“Twenty bucks? You only drove me a couple of miles.”

Earlier this evening, I’d taken the precaution of parking a car on the side of the road just beyond Mab Monroe’s estate. An old, battered burner vehicle with fake registration and fake plates. I’d put a white trash bag in the window, left the hood up, and scattered a few tools by the side of the road. All designed to make it look like the car had broken down and someone was coming right back for it. The car was my insurance policy, in case I needed to make a quicker getaway than the one I had in mind. Once I’d put the car where I wanted it, I’d hiked over to the closest anonymous coffee shop and called the cab to bring me here.

“Twenty bucks,” the driver said again.

Since I didn’t want him to remember me, I quit arguing, paid him, got out, and walked toward the stairs that led up to the main entrance of the mansion. I could hear it, of course. With fifteen stories of solid, stacked stone looming above me, I’d have to be deaf not to. The stone whispered of power and money, the way I’d always thought it would. But there were other vibrations in it too.

Fire, heat, death, destruction. But perhaps most disturbing was a touch of madness that trilled like a whippoorwill’s cry through the solid rock, as though the stone itself had somehow been tortured until it broke. The murmurs grew louder, harsher the closer I got to the mansion, until all I could hear was the stones’ wailing cries.

I gritted my teeth and blocked out the noise of the stones’ unending pain. My only concern was Tobias Dawson, getting close enough to kill him, and getting away afterward.

Not the insanity that permeated the foundation of Mab Monroe’s mansion—or why it made me want to seriously hurt the Fire elemental.

I walked up the steps and stopped in front of the double doors.

“Invitation?” the man with the clipboard asked.

I pointed to the black velvet choker around my throat—the one with the heart-and-arrow rune on it. “I believe this is all the invitation I need, sugar. But here’s the hard copy too.” I gave him a winsome smile and handed over the engraved invitation Roslyn Phillips had slipped me.

The man stared at the heart-and-arrow rune a moment; then his eyes swept over the rest of my body. Behind him, the two giants also leered at me. Looked like Tobias Dawson wasn’t the only one here tonight with a thing for busty blondes.

The man with the clipboard pulled his attention away from my boobs and checked the name on the invitation.

“I assume you know the rules for tonight, Candy?”

I nodded. “Yeah, sugar, I know how to behave myself. I’m a pro.”