If that was what was next on the agenda, I’d be quite happy staying in the bathroom until all the pretty speeches were over with. I’d rather scrub my hands until they were red, raw, cracked, and bleeding than listen to people prattle on about how damn noble the Fire elemental had supposedly been. And I certainly wasn’t going to raise a glass of champagne and toast Mab with it. Especially not now, when I’d discovered that she’d had my mother’s and Annabella’s rune necklaces all these years—

“Anyway, it was nice seeing you again, Gin,” Jillian said, cutting into my dark thoughts. “You have excellent taste in clothes. And men.”

She was trying to make a joke and lighten the mood, so I forced myself to laugh, hoping she wouldn’t notice how tight and hollow the sound really was. “You too.”

Jillian smiled at me a final time, then opened the bathroom door and headed out into the powder room. But the door didn’t quite shut behind her, and I watched her through the wide gap. Jillian walked through the powder room, opened the exterior door, and stepped through to the other side. That door was just swinging shut behind her when she jerked and let out a small, startled gasp, then—

Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!

The sounds were soft, no more than harsh whispers, but they made me reach for one of my knives all the same.

Because unless I was mistaken, someone had just been shot with a silenced gun.

Chapter 6

6

The first thing I did was toe off my shoes so the heels wouldn’t clack against the marble floor. At the same time, I reached through a slit in my skirt. I’d just stepped out of my second shoe when my hand closed around one of the two knives I had strapped to my thighs. I slid the weapon free and pulled open the interior door just wide enough for me to slip into the powder room. Then I tiptoed over to the exterior door. I stood there, head cocked toward the heavy wood, but I didn’t hear anything else.

But there was a pane of glass that served as a vent in the top of the door, so I picked up one of the white velvet chairs, carried it over to the door, and climbed up onto the seat so I could see through the glass.

Jillian Delancey lay on the floor right outside the bathroom door—dead.

At least, I assumed it was Jillian. It was kind of hard to tell, since most of her face had been blown off.