Page 39 of Knotted By the Triad

I adjusted my top again, covering up the girls that were on display. Allie looked down at herself. She was dressed in all black from head to toe. Black fitted pants. Black shirt that clung to her.

Black boots. Black gloves. She'd even made black coverings for our faces, leaving only our eyes exposed. Oh, and our hair. My curls were on full display. If my alphas saw us, they’d know exactly who we were. We were not in disguise. We were in costumes.

“We needed disguises,” she insisted. “What did you want us to do? Walk up to a bunch of criminals with our faces exposed?”

“We needed black, loose-fitting clothes. And head coverings that covered our entire heads. No hair out. All I wanted was for you to find us some black clothes. But you turned it into a DIY project.”

“A what?” she asked, frowning.

“A... never mind. It was you who decided we needed to look like pretty assassins and then spent hours making us these outfits.”

“First of all, we look authentic,” she told me. “This is how all of the female martial artists dress.”

“We’re thieves, Allie. And we look ridiculous.”

“We look intimidating.”

“We look like two women wandering around the woods in the middle of the night, lost, because one of them took too long making cute matching outfits,” I hissed.

Her eyes narrowed. “My outfits didn’t get us lost, Princess. You did. You said you knew where we were going.”

“I do.”

“Then where is the warehouse?” she asked, stretching her arms out. “Where is it, Princess?”

I looked around at the endless trees surrounding us.

“That way.” I pointed left.

“You said that an hour ago. And an hour before that.”

“And technically, it's still that way.”

“Zuri, we're lost.”

“We are not lost. We're just... temporarily unsure of our exact location.”

“That's called being lost.”

“I don't appreciate your negativity.”

Allie made a sound beneath her mask and started walking again. I followed, refusing to acknowledge that she might have a point. This was not how tonight was supposed to go. The plan had been simple.

Find the warehouse, wait for the smugglers to finish whatever illegal business they'd come there to conduct, rob them, and go home richer. Instead, Allie had decided that if we were going to commit a crime, we needed proper criminal attire.

I'd agreed at first because the outfits had sounded like a good idea. That was before I'd realized she intended to make them herself. By the time she'd finished sewing, adjusting, changing things, adding gloves, and insisting we couldn't possibly sneak around with our faces exposed, we'd left much later than I'd planned.

That still wouldn't have been a problem if I'd known how to get to the warehouse. Unfortunately, I didn't. I knew where it was. The book described the warehouse as an abandoned building beyond the capital's western edge.

The book said it was surrounded by forest and far enough from the main roads that the smugglers could do business without attracting attention. However, the book hadn’t told me which roads to take to get there from the manor.

The book hadn’t included directions. And it hadn’t specifically stated the address. Apparently, the author hadn't considered the possibility that one day her friend would get sucked into her story and need to find the warehouse herself so she could rob the criminals she’d written about.

Inconsiderate, really. At this point, I was giving this story 2 stars. I do not recommend.

Allie stopped ahead of me. “Didn't we cross this stream already?”

I looked past her at the narrow stretch of water cutting through the trees.