AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The twist in my stomach tightened with a pinch of guilt. One more way their association with me was changing all of their lives. I didn’t want them losing everything. Maybe it was silly to think that way about money when our actual lives were on the line, but they wouldn’t have been risking anything at all if it wasn’t for me.
Seth reached over from where he was sitting beside me and squeezed my knee as if he’d sensed my thoughts. They wanted to be here, I reminded myself. With every action and every word, they proved how true that was.
“It’s not just for you, so it shouldn’t all come out of your wallet,” I said. I fished out a wad of hundreds and handed it back to him.
“Rose,” Damon said.
I shook my head. “You’re taking it. To make me feel better. Come on.” I shook the bills at him.
He grumbled wordlessly, but he took the cash.
“You too,” I said, handing some to Kyler. He raised an eyebrow at me as if to say I should know it wasn’t necessary but took the money without protest.
“I can think of a few uses I could put this to.”
We cruised over the bridge and down the wide, sparsely treed streets of Staten Island. As we reached the main commercial strip, I motioned for Gabriel to stop.
A fresh wave of that eerie tingling washed over me again. Distant, yeah, but I wasn’t sure I could even trust my sense of its source. The enforcers had taken us by surprise before.
“It’s just a few more blocks,” I said. “We can walk the rest of the way.”
Gabriel parked by the curb. Damon and Ky hopped out right away, Damon grabbing me for a quick kiss.
“We meet back here,” I said. “Or I’ll text you on your burner if we have to head somewhere else. And you tell me if you see anything suspicious.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Damon said dryly. He gave Ky a light shove toward the road and flagged a cab.
“Should someone stay with the car?” Jin asked, leaning against the back of the middle row of seats.
I wavered. “No. I want you guys with me if anything happens. We can stand to lose the car.”
I hefted my purse over my shoulder. With Jin, Gabriel, and Seth gathered around me, we set off down the street. I counted off the numbers as we approached the spot where Margo Elands’s New Age shop should be.
The website had prepared me for the garish purple-and-green sign and the twinkling of crystals in the window. It hadn’t prepared me for the CLOSED sign hanging on the door.
My legs jerked to a halt. I scooted to the side to be out of the late afternoon just-got-out-of-work foot traffic. The guys gathered around me as I peered into the dark space beyond the window. A whiff of resin-tinged incense carried through the door, but nothing moved among the shelves of tarot cards and multi-colored candles on the other side.
“The website said the store is open until eight,” I said. My gaze dropped to the letters printed on the glass. The hours there were exactly the same.
“Maybe she’s changed things up and hasn’t had time to edit the website?” Jin suggested. “Or the door?”
I bit my lip. I hadn’t texted Margo ahead of time because I didn’t know if the Assembly might be keeping an eye on her because of her past behavior. If I’d given them any hint we were coming to see her, though…
“What if they figured out we were coming this way?” I said. “What if the Assembly has already come after her?”
Gabriel frowned. “Then they’d have been here waiting for us to show, wouldn’t they? They’d have already grabbed us. It could be anything, Rose. She might be taking a sick day or something totally normal like that for all we know.”
Seth rubbed my shoulders. “You know I’m not one to be carelessly optimistic,” he said. “But I agree with Gabriel. Why don’t we come back tomorrow morning and see if she’s here then?”
“I’ll text her now,” I said, pulling out my burner. “Nothing obvious. Just asking when the store will re-open. That shouldn’t hurt anything.” And at least it’d give me some reassurance she was okay.
“What should we do in the meantime?” Jin asked. “Do you want to reach out to your mother’s family right away?”
My pulse skipped a beat. “No,” I said. “I don’t think it’d be a good idea to extend ourselves too far all at once. Let’s wait and see what I hear from Margo—if I hear anything—and then figure out how to approach them. I’ve never even talked to them, let alone seen them. I don’t even know for sure if they know I exist. It’s not going to be a simple visit.”
“I don’t think we can just crash in the SUV overnight,” Seth said, glancing back toward our vehicle with a frown of his own.
Gabriel nodded. “Not the kind of thing you can get away with very easily in a big city. What do you think is our safest bet while we wait, Rose?”
