According to the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner, it was almost midnight. I wondered what he was doing out so late. If I were him, I would have been packing my bags and getting out of town. But he was arrogant. Always had been, always would be. Oh, he’d probably been on edge these past few days, wondering if anyone would be able to trace Clementine and her crew back to him. But given that a week had passed and no one had come knocking on his door, he probably thought that he was finally in the free and clear.

I was going to enjoy showing him just how wrong he was.

It had been ridiculously easy slipping onto his sprawling Northtown estate. There were no giants roaming through the woods, no guard dogs to bark at the first hint of danger, no cameras zooming from one side of the lawn to the other. He didn’t even have a decent security system on the house itself. No bulletproof glass, no iron bars over the windows, no reinforced silverstone doors. The pitiful locks that he did have on the doors were hardly worth the trouble of making a couple of Ice picks to jimmy them open with.

I suppose he thought that the stone wall and iron gate out front would deter most folks. Well, that and who he used to work for—but not me.

After I’d opened one of the doors, I’d gone from room to room to room, looking at all of his things, but the house was as cold and impersonal as he was. Oh, all of the furnishings were the absolute best that money could buy: antique desks and chairs, delicate china in stained-glass cabinets, expensive appliances done in polished chrome. But most of the furniture looked like it had never even been sat on, and there hadn’t been any human touches in the house—no odd knickknacks, no stacks of books, no piles of magazines. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d been at Mab’s beck and call so long he probably hadn’t spent much time in his own house.

The only room that looked remotely lived in had been the master bathroom, and that was only because of all the beauty products inside. They were everywhere—in the medicine cabinet, clustered on the sink, even lined up like plastic soldiers around the rim of the sunken bathtub. Jo-Jo didn’t have as many anti-aging creams, gels, and lotions in her beauty salon as he did in his bathroom. Then again, that didn’t surprise me either. Not knowing what I did about him. He might have been a lackey, but he was a vain one at that.