Venom in the Veins by Jennifer Estep

  Mason stayed where he was, all alone on the terrace, like a king in a castle, watching his servants work down below. Once again, that eerie, sickening feeling of déjà vu swept over me. I knew this man. I was certain of it. I just couldn’t remember from where or when at the moment.

  It would come to me eventually, though.

  The nightmares always did.

  Chapter Thirty

  It took another half hour for Mason, Tucker, and the giants to finally clear out and leave the estate.

  My friends and I stayed in the woods another half hour after that, just to make sure that they weren’t going to double back. Then we packed up our gear and left, heading off to our regularly scheduled lives.

  Now that we had seen Mason, we had to be more careful than ever before. I didn’t want him or Tucker to realize that we finally had the advantage, so that meant going on with our daily routines as though everything was normal.

  Luckily, Tucker and Mason had shown up at the estate early enough for me to make it back downtown and open up the Pork Pit on schedule. Silvio came with me, and he perched on his stool, already firing up his laptop again and going through the security camera footage, along with the photos and videos Finn had shot.

  “I’ll go ahead and send you a photo of Mason so you can study it and see where you might know him from,” Silvio said.

  My phone chimed a few seconds later with said photo.

  “It will take me a few days to go through and identify the giants, but maybe I can trace one of them back to Mason himself.” My assistant actually sounded happy about the mountain of work he was facing, and he started humming to himself as he clicked through image after image.

  I left him to it and got busy with my own work. Now that I had seen Mason’s face, now that we had a real chance of identifying him, I half expected Tucker and a dozen giants to storm into the restaurant to try to kill me. But nothing suspicious happened, and the lunch rush came and went like usual. I kept a lookout for anyone I thought might be working for Tucker and eating here just so they could spy on me, but the restaurant was so busy that it was hard for me to pick anyone out of the crowd.

  But two familiar faces did show up around two o’clock: Mallory and Mosley.

  The two dwarves stepped into the restaurant, hung their coats on the rack by the front door, and headed over to the counter. For some reason, Mosley was carrying a small white box tied with a royal-blue ribbon, like he’d brought me a present. I studied both him and Mallory, but they looked no worse for wear, despite the ordeal they’d been through last night.

  I did notice one telling thing about the couple. Instead of her usual array of diamonds, Mallory sported only a single one on her finger. She caught me eyeing it and held out her left hand so I could get a better look at the ring. Even by Ashland standards, it was an impressive diamond, and I could hear each one of the lovely carats singing about its own sparkling beauty, along with Mallory’s happiness.

  “Stuey and I are engaged,” she said in a proud voice.

  Mosley smiled and laid his hand on top of hers. “We had been talking about it for a while, but after everything that’s happened over the past few days, we thought there was no time like the present.”

  “Congratulations! I’m so happy for you!”

  I stepped around the counter and hugged both of them. Silvio shook Mosley’s hand and offered his congratulations as well.

  Mallory beamed at me. “Thank you, Gin. We’ve just started planning things, but I wanted to ask you to be one of my bridesmaids. Bria, too.”

  Her request touched me, and I reached out and hugged her again. “I would be honored.”

  She hugged me back.

  Mosley cleared his throat and looked around the restaurant for a moment. Then he put the white box with the blue ribbon down on the counter and pushed it over to me. “I wanted to bring you a gift, Gin. To thank you for everything you’ve done for me over the past few days.”

  I reached for the box to open it and see what was inside, but Mosley waved his hand, stopping me.

  “Open it later,” he said. “Tonight. When you’re alone and can really…look at it.”

  The serious tone in his voice made me wonder what was inside the box that he didn’t want anyone else to see, but I trusted his judgment, so I slid the box under the counter and out of sight.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Mosley nodded at me, but a strange, almost pitying look filled his face, as if he’d just handed me a live grenade and was waiting for it to explode and blow me to pieces.

  * * *

  Mallory and Mosley sat down on the stools next to Silvio and started chatting about their wedding plans, deliberately lightening the mood. I’d never been big on weddings, but I wholeheartedly joined in the conversation. I needed some lightness, some happiness, after everything that had happened.

  The happy couple lingered over their lunch for more than an hour before leaving to meet with a wedding planner. I watched them go with a smile on my face. I had a feeling that theirs was going to be a romance and a wedding to remember.

  The rest of the day passed quietly. I closed the restaurant a little after seven, grabbed Mosley’s mysterious gift, and headed home for the night.

  As much as I wanted to open the box right away, the chill from the lake still lingered in my bones. Or maybe that was just the uneasy feeling of realizing that I would be dead right now if not for Hugh Tucker. Either way, I went upstairs and took a long, hot shower. Then I put on my pajamas, along with a thick robe, and headed back downstairs.

  I went into the den, sat down on the sofa, and grabbed Mosley’s gift from the coffee table. I shook it, but it was so well packaged that I didn’t have any idea what might be inside. So I undid the ribbon, popped the top off, and pushed aside the white tissue paper to reveal…a book.

  But not just any book—one with a royal-blue cover and silver-foil-trimmed pages.

