AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The words echoed back to our conversation at the fundraiser in a way that sent a pang of understanding and relief through me.
Garrison tipped his head toward me and went on. “You never lied to me or broke any promises, and I shouldn’t have accused you of anything like that. I only—I only got so angry because I thought I’d screwed up by trusting you. But you haven’t done anything wrong, and I’m sorry I went off on you like that.” He paused, and a hint of his usual smirk touched his lips. “I guess I should have known you’re too much woman for any one of us to satisfy on our own.”
Blaze chuckled lightly from the bed. “It’s a good thing there’s four of us.”
A laugh tumbled out of me. “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult.”
“A compliment. Definitely a compliment,” Blaze insisted.
Garrison’s smirk grew. “Absolutely. Hell, if being with all of us makes you happy, who am I to argue with that?”
“Here, here,” Blaze said with a wobbly nod.
Julius shot him a sharp look. “I know this is a difficult ask, but if you could manage to stay still for another twelve or so hours at least, I’d really appreciate it.”
Blaze let out a huff, but he rested his head back into the pillow.
With that, the tension that had been wound through me since this morning started to dissipate. It didn’t vanish completely, but at least the crew felt like a consolidated unit again and not one fracturing under strain. I wasn’t sure whether things would actually play out so smoothly going forward, once they had to put that newfound generosity into practice, but it wasn’t as if I was planning on hooking up with anyone in the middle of this mess. We had more important things to focus on.
“Now that we’ve determined that you’re not all pissed off at me still,” I said, “should we talk about what happened at the storage facility? It was obviously a trap.”
Julius grimaced. “Yes. One you spotted well before we did. We rushed when we shouldn’t have.”
“We were worried about you,” Garrison said quietly.
I shot him a baleful look. “And because of that, you made me way more worried about all of you.”
“I should have known,” Blaze muttered. “For the search to come up with a result this close to home after it’s already been running for days… It should have popped up much earlier if it’d been there all along.”
“Do you think someone planted the image specifically for us to find?” I asked.
Talon hummed. “It wasn’t in the storage units where we thought it would be.”
“Right,” Blaze said. “No symbol there at all. They faked it as bait to get us to come while they prepared their ambush.”
Julius sighed. “After our standoff at the meat factory, the organization behind Dess’s capture must have realized we were looking for their symbol, that we were using it to track them down. They turned the main lead we have against us.”
A gloom settled over me, seeping into my gut. A similar shadow had crossed Garrison’s face.
“If that was faked…” he said. “If they’ve figured out that much about the way we’re working… can we trust any of the leads we’ve gotten? Almost everything we’ve found has been through the image recognition app. All of it could have been manipulated to leave a false trail—the images and videos of Dess’s trainer, the ones of the people we saw her with, the symbol…”
“The symbol is definitely real,” I jumped in, even though a deeper sense of hopelessness was swelling inside me. “It’s on my neck—it was in the mansion.”
“But we don’t know much other than that for sure,” Julius said, frowning. “We can’t trust any information that came to us from outside sources, no matter how innocuous it seemed at the time.”
My heart sank. “Then what do we have, really?”
Garrison made a face. “We’re basically back to square one.”
Silence fell over all of us, even Blaze the chatterbox. I swallowed hard. After all the effort we’d gone to and the danger these men had put themselves in for me, we might not be any closer to answers than when we’d started this mission.
And I had no idea where to go from here.
