She smiled at him, but the cold look in her wintry gray eyes would have frozen most people’s blood outright. Despite the fact that the giant was almost twice her size, Jimmy swallowed and took a nervous step back.

“I–I don’t think that’s necessary,” he sputtered. “Enjoy your lunch, ma’am. You too, Mr. Lane.” Jimmy bobbed his head at Gin and beat a hasty retreat down the hallway.

Gin waited until the sharp echo of his footsteps had faded away before she swiveled her chair around and faced me again.

“You enjoyed that,” I accused.

“Intimidating a bully with a bad attitude? Absolutely.”

She gave me a smug grin and leaned back in her chair, happy to have defended my honor. But her satisfied expression slowly melted away, and a few seconds later, she was eyeing me again, concern creasing her pretty face.

“Although I wouldn’t have had to do that if you would just stick up for yourself,” she said. “What happened was not your fault—”

I snapped up my hand, cutting her off. “I really don’t want to talk about my coworkers’ low opinions of me right now.”

Gin realized that she’d pushed me enough, so she changed the topic. “Approved guest list? I take it that’s another new security measure?”

I grimaced and tossed my fork down onto my plate. “Yeah.”

First Trust was Ashland’s most exclusive bank, serving the city’s social, magical, and—especially—monetary elite. But it was also the bank under the most scrutiny, thanks to me.

A couple of weeks ago, Deirdre Shaw, my long-lost mother, had shown up in Ashland, claiming that she wanted to finally get to know me, her son, after being gone for the last thirty-three years of my life. I’d thought my mother had been killed in a car accident when I was a baby, so her appearance had thrown me for a loop. A dozen loops, actually.

My dad had never talked about her much, but I’d always been curious about my mother. Deirdre had been everything I’d ever wished for—kind, caring, considerate, charming, beautiful. But even more than that, I’d seen so much of myself in her fun, flirty, boisterous manner, and I’d thought that we were so much alike. I’d felt an instant connection with Deirdre, and I’d happily let her into my life, both professionally and personally, working with her as a client here at my bank and introducing her to Gin, Bria, and the rest of my friends and family.

What a sad, stupid, gullible fool I’d been.

Getting close to me had been nothing more than an elaborate plot on Deirdre’s part to gain access to First Trust so that she and Rodrigo Santos, a giant thief, could rob the bank. Deirdre hadn’t cared about me at all, a fact she’d proven in the most coldhearted way possible, by using her Ice magic to burn and torture me when I wouldn’t give her the access codes to Big Bertha, the bank’s most secure vault.

Even now, weeks later, I could still see Deirdre looming in front of me, the blue-white flames of her Ice magic flickering on her fingertips, smiling widely as she leaned forward and unleashed her power, freezing me one slow, agonizing inch of skin at a time—

“Finn?” Gin asked. “Are you okay?”

I blinked, shoved away the awful memories, and dropped my hands to my lap so she wouldn’t see my fingers curled into fists. “Of course.”

Gin kept staring at me, sympathy and understanding flashing in her gaze, but I didn’t deserve either one of those things, so I lowered my head, picked up my fork, dug it into my baked beans, and shoved them into my mouth. The beans were wonderful, made even more so by my dad’s secret barbecue sauce that Gin had cooked them in, but they turned to ash in my mouth.

Everything tasted like cold, bitter ash these days.

But I forced myself to keep eating, swallowing bite after bite, although the food felt like lead weights slowly piling up in my stomach. Gin picked up her own fork, and we finished our lunch in silence.

Once I’d choked down as much food as I could handle, I pushed back from my desk, stood up, and started putting the lids back on all the take-out containers. Gin watched me, but I still didn’t look at her.

“Don’t worry,” I chirped. “This won’t go to waste. I’ll take it all over to the guards’ break room, and Jimmy and the rest of the guys will lap it up. They’ve already asked me if you deliver.”

More lies, since all the food I’d taken to the break room over the past few weeks had gone untouched and been unceremoniously dumped in the trash. But I wasn’t about to insult Gin and her cooking by telling her the truth.

“Sure,” she said. “Just call the restaurant, and I’ll do lunch for the whole bank one day. Anything you need, Finn. You know that.”

I grimaced again. I did know that, and it was one of the things that made me even more miserable. I might have been suckered in by Deirdre’s lies, but Gin had been suspicious of my mother right from the get-go. But I, being the blind, stupid, stubborn fool that I was, hadn’t listened to Gin’s repeated warnings or the nagging little voice in the back of my own mind.

Truth be told, I’d been absolutely awful to Gin, Bria, and Jo-Jo Deveraux, ignoring them all in favor of spending time with my so-called mother. But my selfish stupidity hadn’t kept Gin from figuring out Deirdre’s scheme, breaking into the bank, and risking her own life to rescue me during the robbery. Because that was just the kind of caring person, just the kind of devoted sister, Gin was to me, the colossal idiot.

And what made it even worse was that Gin didn’t blame me for any of it, even though Deirdre had almost killed her twice, once here at the bank and then again when Gin had been kidnapped by Hugh Tucker, Deirdre’s boss. My sister didn’t yell or scream at me. Not even once. All she did was check on me every single day, ask me how things were going at the bank, and bring me more food than an army could possibly eat.

She might be an assassin, but Gin Blanco was far and away the best person I knew.