McAllister poured himself a brandy. I had to hand it to him, his fingers didn’t shake at all as he fixed the drink. Then again, he’d worked for Mab for years. His nerves were probably as good as mine were—maybe even better.

McAllister carefully sipped the brandy, savoring each and every mouthful, instead of slugging it down the way I thought he might. It took him a few minutes, but he finished that first brandy and poured himself another one, adding more amber liquor to the snifter this time around. I wondered if he thought getting drunk would ease the pain of what I was about to do to him. Not the worst strategy, but it wasn’t going to help him. Not tonight.

“What do you want?” he finally asked. “Or are you just here to kill me?”

“Well, as tempting as that thought is, I thought we might talk first,” I said. “Chitchat a little bit.”

He gave me a blank look. “And what do you think that we would have to talk about?”

Instead of answering his question, I asked one of my own. “You didn’t really think you’d get away with it, did you?”

He tensed before he could stop himself. “And just what do you think it is that I’ve gotten away with?”

“Nothing much,” I drawled. “Just hiring Clementine and her crew to rob the Briartop museum.”

His eye twitched again, his shoulders shot up to his ears, and his lips pressed together so hard that they disappeared into the rest of his face. For a moment, I thought he might try to deny it, but McAllister had an entirely different reaction: he laughed.

He choked on that first laugh, trying to smother the harsh, barking sound, but he couldn’t, and after a moment, he quit trying. It was like that one sound opened the floodgates of his emotions, because he just kept right on laughing, louder and louder, harder and harder, until tears streamed down his cheeks and he was almost bent over double from the force of his own mirthless chuckles.

I sat there and waited until he’d calmed down. It didn’t take long. McAllister was a lawyer after all, used to tense, high-pressure situations. It didn’t get any more tense or high-pressure than having an assassin appear in your office late at night.

“Forgive me,” Jonah said, pulling a white silk handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his blue suit jacket and dabbing away his hysterical tears. “It takes a lot to surprise me, but you managed to do it. In fact, you’ve surprised me quite a bit since we first met last year, Ms. Blanco.”

“Please. Let’s not stand on formality tonight. Call me Gin.”

“Very well, Gin,” Jonah said. “As I said, it takes a lot to surprise me. I’ve been expecting you to be waiting for me in here for a long while now.”