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on the sidewalk in front of the pub, and then his gaze settled upon the flower shop.
    Dallas stiffened.
    Then the door to Bridget’s swung open again and a waitress stuck her head out, said something to Cantwell. The bartender nodded and grabbed the open door. Before going inside, he looked around one last time, and Dallas got a good look at his face.
    “Aw, no,” he whispered.
    The door closed behind him. A minute or so later Valerie appeared on the sidewalk beside Dallas.
    “He caught my scent right off,” she said excitedly. “But there were so many people in there, I don’t think he got a look at me. So what do you think?”
    Dallas shook his head and started walking away from the pub. Valerie sniffed in annoyance and followed.
    “Don’t give me attitude, now, Dallas. I did exactly what you asked me to do. You wanted to size up your target, now you’ve had your chance.”
    “You did great,” he said flatly.
    “So when are you going to do it?”
    Dallas paused, but did not look up at her. His thoughts were astir. “I’m not,” he admitted.

    “What do you mean? Why not?” Valerie asked.
    He looked up at her with a smile that had no humor in it. “His name isn’t Cantwell. Or it wasn’t always.”
    Valerie gaped at him. “You know him?”
    Images flashed in the assassin’s mind of his daughter, Olivia, whom he had not seen in years. After her mother’s death—or truth be told, since long before then—he had made no effort to connect with her. Yet when word reached him from her pack that she had not been heard of in quite some time, he had begun to poke around. Olivia had last been seen in the New York area, where Jasmine was forming her new pack in the aftermath of Tanzer’s death. Dallas had known her since before the dawn of the twentieth century, and so it was only natural that he should ask for her help in locating the girl.
    But Jasmine had never been one for sentiment. She agreed to help find Olivia but only if Dallas would take this job. In addition, she would pay him his usual fee. In the end, he really had no choice. While he harbored some resentment toward Jasmine for capitalizing on his daughter’s disappearance, he had begun to get carried away, as he always did, with the stalking of his prey.
    Now, though?
    “Hell,” Dallas muttered. “Small world, huh? Cruel irony. I can’t kill him.”
    Silence descended between them, and both of them turned to look back along the street at the pub in the distance.
    “So, what are you going to do, then?” she asked.
    Dallas thought about it, then ran his hands through his long hair, pushed it away from his face.
    “Well, the whole point of killing him, drawing him out, is to make sure he can’t protect the others. I get the feeling it’s them, this Dwyer guy and his girlfriend, that Jasmine really wants dead. So I guess I’ll just have to find another way to get Cantwell out of the picture.” C H A P T E R 3

    The music seemed loud in Bridget’s Irish Rose, though the volume had not been turned up. It was simply that the pub was quiet and almost empty save for the staff, and so Sarah Mclachlan’s voice filled the restaurant and bar areas as though she were standing in the middle of the room.
    Courtney Dwyer loved this time of day at Bridget’s. It was just after four o’clock, half an hour or so before the early dinner crowd would begin to trickle in. The wait staff pulled double duty between three and five o’clock, polishing the brass handrails, vacuuming, wiping down seats and tabletops. The same sort of thing was going on back in the kitchen, where the cooks were preparing for the evening onslaught, during which they would not have a moment to spare. Anything they could do now to cut down on the amount of cleanup at the end of the night would get them off work that much sooner.
    Most days Courtney used the time to make certain the kitchen was properly stocked and to figure out what she would need from the fish market the