Page 23 of Your Final Resting Place

“Frankly, I do not care what they feel. Agatha’s death was necessary⁠—”

“Kitten!” Zee poofed from the chair, appearing in a shower of sparks at the end of the bed. “You!” He grabbed my feet through the sheet. “You’re alive! I am so mad right now.” I could tell, by the way he jerked my feet to emphasize his point. “How the fuck am I going to run the hotel if you’re dead? I can’t run it with him.” He freed one foot to fling a hand at Victor. “He’ll measure some fuckin’ thing too many times, so I’ll have to kill him and stuff his skinny ass up a chimney, then I’ll regret it the next day, fall into the bottom of a bottle like a bad-cliché trauma boy—because Tom enables that shit—and my story will end with me walking the earth alone, searching for a purpose in my empty life, selling sex to anyone who will have me just so my broken heart might feel again.”

Victor and I both fell quiet, and blinked.

Zee had really thought about this.

“That’s not going to happen, Zee,” I reassured.

He gripped my feet harder and glared. “It better not. The fanfiction will be fucking insane.”

“I suspect Adam would like his feet back,” Victor suggested, seeing me wince.

Zee plucked his hands free. “Right.” And with a huff, folded his arms. “Still mad.” He pointed at my feet tenting the sheets. “Cute feet, though.”

“I love you too, Zee.”

His whole posture softened then, and he sighed. “Yeah okay, I’m easy to love. But no more dying!”

“Okay.” It wasn’t as though I was trying to die, it just happened.

Zee and Victor were the best. They’d saved me, and they’d stayed with me. But I wasn’t sure that infiltrating the warehouse had been worth the almost-dying part. “Did we get the locket?”

“Yes.” Victor dug into a pocket and removed a golden locket on a chain. “Jimmy found this.” He dropped it into my hand. “Without its warded control, Cain will not be able to access the full extent of your power. And it also appears there was an unfortunate fire at Agatha’s workshop, weakening the structure, resulting in its collapse just a few hours after we vacated the area. Nobody will be making any further jewelry for Gideon Cain.”

That was . . . suspicious timing. I eyed Victor, and watched his tiny smirk increase by the tiniest of measurements. Oh, he’d gone back while Zee had watched me. No more Agatha de La Cour, and no more FaeMade® magic gems. When it came to vengeance, Victor didn’t mess around.

I squeezed Victor’s hand. “I am so happy you’re on our side.”

“So . . . we have some good news,” Zee crooned. “Or bad news, I guess. Good for me, bad for you guys. Whatever. Uh . . . Seb escaped.”

Of course he had. “How?”

“Madame Matase went to check on him, after it had been a really long time since we tied him up. He sweet-talked her into loosening the ties and fled. He did not fuckin’ appreciate the SOS Hotel management’s tough love. Oh well. We’re better off without that scumball anyway.”

“We suspect he’s gone back to Gideon Cain,” Victor added.

Seb had given us good information, but his usefulness was definitely limited. “Oh well. Seb doesn’t know anything about us that Gideon isn’t already aware of.”

“Uhm, so . . .” Zee glanced at Victor, who glanced back at him in a ping-pong of uncertain gazes. “There’s more.”

“What?” I asked.

“He took Tom Collins.”

“Oh dear.” Tom knew everything—every little secret, every flaw, every hiccup, every weakness—everything. Gideon had tried to get Tom before, via Agatha. We’d stopped her then, but not this time. Had Seb’s mission been about getting his hands on Tom all along?

And poor Tom.

I suddenly felt very ineffective, here in this public hospital wearing nothing but a thin gown. “We need to get back to the hotel.”

I clambered from the bed, carefully dressed, and with the help of Victor’s voice on the staff, discharged myself. The eye-watering hospital bill was not helping my wound throb any less.

After catching an Uber back to the hotel, we pulled up outside to find Noreen Greene in a gray and pink skirt suit and floofy blonde hairdo waiting on the front porch.

“She can keep right on walkin’,” Zee began, shoving open the cab door.

Zee had a habit of throwing gasoline on an already roaring fire and although there wasn’t much Noreen could do to us to make our situation worse, we really didn’t need her poking her nose up chimneys or into flower beds. “It’s alright. I’ll talk with her. You two go inside.”