Now—now I was determined to find the man in the middle and tear apart the Circle. One person and one body at a time until nothing was left.

   I had faces now. The names wouldn’t be too hard to get. And once I put the two together, I could finally get even. I’d find the weak link in the Circle and use that person to unravel the rest of their dark, poisonous web.

   So I poured myself a glass of gin, pulled a chair up in front of the dry-erase board, and started looking at all the photos again.

   The Spider had new targets.

Turn the page for a sneak peek at the next book in the Elemental Assassin series

   By Jennifer Estep

   Coming soon from Pocket Books

       1

   Being an assassin meant knowing when to kill—and when not to kill.

   Unfortunately.

   I stood in a pool of midnight shadows, my boots, jeans, turtleneck, and fleece jacket as black as the night around me. My dark brown hair was stuffed up underneath a black toboggan that matched the rest of my clothes, and I’d swiped a bit of black greasepaint under my eyes to break up the paleness of my face. The only bit of color on my body was the silverstone knife that glinted in my right hand. I even inhaled and exhaled through my nose, so that my breath wouldn’t frost in the chilly January air and give away my position.

   Not that anyone was actually looking for me.

   Oh, a dwarf on guard duty was patrolling the back side of the mansion. Supposedly, he was here to keep an eye out and make sure that no one snuck out of the woods, sprinted across the lawn, and broke into the house. But he was doing a piss-poor job of it, since I’d been watching him amble around for more than three minutes now, making an exceptionally slow circuit of this part of the enormous landscaped grounds.

   Every once in a while, the guard would raise his head and look around, scanning the twisting shadows cast out by the trees and ornamental bushes that dotted the rolling lawn. But most of the time, he was more interested in playing a game on his cell phone, judging from the beeps and chimes that continually rang out from it. He didn’t even have the sound muted—or his gun drawn. I shook my head. It was so hard to find good help these days.

   Still, I tensed as the guard wandered closer and closer to my position. I was standing at the corner of a gray stone house, set back several hundred feet from the main mansion. Trees clustered all around the house, their branches arching over the black slate roof and making the shadows here particularly dark, giving me a perfect hiding spot to watch and wait out the guard.

   I was sure that the man who lived in the mansion charitably referred to this house as a caretaker’s cottage, or something else equally dismissive, even though the house was almost large enough to be its own separate mansion. Even Finnegan Lane, my foster brother, would have been impressed by the spacious rooms and expensive furniture that I’d glimpsed through the windows when I’d been getting into position—

   “So are you actually going to go into the mansion or are we just going to stand around out here all night in the dark?” a low, snide voice murmured in my ear.

   Speak of the devil, and he will annoy you.

   I looked to my right. Fifty feet away, a tall, man-shaped shadow hovered at the edge of the tree line. Finn was dressed all in black the same way that I was, although I could just make out the glimmer of his eyes, like a cat’s in the darkness.

   “I’m waiting for the guard to turn around and go back in the other direction,” I hissed. “As you can bloody well see for yourself.”

   The transmitter in my ear crackled from the force of Finn’s snort. “Mr. Cell Phone Video Game?” He snorted again. “Please. You could do cartwheels naked across the lawn right in front of him, and he still wouldn’t notice.”

   Finn was probably right, but the guard was only about thirty feet from me now, so I couldn’t risk responding. Instead, I slid back a little deeper into the shadows, pressing myself up against the side of the cottage. As my body touched the wall, I automatically reached out with my elemental magic, listening to the gray stone that made up the structure.

   Dark, malicious whispers echoed back to me, punctuated by high, shrill screaming notes of agony as the stone continually muttered about all the blood and violence that it had witnessed over the years—and all the people who had died inside the cottage. The mutters didn’t surprise me, given where I was, but their deep, harsh intensity made me frown. I wouldn’t have thought that the caretaker’s cottage would have been this affected by the man in the mansion, given its distance from the main structure.

   Then again, anything was possible when dealing with the Circle.

   I shut the stone’s mutters out of my mind and focused on the guard, who’d finally reached the cottage. Like most dwarves, he was short and stocky, with bulging biceps that threatened to pop right through the sleeves of his suit jacket. Your typical muscle, except for the thin, scraggly wisps of black hair that lined his upper lip. Someone was trying to grow a mustache with very little success.

   The guard stopped about ten feet away from me, raised his head, and glanced at the front of the house, making sure that the door and the windows were shut. He even tilted his head to the side, listening to the whistle of the winter wind as it made the tree branches scrape together like dry, brittle bones.

   I tightened my grip on my knife, feeling the rune stamped into the hilt pressing into the larger, matching scar embedded in my palm, both of them a circle surrounded by eight thin rays—a spider rune, the symbol for patience.

   Something that the guard had little of, since five seconds later he turned his attention back to his phone and started his slow, ambling walk again, one that took him right by my hiding spot. I could have reached out of the shadows, sunk my hand into the dwarf’s hair, yanked his head back, and cut his throat. He would have been dead before he’d even realized what was happening. But I couldn’t kill him—or anyone else here—tonight.