behind the row of guests, stopping every few feet to deposit baskets in the appropriate spots. All too soon, though, I reached Sebastian’s seat. Instead of ignoring me like all the other diners had, he turned in his chair and took the basket from me, his fingers brushing against mine for the briefest instant.
Once again, that strange, unwanted heat flooded my face, before the flush spread down my neck, but it was nothing compared with the warmth racing through the rest of my body. Sebastian noticed my embarrassment, and his lips curved up into a smile. I hurried on with the rest of the bread, but all the while, I was aware of his gaze on me, and I couldn’t help but glance in his direction. He was still staring at me, that same small, satisfied smile on his face, his eyes dark with some sort of secret triumph.
I swallowed and continued with my serving duties, but I couldn’t help but think that ignoring Sebastian Vaughn was easier said than done.
7
The rest of the night passed by in a blur—except for the heated looks that Sebastian kept giving me.
His gaze stayed on me most of the evening, long enough that his father noticed and started frowning, as though he didn’t like the thought of his son making googly eyes at a lowly waitress. I wondered if Vaughn would have changed his mind if he knew exactly who and what I was.