Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads by authors_sort Page B

interested in my girls, but he’ll go out with one occasionally. I’ve never had any problems with him. He comes in, makes sure the bar is in one piece, mixes drinks, takes a few quick breaks to go check on his daughter, and leaves. He’s the best bartender that I’ve ever had. I’d really hate to lose him.”
    I gave her a cool look. After a moment, Roslyn nodded.
    “But if it can’t be avoided, I suppose that I can find anotherIce elemental to take over for him,” she said. “What I really want to know is if Vinnie’s spying for Mab Monroe. If he is, he’s out. Nobody who works for Mab is going to be on my staff or welcome in my club—ever.”
    Roslyn’s toffee eyes glittered with anger, and her mouth flattened into a hard, ugly slash in her beautiful face. The vampire had just as much reason to hate Mab as I did, because Mab had been Elliot Slater’s boss, the one who pulled all his crazy, twisted strings. The Fire elemental had known that Slater was stalking and terrorizing Roslyn, and she’d done nothing to stop it. As long as Slater had done Mab’s bidding, she hadn’t cared what he did to anyone else—or who got hurt in the process.
    “What about Vinnie’s Ice magic?” I asked. “Will that be a problem?”
    “He has enough to keep the bar in one piece,” Roslyn said. “But I think that’s about it. I’ve never seen him do anything else with it. He’s certainly not as strong as you are.”
    I shifted in the booth. Everybody always said how
strong
my magic was, like it was something to be proud of. But I knew that I wasn’t that powerful. Alexis James. Tobias Dawson. Elliot Slater. Each one of them had come far too close to killing me in the last few months for me to believe that I was invincible. Death came to us all in the end, no matter how tough we thought we were.
    Still, every time someone commented on my magic, I couldn’t stop this uncomfortable shiver that swept through my body. It was like they were all setting me up for the fall that I knew was coming up fast on the day that I went toe-to-toe with Mab with my magic.
    And lost.
    “So can we get on with this?” Finn asked, his green eyes locked onto a redhead gyrating on the edge of the dance floor. “Because if we hurry, we can still learn everything that Vinnie knows before closing. Which would leave me plenty of time to find someone to keep me warm for the rest of the night. You wouldn’t want me to be lonely, now, would you?”
    I rolled my eyes. Finn’s propensity to think with his dick first was going to get him into deep trouble one day. Especially since he didn’t mind seducing women who were already taken. He saw a wedding ring as a challenge more than anything else. I always found it amazing that some angry husband hadn’t hired me to kill Finn long ago.
    But my foster brother was right. It was time to get on with things. The sooner we squeezed Vinnie for info, the sooner I could start planning how to find and take out LaFleur—before she found me first.
    I’d just started to slide out of the booth when a peculiar ripple in the crowd caught my eye. A wave of people parted for someone in their midst. A moment later, a woman stepped up to the Ice bar in the exact spot where Vinnie was serving drinks.
    A petite, slender woman with a short bob of glossy black hair. A wide headband of flat emeralds held her hair back off her face, so that everyone could get a good look at her delicate features. The gems winked at me underneath the black lights of the club.
    Unlike me, she was dressed for a night out on the town. A tight, black, sleeveless top showed off her creamy, muscled arms, while a lime green miniskirt hugged her bonyass. Black leather boots with stiletto heels crawled up to her knees. She didn’t appear to be carrying any weapons, unless she had a couple of knives tucked into her boots. But given what I’d seen her do with her electrical magic last night, she didn’t really need any.
    She leaned against the Ice