“Thank you,” Charlotte whispered. It was the first time she’d uttered a single word since coming into the restaurant.
Sebastian gave his sister an encouraging smile, then put his arm around her shoulder again. Charlotte stiffened at his touch, but she let him lead her out of the restaurant, down the sidewalk, and out of sight.
Finn watched them walk away before swiveling around on his stool and facing me again.
I sighed. “All right. I know you know about the Vaughn job. I could tell by your reaction to Sebastian. So let loose. Let me have it. Tell me what a huge, horrible, terrible mistake I’m making with him.”
Finn gave me a thoughtful look, then shook his head. “I’m not going to tell Dad, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I blinked. “Why not? You’re usually not so . . . generous.”
What I really meant was that he was a complete tattletale. Finn was all too happy to rat me out to Fletcher whenever I did something wrong, usually gleefully cackling all the while.
Finn puckered his lips, giving me a sour look. But then he glanced out the storefront windows again before turning back to me, his green eyes dark and serious. “Look, I know you’re really into this guy,” he said. “He’s rich, handsome, and charming enough to make even me jealous. If I were you, I’d probably be into him too. I kind of was, anyway.”
“But?”
“But I don’t know. There’s something about him that I just don’t like. It’s like he’s . . . trying too hard. Like he has some desperate need for you to like him.”
I snorted. “This coming from the guy who spends longer on his hair in the morning than I do. If that’s not desperate, I don’t know what is.”
Finn sniffed, but he reached up and touched his hair, making sure that every dark lock was still perfectly in place. “It’s not my fault that you think pulling your hair back into a ponytail every single day of the year is a rocking style.”
I glared at him.
Finn glared back at me, but after a moment, his face softened. “Jealousy and everything else aside, you know that he’s never going to be good enough for you, right?”
I snorted again. “According to you, the only guy who was ever good enough for me was you.”
“True.” He grinned. “So very true.”
A few summers ago, Finn and I had had more than a brother-sister relationship—much more.
Maybe it had been inevitable, being around each other for so long, living, fighting, and training together, slowly taking over Fletcher’s assassination business together. Maybe it was the secretive nature of the life we led and the fact that we could only really trust each other and not any outsiders. Or maybe it had been all of those teenage hormones raging through our systems. Either way, we’d spent a long, hot summer together before both of us realized that we were better off as friends.
In some ways, Finn and I were too much alike to have any sort of lasting romantic relationship. Too hard, too cold, too ruthless, each of us always thinking about the angles we could play and how best to go about getting exactly what we wanted from the other. In other ways, we were too different. He was still warm, carefree, and fun, all emotions that had been burned out of me the night my family was murdered.
These days, we had more of a sibling rivalry, especially as it became more and more apparent that I was better suited for the up-close and dirty work of being an assassin than Finn was. Sometimes I didn’t think that Finn cared anything at all about the flings I had with other guys as much as it bugged him how much closer I was to Fletcher in this one crucial regard.
“Actually,” Finn said, sniffing, “I was too good for you. I’ve ruined you for all other men.”
“Hardly. I’ve had longer, deeper, more meaningful relationships with cheeseburgers than I did with you.”
“Yes, but at least I didn’t go straight to your ass,” he said in a smug, superior tone.
I rolled my eyes and made that threatening, slashing motion with my finger again, letting Finn know exactly what I wanted to do to him. At the far end of the counter, Sophia snickered at our antics.
Finn and I both glared at her, but the Goth dwarf was immune to our dirty looks, and she kept right on slicing tomatoes for the rest of the day’s sandwiches. She could pick us both up by the scruffs of our necks and shake us like disobedient puppies, and we all knew it.
Finn sniffed again, just to let Sophia know how annoyed he was with her. Then his glare disappeared, and he gave me a serious look again.
“All kidding aside, just be careful around this guy, okay, Gin? A slick smile can hide a lot of sins.” He paused. “Trust me. I know all about that.”
“Of course you do. You’ve broken far more hearts than I’ve ever cut into.”
Despite my kidding, Finn kept giving me that dead-serious stare. “And no matter what, you should never, ever tell someone all of your secrets.”
I sighed. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to be stupid enough to tell Sebastian anything about what I do as you-know-who. Especially not since it’s going to involve his father.”
He shook his head. “I’m not just talking about what we do, what you do. I’m talking about other things.”
“What other things?”
Finn shook his head again. “I can’t tell you that. Not really. It’s different for everybody. But the funny thing is that you won’t even know that they’re secrets until after you’ve said them—and realized that it’s too late to take them back.”
I stared at him, mystified. I didn’t know what could be more important than what I did as the Spider. That was the deepest, darkest, blackest secret in my heart. Well, that and what had happened to my family. But I wasn’t telling anyone about that—not ever.
Finn kept staring at me, his face suddenly seeming as old and wise as Fletcher’s, as if he knew something important that I didn’t. So I made myself nod, as though I understood exactly what he was talking about, even though I didn’t have a clue.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t be telling Sebastian Vaughn any of my secrets. Trust me. After tonight, I will be the last thing on his mind.”
9
A couple of hours later, I found myself sitting in a van outside the entrance to Vaughn Construction.
It was after eight now, and the warm rays of the setting sun made the chain-link fence that surrounded the site gleam like molten silver. Security lights burned at fifty-foot intervals along the fence, casting small pools of weak white light against the encroaching darkness. Two giant guards manned the main entrance, sitting in their flimsy wooden shack and rifling through magazines to try to alleviate their boredom at working the night shift. Deeper in the compound, lights blazed in the windows in Vaughn’s office. He was working late again, just like he had every day that I’d watched him.