AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yep,” Ford said and slapped a hand on Jagg’s back. “He deserved it.”
Her guy cracked his jaw. “Yeah, I did.”
“Beer?”
They drifted away, Daisy’s name back on their breath. Her father was out of line. Not a word and…
Walking the opposite way from the guys, she got outside in time to see Strat drive out of the lot.
This was a… Nothing was going right. Lives were being lost and violence was never the answer.
It was time to negotiate.
FORTY
WHIZZING PAST LUCY at The Chronicler reception desk, questions piled up. Sersha. She needed to see Sersha and—through the glass wall panels, she spotted her target in Steeple’s office.
Without knocking, she hurried inside. “What is going on?”
“Sersh says it’s a distraction,” Steeple said, swiveling his seat in a narrow arc back and forth.
“The riot?”
“If the only guy the cops have on tape is this Bryan, the Manzanis obviously had a clear plan in place for evacuation. They took what they needed to take and destroyed everything else… or that was the idea.”
“While the building was burning around them?”
Most people might think about running for their lives, but not Manzani soldiers. Maybe that was because if they left without doing their part, they’d be tossed back into the flames and told to get it right.
“Something must’ve been missed,” Sersha said. “Someone needed to get back inside. The fight with the cops, the scale of it, being that heavy-handed hid something else. It was misdirection.”
Something they had experience of, like last night.
“So what was it? What did they miss?”
“I don’t know,” Sersha said.
“Is it important?”
“To someone.”
“How do we find out?” she asked.
With an exhaled laugh, Sersha landed her smile on Steeple. “Is she for real?”
“Ask your brother.”
“Yeah,” Sersha said. “Now I know that idealism rubs off, I won’t get too close to either of them.”
Funny joke, she didn’t appreciate being the punchline. “There must be someone we can ask.”
“Yeah, there is,” Sersha said, bobbing her head in a shallow nod. “You can ask around. Won’t get you far but—”
“You know the world. You know people in it. Someone could tell you the truth. You can, right? You can ask?”
“I could.” Another moment of eye contact with Steeple betrayed something more somber. “But why would I?”
She faltered. “Why would—”
