Free Widow's Web (Elemental Assassin) by Jennifer Estep

up my sleeves and hurried back to the main deck. It looked like a tornado had swept through the area. The gaming tables, the chairs, even the cooking station Sophia and I had manned. Everything was turned over on its side and had been trampled into a splintered, broken mess. All those precious chips the students had been vying for earlier now littered the deck like forgotten bits of confetti. Oh yes. The party was definitely over.
    By this point, most of the college students had left the riverboat, although I could see them milling around on the boardwalk below, still stunned by what they’d seen. Many of the giants who made up the riverboat’s security force were down there with them, although most of the giants looked just as shell-shocked as the kids did. Shootings, stabbings, and beatings were as common as the sunrise in Ashland, but this—this display of magic and malice had just been downright vicious . Probably more vicious than anything Kinkaid’s men had ever seen, much less done themselves. No, Antonio’s death had been particularly cruel, and would have impressed even Mab.
    I walked over to where Sophia and Violet hovered next to the doors that led inside. Someone had thrown a white tablecloth patterned with small gold imprints of the casino rune over Antonio’s corpse, something the fewstudents and giants still on board were trying very hard not to look at.
    And then there was Phillip Kincaid.
    The casino owner stood a few feet away from the sheet covering what was left of Antonio. He has his arms wrapped around Eva, who was sobbing into his shoulder. But the most surprising thing was that Kincaid was actually . . . comforting her.
    “It’s okay, Eva, it’s okay,” he said, patting and rubbing her back the way one might soothe an upset child. “She’s gone now. She can’t hurt you anymore.”
    And on and on it went, with Eva crying and Kincaid murmuring platitudes into her ear. Not at all what I’d expected to find. Then again, nothing about tonight was turning out like I’d thought it would.
    “What is that about?” I asked Sophia in a low voice, jerking my head at Kincaid and Eva.
    The dwarf shrugged. So I turned to someone who might be able to give me some answers.
    “Violet,” I said in a dark tone, making sure she heard all my questions loud and clear in that one word.
    She sighed and ran a hand through her blond hair, making it frizz out a little more. “I’m not supposed to say anything.”
    “I know this is going to make me sound like somebody’s mom, but right now, I don’t fucking care. You either tell me what you know, Violet, or I’m going to call your grandfather and tell him that you’ve been keeping company with one of Ashland’s most notorious crime lords. Somehow, I don’t think Warren will like that.”
    I might have been the Spider, might have been oneof the scariest folks in Ashland, but even I couldn’t hold a candle to the force of nature that was Warren T. Fox. The old coot was just as tough as I was, and he wouldn’t hesitate to give Violet a severe tongue-lashing for hanging out with Kincaid. Maybe it was judgmental of me, thinking the casino boss was such a bad guy when I was an assassin myself, but I would never hurt Violet. I’d do everything in my power to protect her, just like I had in the past when she’d been threatened. And I’d do the same for Eva. I wondered what Owen was going to make of his sister’s friendship with Kincaid—and the fact she’d witnessed such a brutal murder because of that association.
    Violet sighed again, knowing she was beaten. “It was a fluke, really. Eva and I were out shopping a couple of weeks ago over in Northtown, and we ran into Phillip.”
    Northtown was the uppity part of Ashland, where the yuppies and all the other folks with money, power, influence, and magic to spare lived. The area was full of themed shopping developments and exclusive, trendy restaurants designed to cater to folks with expensive tastes and