“You go in, work your way down. I’ll enter through the front.” She caught his scowl, shook her head. “I’ll go in like I’m following up on Penelope, making sure she’s all right after the trauma of discovering Giorgio’s crimes.”
“It’s still a risk.”
Ashwini smiled. So did Janvier. Then they split.
She walked down the sidewalk and up the steps to the front door of the house, while Janvier went left and over the fence of the house on the corner. By the time she rang the front doorbell, she figured he had to be climbing the side of the house.
When no one answered on the first ring, she leaned on it, acting irritated for the benefit of the surveillance camera trained on the doorstep. Meanwhile her stomach churned, her ability picking up something so horrible that she had to shove it aside or she wouldn’t be able to function. Glancing at her watch at the continued lack of an answer from within, she took out her cell phone and rang Penelope. She heard it ring inside the house before it was silenced. The door swung open five seconds later.
No gold choker or silk top this time, but the thigh-length robe of deep blue was richly embroidered.
“Oh, hi!” said the brunette, her eyes glittering and her cheeks flushed. “Sorry about the wait.” A small laugh. “I was shaving my legs.”
Ashwini didn’t glance down, simply smiled as if she’d swallowed the excuse. “I wanted to check up on you,” she said, wondering what lay in the darkness of the hallway behind the woman who played aide to a sadistic psychopath. “Brooke told us you might be here when we couldn’t find you at the hotel with the others.”
Penelope’s mouth thinned at the sound of Brooke’s name, but she recovered quickly. “Oh, I hope I’m not in trouble—I wanted to be in my own home.” She opened the door a little wider. “You can tell everyone I’m fine. And Brooke?” Bright, hard eyes. “She’ll be okay?”
“Yes, the doctors say she’ll make a full recovery.” Ashwini patted the brick cladding. “This is a great place.”
“Isn’t it? My aunt left it to me.” Lower lip quivering, Penelope hugged herself, her distinctive gold and diamanté nails vivid against the dark blue of the robe. “I can’t believe Giorgio did those things, hurt Brooke. I loved him.”
She was, Ashwini thought, a pathologically good liar. She was also now a step outside the doorway, having instinctively followed Ashwini when she shifted back. Continuing to smile, Ashwini leaned in toward her and said, “I can blow a hole through your gut in the time it takes for you to scream, so don’t.”
Penelope froze midbreath, her mouth open like that of a blowfish.
Remaining close to block the expression on Penelope’s face from the camera, she said, “Is Giorgio inside that house?” She dug the gun into Penelope’s side when the other woman didn’t answer quickly enough, no mercy in her with the memory of Brooke’s battered face at the forefront of her mind.
“Y-yes.”
“Who else?”
A twist of her lips. “Nothing but two whores I picked up off the street.”
Ashwini flicked off the safety. “Don’t lie to me. I don’t like you and I’ll have no hesitation in putting a bullet through your pretty face to mess it up.”
Smugness wiped away, Penelope whimpered. “You can’t do that.”
“Self-defense. Who do you think the Guild is going to believe? Me or a dead blood junkie who sold out her sister?”
“Brooke isn’t my sister! She’s a piece of trash who shamed our master.”
“One last chance.” Ashwini shoved in the gun hard enough that it would bruise, her voice ice-cold. “Who else is inside the house?”
Goose bumps on her skin, Penelope crumbled. “The other master,” she whispered. “The old one.”
“Who watches the surveillance feed?”
“The master,” she said. “He’ll see you.” She began to smirk.
Ashwini reached out as if to hug Penelope and stabbed two fingers into a particular part of her throat. It made the brunette’s eyes go wide, a retching sound escaping her before she slumped. Slinging an arm around the dazed woman, she gave up any attempt at stealth and shoved the door fully open to see no one lying in wait.
She dumped a moaning Penelope in the hallway and, pulling out the belt of the woman’s elaborate robe, used it to hog-tie her, hands behind her back and ankles lashed to her wrists. A slash with one of her blades and she had another piece of the robe to use as a gag. “Wouldn’t want you calling out to your precious Giorgio at the wrong time,” she muttered. Finished, she set Penelope on her side to make sure she could breathe.
The entire operation took her under a minute and her skin crawled the whole time, but she figured Giorgio was too much of a coward to come at her straight-on. No, the pencil-dicked bastard would be hiding somewhere, ready to ambush her like he’d ambushed the women who had trusted him.
Ignoring the daggers Penelope was throwing at her with her eyes, she slid away the knife she’d used to cut up the robe and pulled out her secondary gun from an ankle sheath. Both guns held out, she took a step toward the first closed door on this floor.
• • •
Having scrambled up the side of the building, Janvier got to the old-fashioned bay window and looking through the parted curtains, confirmed the room beyond was empty. He could’ve broken a pane to get in, but the noise might alert anyone up here—so he used a trick he’d learned from a jewel thief, and broke the hinges instead, using a sharp blade and vampiric strength.