Winter's Web by Jennifer Estep

Author:Jennifer Estep
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jennifer Estep
Published: 2018-11-13T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

The two giants half dragged, half carried Owen over to a wooden chair close to the diorama and threw him down into the seat.

An ugly bruise had bloomed like a purple pansy on the left side of Owen’s face, and blood had oozed out of a deep, nasty cut in the center of the swelling, trickled down his cheek, and dried on his skin like rusty paint. Owen blinked and blinked, but he didn’t resist as the giants tied his arms down to the chair with thick, heavy ropes. He was still clearly dazed from the hard hit he’d taken when the men attacked him behind the blacksmith forge.

Some of the tension in my chest eased, and my breath escaped in a relieved rush that sent the dust motes spinning through the air. Yes, Owen was injured, but Jo-Jo could use her Air magic to heal his head, along with all the other damage the giants had done. I just needed to get him out of the barn first—and figure out exactly who these people were and why they had kidnapped him.

I could understand Hugh Tucker, Mason, or some other Circle member snatching Owen to lure me into a trap, but it sounded like Lancelot had been ordered to kill me outright, while Owen was still alive. Why eliminate me and keep him alive? Unless…

Unless this was all about Owen.

This whole time, I’d thought someone had been using Owen to get to me. But these people didn’t care about me at all, other than making sure that I stayed out of their way. No, they had been after Owen this whole time. But why?

I studied Celeste and the four giants, but I had never seen any of them before today. I was certain of it. I also didn’t remember seeing their faces in the files Fletcher had kept on Ashland’s many criminals. These were either low-level players or new folks in town. But that still didn’t answer the question of why they had kidnapped Owen.

Celeste glanced over at the two giants in front of the laptops. “Aren’t you ready yet?” she snapped, an impatient note in her voice. “How long does it take to type in a few passwords?”

“A few dozen passwords,” one of the giants corrected her, still tapping keys the whole time. “And we’re almost ready. We’re just logging into all the accounts so that we can see the transactions and make sure that everything processes correctly.”

My eyes narrowed. Accounts? Transactions?

The giant was making it sound like this was all about…money.

Kidnapping someone and cleaning out their personal and business holdings was a common enough scheme, especially in a place as corrupt and violent as Ashland, but I still wondered exactly why Celeste and the giants had chosen Owen out of all the businesspeople in the city.

It wasn’t like they’d seen Owen walking down a dark street at midnight and decided to grab him on the spur of the moment. This whole setup reeked of weeks, if not months, of careful planning.

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