I’d wondered those same things myself. Because that’s exactly the kind of man Fletcher Lane had been. Live and let live, had been his motto. After all, assassins didn’t have a lot of moral high ground to stand on and cast stones and aspersions down at others. But if you fucked with somebody Fletcher Lane cared about, you might as well cut out your own heart with a rusty spoon—before he did it for you. The old man had taught me to be the same way. Loyalty, love, whatever you wanted to call it, it was the only thing as important as survival—and the only thing truly worth dying for. Which is why I’d hunted down Alexis James, the Air elemental bitch who’d killed Fletcher and had Finn tortured, even though I’d almost died in the process.

I rubbed my palm over my forehead. The silverstone metal in my skin felt as hard and cold as my heart. “I don’t know what Fletcher wanted me to do. Now I’ll never know.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Finn said. “And I’ll help you.”

Spoken like a true brother, blood or not. I smiled at him. “I know you will—”

Click-click. Click-click.

Finn’s laptop spit out a different sort of noise, as though the hard drive had caught and snagged on something. I raised my brows. Finn leaned forward and hit a button.

Numbers popped up on his laptop monitor, along with what looked like a driver’s license photo. Frizzy blond hair. Dark eyes. Dusky skin. Black glasses.

“Got her,” Finn said. “Violet Elizabeth Fox. Credit card records, bank accounts, school transcripts. Read all about her.”

I joined him on the sofa and read the information on the screen. Violet Elizabeth Fox, age nineteen, parents deceased. A straight-A student on a full scholarship, getting her business degree at Ashland Community College.

A couple hundred bucks’ worth of charges on her credit card, a couple thousand in a savings account. A small check deposited every two weeks into her checking account from some business called Country Daze. Probably a part-time job of some sort. Nothing out of the ordinary and nothing to suggest why she’d come into the Pork Pit looking for the Tin Man.

“Violet Fox commutes to school,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Finn asked.

I tapped the screen with my fingernail. “Because she’s got an ACC parking permit and assigned slip. And look at her home address.”

“Ridgeline Hollow Road?” Finn asked. “That’s up in the mountains.”

“In the coalfields,” I added.