Venom (Page 41)

Jonah McAllister and Mab Monroe also worked the crowd. Or rather, they stood in the middle of the deck and let their admiring sycophants come by one by one and suck up.

Jonah also wore a tux, his silver hair a bright, gleaming contrast against the black fabric. Mab wore a black cocktail dress not too dissimilar from my own. The dark color made her hair look like burnished copper against her creamy shoulders. As usual, she sported her gold sunburst necklace. The ruby that made up the center of the ornate design gleamed like fresh blood against her skin. Even across the open deck, my Stone magic let me hear the gemstone’s harsh, powerful murmur-one of fire, death, destruction. The awful sound made me grind my teeth together. The primal, elemental part of me wanted to smash that damn ruby and destroy its proud, horrid murmurs almost as much as I wanted to kill Mab.

"Now that you’ve had time to scope out the place, how do you want to do this?" Finn asked in a low voice. "Want me to cull Slater from the herd? Spill a drink on him so he has to take a convenient trip to the men’s room?"

"No," I replied. "We both need to leave with plausible deniability. You spilling a drink on Elliot Slater, and then him disappearing adds up to the right conclusion real quick. Throw me into the mix, and they’ll even think they have the right motive. Just keep an eye on them, especially Roslyn. She looks like she’s about ten seconds away from screaming and trying to claw out Slater’s eyes."

"Wouldn’t you be?" Finn asked in a quiet voice. "Xavier told me about Roslyn’s so-called meetings with the giant. All the ways that he’s been terrorizing her. About how he’s been making her play house with him, as though they’re a real couple. It’s one of the sickest things I’ve ever heard."

I thought about how calm Roslyn Phillips had been when she’d told me what Slater had been doing to her. How the bastard was controlling and scaring and hurting and abusing her. How he was playing with her before he finally raped her.

"I would have cut his heart out of his chest with one of my knives-or at least tried to," I replied.

"So why hasn’t Roslyn done that?"

"Because Roslyn isn’t a former assassin like me. She didn’t have the benefit of Fletcher’s training. But more importantly, she has her sister and niece to think about. Xavier too. Her dying doesn’t help them one bit."

Finn looked at me with his bright green eyes. "And you don’t have people who love you too?"

I shrugged. "It’s not the same. You, Jo-Jo, and Sophia know what I am, what I can do. And you’ve seen what other people have done to me."

"You were a mess after Alexis James and Tobias Dawson got done with you," he agreed.

I continued on like he hadn’t spoken. "The three of you know the risks by now. That one night, I might not come home. The three of you have each other to lean on. Roslyn’s the rock in her family. Her sister and her niece depend on her. She was trying to protect them."

Finn kept staring at me. "And you’re our rock, Gin. You should think about that too."

I didn’t respond. Because the funny thing was, Finn, Jo-Jo, and Sophia were my rocks-and I’d kill anyone who even thought about hurting them. Even if it meant my own death.

It was a price I’d be happy to pay.

Finn strolled off into the crowd, planting himself at a slot machine just in front of Slater’s blackjack table. Roslyn gave him a wan smile, but some of the tension eased out of her slim shoulders. At least the vamp knew we were here and ready to play. Her toffee eyes skimmed over the crowd, looking for me, but she couldn’t see me from where she was sitting. I made sure of it. I stayed at the bar, drinking a gin, watching the flow of traffic around the blackjack table, and thinking about everything I’d read about Elliot Slater in the past few days.

Finn had compiled quite a file on the giant, looking for any way to get to him, any weakness, vice, or hobby that he might have. We’d even dug into the folder of info that Fletcher Lane had compiled on Mab Monroe. The old man had included Slater in the mix with his boss, for obvious reasons. All the information had been interesting but not very helpful. Slater hadn’t become Mab Monroe’s top enforcer by accident. He was a crafty, cold-blooded bastard who liked using his fists to hurt people-a fact I’d felt for myself twice now.

Sadly, Roslyn Phillips wasn’t the first woman Elliot Slater had terrorized. Finn had dug up a dozen investigations involving missing women in Ashland just in the last two years alone. Slater’s name had been connected to all the cases, with him almost always listed as being the victim’s boyfriend.

Tall, short, curvy, or not. Giant, dwarf, vampire, human, elemental. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian. None of those things mattered to Slater. The only thing he seemed to care about was beauty. That was the one thing all his victims had in common-they were all exceptionally beautiful women, just like Roslyn was. Eye-catching and striking with the kind of perfect features you just couldn’t look away from.

The pattern was the same every single time. Slater would see a beautiful woman, become obsessed with her, and start stalking her. Showering her with his own twisted brand of attention and inventing the same sort of sick relationship with her that he had with Roslyn. In every single case, the woman turned up dead-raped and beaten to death a few weeks after she started dating Elliot Slater.

Finn had gotten his hands on some of the crime scene photos. They weren’t pretty. They made what the giant had done to me that night at the community college seem like a gentle massage. Slater seemed to enjoy destroying the women’s beauty just as much as he did admiring it to start with.

Some of the women had tried to fight back, of course. They’d gone to the police and tried to get a restraining order against Slater. But nothing ever came of their cries for help. In those cases, the women ended up dead within days instead of weeks. Slater didn’t like being disobeyed.

The simple fact was that Elliot Slater was a serial killer who enjoyed stalking, terrorizing, and controlling women before he finally raped and ultimately murdered them. He liked their fear, liked the feeling of power it gave him. It was probably the only thing that could get a sick bastard like him off.

Of course, nothing ever came of any investigation into Slater, thanks to the giant’s working for Mab Monroe. Hell, she probably gave him carte blanche to go out and find himself a certain kind of distraction every once in a while. A reward for all the bloody jobs he did on the Fire elemental’s behalf.

But I had seen a sliver of opportunity in the file, one possible window to get the giant alone tonight-Elliot Slater liked to smoke cigars. A fact I’d witnessed the other night outside of Underwood’s restaurant. Not an unusual habit among the moneyed, muckety-muck types in Ashland.