“I haven’t forgotten any of it, not one thing. No matter how much I might have wanted to.” This time, my mouth twisted with bitterness.
Charlotte stared at me, then moved over to a cabinet in the back corner of the library. She opened one of the glass doors, reached inside, and drew out a bottle of gin. She held it up so I could see it.
“How about a drink?” she asked. “For old times’ sake?”
I nodded and settled myself in one of the chairs in front of the fireplace. While Charlotte fixed our drinks, I reached out with my magic, listening to the stones around me. According to the news reports, part of the Vaughn mansion had collapsed in on itself the night I killed Sebastian. After his death, it had stood empty for years. But now it looked eerily similar to how it had all those years ago, with one notable difference: the stones no longer murmured with Sebastian’s cruelty.
Oh, a current of darkness still rippled through them, but it was the emotion of someone who’d known her share of horrors and would never, ever forget them. Mostly, though, the marble and granite murmured with pride at all the hard work she’d done to restore them to their former glory. Looked like Charlotte had inherited more of her father’s Stone magic than Sebastian had realized.
Charlotte walked over and handed me a crystal tumbler full of clear liquid, a few ice cubes, and a thick wedge of line.
“Gin for Gin, right?” she murmured, settling into the chair across from me.
“You’ve done your homework.”
She shrugged. “I had a lot of time to think about things in foster care. That’s where I ended up, after everything that happened.”
I took a sip of the gin, feeling the cold liquid slide down my throat, then start its slow, familiar burn in my stomach. Charlotte and I sat there sipping our drinks. All around me, the stones kept whispering of secrets—hers and mine.
“The first foster home they sent me to was terrible,” she said, staring into her glass. “The sort of place where the adults are only in it for those sweet little checks the government sends them every month. The husband and wife constantly screamed at each other. One day, the husband hit the wife—and me too. So badly that I ended up in the emergency room with a broken arm.”
“Something that sadly is not uncommon in the system.”
Charlotte shrugged, then raised her eyes to mine. “It’s funny, though. The next day—the very next day—they found the husband in an alley behind some Southtown bar. He’d been beaten to a pulp.”
“Imagine that,” I drawled. “But that’s the risk you take when you wander over into Southtown, day or night.”
Charlotte snorted. “Well, his beating got the cops involved, and I got shipped to another foster home, a much nicer one, with an older couple. They treated me like their own daughter.” She jerked her head at another photo on the mantel, one that showed Charlotte standing between a man and a woman. “The Smithson family.”
I’d noticed that photo too. I didn’t say anything, although I did take another sip of my gin.
“When people have accidents and walk away from them, lots of them claim that their guardian angels were watching out for them,” Charlotte said.
“Mmm.”
“My experience has been a little different,” she continued. “I was never involved in any accidents, but every time I had a problem, no matter what it was, it was always taken care of. I got a bad foster family, I got a new one. Somebody hassled me at school, he soon stopped. A guy even stole my car once. He brought it back to me three days later, washed, waxed, and with a full tank of gas.”
“I guess his conscience caught up with him, and he realized what a bad thing he did.”
Charlotte quirked an eyebrow at my sarcasm, but she continued with her story. “Some anonymous donor even paid to have the rubble of my father’s mausoleum cleared away and to have him and my mother entombed at Blue Ridge Cemetery, in a new mausoleum that looked just like the one he’d built before.”
I didn’t respond this time.
“Then, on my eighteenth birthday, just as I’m wondering how I’m going to pay for college, I get a letter from some investment banker saying that my father had set up a trust fund for me and that all of the Vaughn property had been signed over to me. The mansion, the grounds, even the few assets that were left from my father’s construction company.”
“Good for your father, for thinking ahead like that.”
Charlotte leaned forward, her dark brown eyes searching mine. “But you see, I know for a fact that all of the property was in Sebastian’s name. He got it as soon as my father died. But Sebastian didn’t leave a will, and since I was underage, it was tied up in the courts for years. And there was no trust fund, not when most of my father’s money was used to pay off lawsuits from the family members of the victims of the terrace collapse. It came out, you know, that Sebastian used his Stone magic to cause it. A cop my father knew sent his findings to the police. It cleared my father’s name, but Vaughn Construction was still liable since Sebastian was part of the company. I didn’t mind those folks getting the money, though. I think my father would have paid them himself, if he’d still been alive.”
I didn’t respond.
“I know it was you, Gin,” Charlotte said in a soft voice. “The foster home, the bullies, the guy who boosted my car, the money, the mausoleum . . . everything. It was you—you took care of everything. You took care of me.”
Actually, Finn had done the heavy lifting with the money and all the legal stuff, one of the first jobs he’d ever done at his bank. But she was right. I’d done the rest.
“Why did you do it? Was it because you felt guilty about killing my father?”
I gripped my glass a little tighter, feeling the chill of it sink into the spider rune scar in my palm. “If—and this is a big if—I had anything to do with your good fortune over the years, it wasn’t because of the guilt. I’m an assassin. I kill people. Sometimes the wrong ones, but it’s still who I am and what I do.”
“Then why?”
I looked at her. “Because I know what it’s like to be alone and scared and lost and hurt—hurt so deep down in your soul that you know that part of the pain will never, ever go away. Once upon a time, someone was kind enough to take me in and teach me how to deal with that hurt the best way that he knew how. He helped me, and I owed it to you to do the same. And then some.”