“You should let me help you with that,” Finn said. “I have contacts you don’t.”

I shook my head. “No. Not… yet. I still don’t know how I feel about it.”

“About what?”

“About the old man knowing who I really was all these years and not saying anything to me about it. About him collecting all that information about my family.”

The spider rune scars on my palms started itching, the way they always did when I thought about my dead, lost family. A small circle with eight thin lines radiating out of it. The symbol for patience. I rubbed first one scar with my fingers, then the other, trying to ease the burning sensation.

Didn’t help. Never did.

“Fletcher loved ferreting out people’s secrets. Compiling information, dossiers on them. It made him a good assassin and an even better handler,” I said. “I just never thought he’d do it to me.”

“You’re angry at him.”

“Hell, yeah, I’m angry,” I snapped. My toes pushed off the floor, and the recliner rocked back. “Fletcher spends years putting that folder together and then leaves it with Jo-Jo Deveraux instead of giving it to me. Why? What’s the point?”

I was angry, of course, but more than that, I felt betrayed.

Like Fletcher Lane had regarded me as nothing more than a mark to gather intel on. Like I wasn’t the daughter he’d claimed me to be. Like he hadn’t ever really loved me the way that I’d loved him. Or at least trusted me enough to tell me what he was doing.

And I was angry at myself too, because I’d had no clue what the old man had been up to, that he’d been out gathering information on me and my murdered family.

I’d never even dreamed that Fletcher would do such a thing—at least not to me. Or maybe I just hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility. Either way, all that I had left now were questions and more questions.

“Maybe he was planning to give it to you,” Finn said.

“Before he died.”

Another image flashed before my eyes. Fletcher Lane, lying in a pool of his own blood at the Pork Pit, the skin flayed and ripped from his body. His face and chest and arms and hands a ruined mess of raw flesh and bones.

I shook my head, trying to banish the memory. Didn’t work. Never did.

“I just don’t understand what he expected me to do with the information. Take my revenge on the Fire elemental? It’s been years, and I still don’t know who she was or why she killed my family. I didn’t even see the elemental before one of her goons caught and blindfolded me. Just heard her laughing while she tortured me. For all I know, the bitch could be dead by now.”