"Sit me up, please," I asked.
Jo-Jo nodded. She moved behind me and hit a lever on the chair. The back tilted up, moving me into an upright, seated position. I shifted around, wiggling my fingers, toes, and jaw. I felt tired, but that was to be expected. The body could handle only so much trauma, and going from being well to being severely injured to being well again in the space of a few hours always left me feeling drained and lethargic. It took my brain a while to catch up to the fact that I was still breathing and not six feet under like I should have been.
Dried blood still covered my clothes and hands, but everything else was in pain-free, working order once more. I sniffed. Jo-Jo had even fixed my drippy nose and purged the flu from my system. Humpty-Dumpty had been put back together again. Despite all of Mab Monroe's men.
My eyes scanned over the salon, which took up the back half of Jo-Jo's massive, antebellum house. It looked the same as it always did. Lots of padded swivel chairs. Several old-fashioned hair dryers. Counters cluttered with hairspray, scissors, pink sponge rollers, nail polish, makeup, and gap-toothed combs. Pictures and posters of models with various hairstyles taped to the walls. Piles and piles of beauty and fashion magazines everywhere. I drew in a breath. The air smelled the same too-chemicals mixed with coconut oil from the tanning beds in the next room.
Jo-Jo plopped down in the chair to my right. On the floor between us, Rosco actually expended enough energy to roll over, so the dwarf could rub his pudgy stomach with her bare foot.
"You want to talk about it?" Jo-Jo asked.
I shrugged. "Not much to talk about. Jonah McAllister got Elliot Slater and two of his giant goons to jump me at the community college. McAllister thought I might have info on his son Jake's murder. Since I didn't want to blow my cover, I had to let them beat me. End of story. "
Jo-Jo stared at me, a reproachful look in her pale eyes. The dwarf had known me long enough to realize when I was fudging the truth.
I sighed. "And Mab Monroe was there too. "
Jo-Jo opened her mouth to ask a question, but Finn chose that moment to pop his head into the salon.
"Is she finally awake?" he asked.
"Finally?" I groused, looking up at the cloud-shaped clock on the wall. "It's barely after ten. I only got the shit beat out of me a couple of hours ago. I'd say I was recovering nicely, all things considered. "
"That's what you think," Finn said.
He leaned against the door frame, a mug of chicory coffee in his hand. Finn drank the stuff at all hours of the night and day, but the caffeine seemed to have little effect on him. Or perhaps he'd just become immune to it. Fletcher Lane had drunk the same kind of coffee.
I breathed in again, this time tasting the caffeine fumes in the air. The warm, comforting scent always reminded me of the old man. I wished Fletcher had been here tonight, to talk to me about the attack and seeing Bria again. I wished a lot of things about the old man that were never going to come to pass.
Heavy, plodding footsteps sounded, and another person entered the salon. Sophia Deveraux, Jo-Jo's younger sister. Where Jo-Jo was all sweet pink sunshine, Sophia was the heart of darkness-as in Goth. Sophia wore her usual black jeans and shit-kicker boots. Her T-shirt was actually a girly pink tonight, although images of decapitated doll heads dotted the light fabric. A black leather collar studded with plastic pink hearts ringed Sophia's neck. A bright pink gloss covered her lips, but her cropped hair was as black as black could be. It stood out in stark contrast to her pale skin.
Sophia was an inch or so taller than Jo-Jo and had a much more muscular figure than her big sister did. At a hundred and thirteen, the younger Deveraux sister was in her prime, instead of firmly entrenched in middle age like Jo-Jo was. Sophia plopped down in the chair to my left and nodded at me. I nodded back.
And then the three of them stared at me. Finn, Jo-Jo, Sophia. Hell, even Rosco turned his head back in my direction. All of them looking steadily at me, expectation shining in their eyes. Oh, fuck. They actually expected me to talk about what had happened tonight. To share my feelings. I sighed again. I'd much rather have hacked and slashed my way through a platoon of Mab Monroe's giants than explain how I was dealing with my emotions.
But they were my family, for better or worse. They deserved to know what had happened tonight-and how it could affect them tomorrow.
"All right," I said. "Here's the short version. "
I recapped the events of the evening, starting with Jonah McAllister and Elliot Slater bracing me, Slater beating me, and Mab Monroe stepping in and leading her goons off into the dark night. And then there was the biggie-my unexpected meeting with Bria, my long-lost younger sister.
"So Bria's a detective? Working in Ashland?" Jo-Jo asked. "Why didn't we know this before?"
"Because she's a new transfer, only started a week ago," Finn said, taking another sip of his chicory coffee. "I did some checking while you were healing Gin. "
In addition to (mis)handling other people's money, Finn was also something of an information trader. If you wanted dirt on someone, Finnegan Lane could get it for you-in a hurry.
"Bria has been working down in Savannah, Georgia, ever since she graduated from the police academy a couple of years ago. She moved up to Ashland a few weeks back. " Finn hesitated and stared at me. "She took Donovan Caine's position in the police department. "
My hands tightened around the padded arms of my salon chair. A man's face flashed before my eyes. Black hair, hazel eyes, bronze skin, and a lean, hard body that had felt marvelous pressed against my own. Detective Donovan Caine. One of the few honest cops in Ashland who actually tried to fight crime, rather than taking a bribe to look the other way. Caine had also been my sometimes lover, until he'd left town a few weeks ago.
Detective Donovan Caine had been upstanding to a fault, with a strict code of justice and morals that never, ever bent. He'd had a hard enough time dealing with the fact that I used to be an assassin-and that I'd killed his former partner, Cliff Ingles, for raping a thirteen-year-old girl. But when I'd gone after coal mine owner Tobias Dawson for threatening an old friend of Fletcher's, Donovan hadn't handled it well at all. He'd known I'd planned to assassinate Dawson, and he'd done nothing to stop me.
After I killed Dawson, well, Donovan's morals, his ideals, started eating away at him. He'd come down to the Pork Pit one night and said he couldn't be the man he wanted to be and be with me at the same time. Donovan Caine had broken off our complicated affair and left town to get away from me and the attraction between us-and the fact that he still wanted to fuck me despite a) his precious morals and, b) all the bad things I'd done.
I'd been willing to share my life, my heart, with Donovan, and he'd walked out on me. On the possibility of us. Maybe it was a good thing he'd left town. Otherwise, I might have been tempted to do something stupid. Like try to seduce him into giving us just one more chance. And be pissed off all over again when he said no.
"Gin?" Finn asked. "Are you still with us?"