“Bria has been working down in Savannah, Georgia, ever since she graduated from the police academy a couple of years ago. She moved up to Ashland a few weeks back.” Finn hesitated and stared at me. “She took Donovan Caine’s position in the police department.”

My hands tightened around the padded arms of my salon chair. A man’s face flashed before my eyes. Black hair, hazel eyes, bronze skin, and a lean, hard body that had felt marvelous pressed against my own. Detective Donovan Caine. One of the few honest cops in Ashland who actually tried to fight crime, rather than taking a bribe to look the other way. Caine had also been my sometimes lover, until he’d left town a few weeks ago.

Detective Donovan Caine had been upstanding to a fault, with a strict code of justice and morals that never, ever bent. He’d had a hard enough time dealing with the fact that I used to be an assassin—and that I’d killed his former partner, Cliff Ingles, for raping a thirteen-year-old girl. But when I’d gone after coal mine owner Tobias Dawson for threatening an old friend of Fletcher’s, Donovan hadn’t handled it well at all. He’d known I’d planned to assassinate Dawson, and he’d done nothing to stop me.

After I killed Dawson, well, Donovan’s morals, his ideals, started eating away at him. He’d come down to the Pork Pit one night and said he couldn’t be the man he wanted to be and be with me at the same time. Donovan Caine had broken off our complicated affair and left town to get away from me and the attraction between us—and the fact that he still wanted to fuck me despite a) his precious morals and, b) all the bad things I’d done.

I’d been willing to share my life, my heart, with Donovan, and he’d walked out on me. On the possibility of us. Maybe it was a good thing he’d left town. Otherwise, I might have been tempted to do something stupid. Like try to seduce him into giving us just one more chance. And be pissed off all over again when he said no.

“Gin?” Finn asked. “Are you still with us?”

I shook my head to banish my troubled, unwanted thoughts. “Yeah, I’m still here. So my mysterious sister took Donovan’s place in the department. What else do you know about her?”

Finn shrugged. “Not much. I’ve only been digging for an hour. But Bria’s got a reputation for being a real hard-ass. Cleaning up corruption, sticking up for the little people, that sort of thing.”

So Bria was a crusader, just like Donovan Caine had been. Just what I needed. Another honest cop complicating my life. Especially when I was still trying to figure out why Mab Monroe had murdered my mother and older sister all those years ago—and how I could kill the Fire elemental now without getting dead myself.