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“She went missing two years ago,” Diana told him.
He knew she was watching for his reaction. Finch could feel his face contorting, his mouth opening and closing but no words emerging while his brain tried to catch up with this fact.
“What do you mean missing?” he asked in confusion.
For three years he’d been imagining what it would be like if he bumped into Zezi in the street. That she’d see him as a mature man know, twenty years old, not seventeen, and she’d maybe marvel at how much he’d changed.
And Finch had changed. He had done things that neither he nor Zezi would have thought he was capable of back then. He was not the same guy that she had known, and he had hopes that maybe she would sense that and be intrigued. Because no way could he tell her what he had done. But it turned out that in all this time that he had been daydreaming of her, she had been gone.
“What do you mean missing?” he asked again, his voice gone steely.
“Missing, presumed dead,” she replied, giving him no mercy.
“But you don’t think she’s dead?” he said urgently. “You wouldn’t be looking for her if she was dead. You never said you were looking for a murderer.”
“Why do you think she’s been murdered?” Diana asked sharply.
“Because… because why else are you here?”
She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “Dead or alive, I need to close this case,” she said.
But he could tell that really she did care. She wanted to find Zezi alive, and that was all Finch needed to know about her.
She was looking at him as if she still hadn’t decided whether she trusted him or not. She reached out and touched the back of his hand, which startled him. Quickly, he pulled it away. She grabbed hold of it again, and said, “What do you know about the Petrichor Club?”
“Nothing!” He yanked his hand away and put it behind him where she couldn’t get it again. He really, really did not want this Diana girl touch him. Clearly she had done it on purpose. What had she been doing? Taking his pulse? Or was she using some magic to be able to tell if he was lying? Some magic that might tell her more about him than he wanted her to know?
She seemed satisfied with his answer because she didn’t try to grab hold of him again.
“What is this Petrichor Club?” he asked.
She shrugged noncommittally. “A friend of Zezi’s mentioned she had hung out there.”
The cowboy suddenly spoke up in a slow drawl. “Boss’s sister-in-law goes there at times,” he said.
This immediately got Diana’s attention because she leaned forward to listen to him over the sound of the wind and his overly loud music. “Steffane Ronin’s sister in law?”
The cowboy nodded. “Marielle Zamas Ronin. She’s married to Rodrigge, boss’s brother.”
“The older brother, right?” Diana asked.
The names rang a bell. Finch had heard them before. He leaned forward to join in the conversation. “Are you talking about the vampire Ronins?”
The cowboy nodded.
“I met Marielle Zamas already,” Diana said. “She said she’d keep an ear out at the club in case anyone had remembered seeing Zezi there.”
“But she’s a vampire!” Finch burst out. “You can’t trust a vampire!”
“Like you can’t trust a goblin?” said Diana with her eyebrows raised.
“That’s different!” Finch insisted. “Vampires are… worse.”
“And anyway,” said Diana. “Zezi said in her letters that she was working for your kind of people. So it’s not vampires that I’m interested in when it comes to Zezi.”
“Did she say goblin specifically?” Finch demanded.
“No. But that’s what she must’ve meant. She knew you were a goblin, right?”