  I was so surprised that I almost dropped the box and the book onto the floor, but I tightened my grip and managed to hang on to them. I set the box down, then grabbed the book out of it and started turning it over and over in my hands.

  I examined it from all angles, but it was exactly the same as the two blue books that had been with Mab’s things, the ones that Mason and Tucker had been so desperate to get their hands on. But where had Mosley gotten this book? According to Tucker, only two blue books had been part of the auction.

  Then I remembered our dinner conversation at Underwood’s the night this whole thing had started. Mosley had said that Fletcher had given him some book, one that Mosley had kept safe for all these years. He must have finally found the book buried in one of those boxes at his mansion.

  I frowned. But where would Fletcher have gotten this book from? The answer came to me a moment later. Mab—he must have stolen it from Mab Monroe.

  Fletcher must have figured out that Mab had the book and that she was using it as leverage against the Circle. So he’d decided to steal it from her. After all, it wasn’t like Mab could tell anyone that she didn’t have the book anymore. So the old man had swiped the book and given it to Mosley for safekeeping.

  If my theory was right, then that meant this was the real book, the one with all those damning Circle secrets in it.

  Hands trembling, I held my breath and opened the book, half expecting the pages to be blank…

  But they weren’t.

  Rows of numbers, dates, times, places, and names filled the pages from top to bottom and front to back. I flipped through page after page, and each one had just as much information as the last. It was some sort of ledger just like Mason had said. But that wasn’t the biggest shock. No, the biggest shock was that I recognized the elegant handwriting that flowed across the pages.

  My mother had written this book.

  I was so surprised that I almost dropped the book again, but I managed to hang on to it, although I sagged back against the couch cushions. I slowly flipped through the pages, but they were all t
he same. Numbers, dates, times, places, and names, all in my mother’s handwriting. I scanned a few pages, but they seemed to be written in code, so I couldn’t make sense of them right away.

  Emotion surged through me. I couldn’t sit still, so I got up and started pacing back and forth through the den, clutching the book to my chest and trying to figure out what this meant.

  I knew that my mother had been part of the Circle, although I’d never known exactly what she had done for the group. But this made it look like she’d been some sort of…bookkeeper for them. Not just of money but of other things too.

  Like where some of the Circle’s many bodies were buried.

  If Eira had been the group’s bookkeeper, then she would have had access to all sorts of damning information. Maybe she’d been getting ready to go public with the Circle’s sins. Maybe that was why Mason had ordered Mab to murder her.

  Mab had been all too happy to kill my mother, but she must have realized that the same thing could happen to her someday, so the Fire elemental had taken my mother’s book. But when? The night that photo of her and my parents was taken? Or sometime later? Maybe Mab had even taken the book from Eira’s office the night she killed my mother. No way to know for sure.

  But no matter when she had gotten the book, Mab had used it to keep herself safe from Mason and the rest of the Circle, at least until Fletcher had come along sometime later and stolen it from her. That’s when Mab must have gotten those other two blue books, just to keep up appearances that she still had the real one.

  I didn’t know if I was right about everything, but I was betting that I’d guessed the rough outlines of how everything had gone down.

  I kept pacing back and forth, and my steps took me over to the fireplace mantel. I stopped and stared at my mother’s snowflake rune pendant resting on top of the matching, framed drawing. Eira’s snowflake was the symbol for icy calm, but I felt anything but calm right now.

  “Were you planning to expose the Circle?” I whispered. “Is that why they killed you?”

  But of course, my mother didn’t answer me. She couldn’t, thanks to Mason, Tucker, and Mab. I had started to turn away and continue my pacing when I felt a wave of magic. I froze and looked at the fireplace again.

  That sapphire paperweight, the one that had been with Mab’s things, glinted at me from the mantel. I reached out, picked it up, and hefted it in my hand. A second later, I realized why it was bothering me so much.

  Because the magic emanating off the jewel felt exactly the same as the magic that had rippled off Mason at the Eaton Estate earlier today.

  I frowned and curled my fingers around the sapphire, concentrating on the feel of the magic. Cold and hard like my own Stone power. Unless I was mistaken, Mason had coated this jewel with his magic and then given it to Mab as…what? A warning? A reminder of his power and how easily he could crush her with it?

  More and more questions crowded into my mind, but I didn’t have answers to any of them. Frustrated, I set the jewel back down on the mantel. This time, I did turn away from it, although my gaze landed on something else: the photo of my parents that was lying on the coffee table. I stared at my mother for a moment before my gaze moved over to my father’s face—

  Shock stabbed through my heart, as sharp as one of my silverstone knives.

  The blue ledger slipped from my grasp and thumped to the floor, but I didn’t care. I bolted over to the table, snatched up the photo, and held it up to the lights where I could really see it. My father looked the same as all the other times I’d stared at this photo in the past few days. Dark brown hair, gray eyes, handsome features, tall, strong body.

  But my father also looked exactly like Mason.

  The photo slipped from my fingers and sailed through the air before gliding to the floor, but I didn’t care. This time, I lunged over to the couch and snatched my phone up off one of the cushions.

