Exasperated, Charlotte reached over and dragged my champagne glass out from where I’d hidden it behind the lamp on the nightstand.
“Because Sebastian drugged you,” she whispered. “Because he’s planning to hurt you. I heard him talking to Porter about it earlier. That’s why you have to leave. Right now.”
What . . . ? Sebastian had drugged me? Well, that explained this strange, disconnected feeling and the raging headache I had. But why would he drug me? Why would he be planning to hurt me? He cared about me . . .
Didn’t he?
Charlotte grabbed my arm, but I shooed her away. Somehow I managed to slide out of bed and get to my feet. Despite the fact that I was wobbling like a newborn fawn, I turned my back to her and managed to shimmy into my panties and the slinky silver dress.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she whispered, helping me slide into my high heels. “His meeting won’t last much longer.”
“Where?” I croaked. “Where is he?”
“In the library. But you don’t want to go that way. You can still sneak out the front with the last of the guests. But you have to hurry. The party’s over, and everyone is leaving.”
I staggered over to the windows and peered outside. Sure enough, a long line of limos and town cars were coasting down the lighted driveway. I frowned, struggling to make sense of things through the thick fog that just wouldn’t leave my mind.
Why wasn’t Sebastian here? Whom was he meeting with in the library? And why would Charlotte think that he wanted to hurt me? As far as he knew, I was just a simple waitress, just the girl he’d been seeing the past few weeks. Sebastian couldn’t possibly know that I was secretly an assassin . . . he couldn’t possibly know about my being the Spider . . . he couldn’t possibly know that I’d killed his father . . .
Could he?
The thought chilled me to the bone.
Charlotte kept running around the room, this time grabbing my purse and shoving it into my hands. It took me a couple of tries, since my fingers felt as awkward, clumsy, and detached as the rest of me, but I managed to pop open the top. My silverstone knife lay nestled inside the bag, the one weapon I’d brought with me. I hadn’t thought that I’d need the rest of my knives, not here, not tonight, not with Sebastian.
He’d made me feel special . . . he’d made me feel safe . . . he’d made me feel loved . . .
I spaced out, and it took me a few seconds to blink away my confusion and focus on my knife again. Still, I hesitated, thinking that maybe Charlotte was jealous, that she was trying to get rid of me for whatever reason, and that was why she was saying all of these terrible things about Sebastian. It would be perfectly understandable, given the fact that she’d lost her father and everything that she’d suffered at his hands. Grief could make people do strange things.
But I couldn’t quite quiet the doubts that whispered in my muddled mind—or ignore the mutters that rippled through the stone, even blacker and more ominous than before.
So I reached into the bag and pulled out my knife, feeling the hilt dig into the spider rune scar in my palm, silverstone on silverstone. The solid, familiar weight of the weapon helped ground me and cleared some of the fog from my mind.
Charlotte’s eyes widened when she realized that I was holding a knife, but I stepped forward and shoved my purse at her. The knife was the only thing I needed out of it.
“Here,” I said, staggering toward the bedroom door. “Hold that for me.”
I didn’t know what was going on, but I was sure as hell going to find out.
21
I made it over to the door, opened it a crack, and peered outside, but the hallway was empty.
“Come on! Come on!” Charlotte hissed, pushing past me, sprinting out into the hallway, and gesturing at me with her hand. “This way! This way!”
I looked at the open hallway in front of her, the one that I knew led to a set of stairs that would take me down to the first floor. Charlotte was right. I could still make my escape. But that old, nagging curiosity rose up in me, the one that Fletcher had instilled in me, along with the burning desire to find out what possible reason Sebastian could have had for drugging me.
So I turned and started walking in the opposite direction, toward the library.
“No,” Charlotte said, following me and tugging on my hand, trying to get me to stop. “This way. You have to get away before he hurts you.”
I looked down at her. “How do you know that he’s going to hurt me? Why do you keep saying that?”
Charlotte stared at me, her dark eyes full of pain, pity, and utter misery—too much misery for someone so young. She slowly pushed up the right sleeve of her black dress.
A perfect handprint bruised her bicep in deep blues, as though someone had wrapped his hand around her upper arm as tight as it would go and had then given her a vicious shake.
All the air fled from my lungs, and white stars winked on and off in front of my eyes, as though I’d been sucker-punched in the throat by a giant. If only that were the case. It would have hurt less, so much less.
“Sebastian . . . Sebastian did that to you?”
“And more,” she whispered.
A sick, sick feeling filled my stomach, making me want to vomit up the drugged champagne. “Not—not your father?”
Charlotte gave me a puzzled look, then shook her head.
That sick, sick feeling intensified, and my knees threatened to buckle, but I forced myself to swallow down the bitter bile rising in my throat and stay on my feet.
“Why? Why did he do that to you?”
“Sebastian likes to hurt people, especially me,” Charlotte said in a voice that was far too old, knowing, and matter-of-fact for a teenager. “He always has, ever since I was little. He hides it, though. From everyone but me.”
“Did you—did you ever tell your father what Sebastian was doing to you?” I could barely croak out the words.
She hesitated. “No. I wanted to, but Sebastian told me that he would hurt Papa if I ever said a word to him.”
All along, I’d thought that Cesar Vaughn was the bad guy, a dirty, rotten, low-down, despicable villain who’d been abusing his own daughter. But it wasn’t him. None of this had been his doing or his fault. Charlotte hadn’t been suffering because of him. Which meant . . . which meant . . .
I killed an innocent man.
The thought slammed into my gut like a sledgehammer, and I almost got sick right then and there. But once again, I forced myself to choke down the bile in my throat, even though it burned me like acid from the inside out.