Oh, I could see some of the underworld figures staring at the giants, trying to figure out how to overpower them. Beauregard Benson coldly eyed a giant’s throat like he wanted to rip it open with his bare hands. But nobody wanted to be the first—or only—person to make a move against the guards. Even though they all knew that everyone here was most likely marked for death.

If this had just been a simple sting, Clementine and her crew would have all been wearing masks, not walking around with their faces exposed for everyone to see. There were a lot of heavy hitters at the gala, a lot of folks with a lot of money and power who wouldn’t take too kindly to being robbed. The sort of folks who would expend a lot of time, energy, effort, and resources tracking down every single one of the robbers and horrifically executing them.

Clementine was smart and sly, which meant that she knew the score as well as I did. But she’d boldly announced herself and her intentions to all of the hostages. There were only a couple of reasons I could think of for her to do that.

The first, and most obvious, was that she wasn’t planning on leaving any survivors around to identify her after the fact. A bloody option but effective in the end.

The second was that she really thought that she and her squad of giants could handle any repercussions or reprisals from tonight. That she could take control of the underworld. That her little uprising would actually take. A pie-in-the-sky hope, at best.

And the third was that she’d already made arrangements to leave Ashland far, far behind and that, despite her talk of running the town, she’d already set herself up somewhere she thought no one would ever find her. But that was still a big risk to take. Nobody could hold a grudge like the folks in Ashland—nobody. The Hatfields and McCoys had nothing on us.

Still, it didn’t much matter what Clementine Barker had planned—because I was going to make sure that she didn’t live through the night.

“Now,” Clementine said, after everyone had taken a good, long look at my supposed corpse and the whispers had died down once more, “I suggest that everyone sit down and start taking off their valuables. The sooner we rob you, the sooner we can leave.”

She let out another loud howl of laughter, one that had all the hostages hurrying to plant themselves on the marble floor just as quickly as they could.