  My heart was pounding, and my hands were shaking so badly that it took me a couple of tries to enter my password, pull up my email, and open the photo of Mason that Silvio had sent me. I grabbed the picture from the floor, sat down on the couch, and held it up next to my phone, comparing the two images, the two men.

  Same dark brown hair, same light gray eyes, same handsome features. They even had the same tall, strong bodies.

  Mason and my father could have been twins.

  For a moment, I had the mad, crazy, insane thought that Mason was my father. But as soon as the thought occurred to me, I rejected it. Mason wasn’t my father. He couldn’t be.

  My father’s name was Tristan, and he had been dead for years. Besides, the man I had seen at the Eaton Estate was nothing like the kind, caring man I dimly remembered from my childhood, the man my mother had always told me about.

  No, Mason wasn’t my father. He just looked exactly like him. Eerily so.

  Mason isn’t my father… Mason isn’t my father… Mason isn’t my father…

  I kept repeating the words to myself over and over again, but it still took me quite a while to slow my racing heart and get my thoughts under control.

  When I was calm again, I leaned forward and studied the two photos even more closely. Tristan’s and Mason’s features remained the same as before, but I realized that they weren’t the same man. My father had a small dimple in his right cheek that Mason didn’t have, while Mason had a mole on his neck that my father didn’t have.

  But the two of them were most definitely related, probably brothers, given how much they looked alike.

  All this time, I’d thought that my mother had been the one involved with the Circle. I hadn’t even considered the idea that my father might have been a member too—or that he was related to the group’s evil leader.

  That I was related to Mason, the man who’d ordered my mother’s murder.

  I racked my brain, thinking back, trying to remember every single thing my mother had ever said about my father’s family. But I couldn’t recall anything. No awkward holiday visits, no phone calls from Grandma and Grandpa, no cousins coming by our house to play, nothing like that at all. As far as I knew, Tristan hadn’t had any family.

  But Mason was proof otherwise.

  So I studied the photos yet again. If I had to guess, I would say that Mason was the older brother, given how young my father looked in that photo of him and my mother with Mab, but I had no way of knowing for sure.

  I thought about calling Bria to see if she might remember something that I didn’t, even though she’d just been a baby when our father died. Maybe Eira had said something to her that she hadn’t said to me. I looked at the clock on the wall, but it was late, so I blew out a breath and put my phone back down on the table.

  I’d let my sister sleep tonight. But I would call her first thing tomorrow morning and tell her what I’d found out. Bria deserved to hear it from me first before I told the rest of our friends. And I knew that it was going to rock her world just as soundly as it had mine.

  All along, I had wondered what was so special about Mason that Fletcher hadn’t given me a photo of him along with photos of the other Circle members. Well, now I knew. And just like I’d expected, it was only going to cause me more heartache in the end.

  I’d always thought that I was the worst person in my family. The coldest, the cruelest, the most ruthless and heartless. But it seemed as though my entire family had venom in the veins, just like Amelia and Alanna Eaton, and I was beginning to think that I couldn’t hold a candle to Uncle Mason.

  Uncle Mason. I still couldn’t quite believe it.

  But the practical side of me took over, and I called up the photo of Mason on my phone again and put it on the coffee table right next to the picture of my father. Then I grabbed a pen and a notepad out of the drawer and started scribbling down every little thing that I could remember about my father and my mother and anything anyone had ever said about my father’s family.

  I didn’t know what, if anything, I might remember, but one thing was for sure. It w
as time to dig into the old family tree and see what skeletons might be hanging from the branches. And when I figured out exactly who Mason was and what had happened to my parents, well, then I would cut the tree down and burn the bastard with the wood.

  It was time for some family feuding—Spider-style.

  * * *

  GIN BLANCO WILL RETURN

  About the Author

  Jennifer Estep is a New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author, prowling the streets of her imagination in search of her next fantasy idea. She is the author of the following series:

  The Elemental Assassin series: The books focus on Gin Blanco, an assassin codenamed the Spider who can control the elements of Ice and Stone. When she’s not busy battling bad guys and righting wrongs, Gin runs a barbecue restaurant called the Pork Pit in the fictional Southern metropolis of Ashland. The city is also home to giants, dwarves, vampires, and elementals—Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone.

  The Crown of Shards series: The books focus on Everleigh Blair, who is 17th in line for the throne of Bellona, a kingdom steeped in gladiator tradition. But when the unthinkable happens, Evie finds herself fighting for her life—both inside and outside the gladiator arena.

  The Mythos Academy spinoff series: The books focus on Rory Forseti, a 17-year-old Spartan girl who attends the Colorado branch of Mythos Academy. Rory’s parents were Reapers, which makes her the most hated girl at school. But with a new group of Reapers and mythological monsters on the rise, Rory is the only one who can save her academy.

  The Mythos Academy original series: The books focus on Gwen Frost, a 17-year-old Gypsy girl who has the gift of psychometry, or the ability to know an object’s history just by touching it. After a serious freak-out with her magic, Gwen is shipped off to Mythos Academy, a school for the descendants of ancient warriors like Spartans, Valkyries, Amazons, and more.