AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Or, in my personal experience, they tracked your location to figure out where you lived.
* * *
A single knockon my motel room door had me hauling myself out of bed with a groan. I opened the door with a snarl, expecting the creepy manager of the small motel, but froze in place when I found myself looking into the angry eyes of my sister. Ames stood outside my door with her arms crossed and her lips pursed, and I knew based on her stance alone that this was going to be a fight.
“Thisis where you’re living?” She flung her arms out to her sides, indicating the cracked pavement of the sidewalk, the weeds creeping up against the edges of the parking lot, and the overall decrepit quality of the motel.
“How’d you find me?” I sure as hell hadn’t given Ames the address, knowing her response would look a lot like this. Just as I finished asking, I noticed a familiar face in the parking lot, answering my question before Ames could.
Alex stood leaning against Ames’s new car, the one he had bought her after she made a passing comment about needing a new one. He was so far gone for her he bought her a house before she even knew his name, and I was honestly happy for her.
After our parents died, Ames had been the rock of our little duo, getting me through high school and trying to keep me on the straight and narrow despite my attraction to danger and red flags. I didn’t appreciate her when I was younger, but I could see now that she had destroyed parts of herself to support me.
Either those parts had healed or new ones had grown in the past few months. I hated to admit a good portion of that was likely due to the man standing behind her, watching her berate me with a small smile on his face and more emotion in his eyes than I’d ever seen him aim toward anyone or anything else in the short time I'd known him.
After everything she had gone through with our parents and everything I had put her through myself, Ames deserved some happiness. She deserved more than that, really. She deserved this man, who thought she hung the moon and who worshiped the ground she walked on. Who would break the law for her, kill for her, buy her houses and cars, and build her a pottery studio just to see her smile.
So I couldn’t be surprised that he had tracked me down on Ames’s insistence, even if it stung a little bit.
“Traitor,” I muttered in his direction. Alex just shrugged in response, clear in his allegiance.
“Don’t make this about him!” Ames drew my attention back to her as she pushed into my room, taking in the stained carpet and flickering television screen. Seeing the place through Ames’s eyes had me grimacing alongside her. “Nope.”
“Nope?”
Ames ignored me, poking her head out the door to call to her boyfriend, “Bring the trash bags, babe.”
Alex nodded, grabbing a roll of trash bags out of the trunk of the car and passing them to Ames when he reached my room. She immediately made her way to a pile of my clothes that laid across the floor, shoving them into a bag. She tied and threw the filled bag toward the door and immediately started on a new one. By the time my toiletries were thrown into a third bag, I unfroze from my surprise and spoke up.
“Ames, what are you doing? I live here.”
“Not anymore.” She punctuated the statement with an angry tug on the ties of the trash bag, knotting them so tight that I knew I’d have to cut them open later. “You’re coming to live with us.”
My mouth dropped open at her words. For some reason, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind since Ames moved in with Alex. Of course I hated living at the motel, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Thanks to my almost-criminal record and the lengthy criminal trial that had associated me with domestic terrorists, I hadn’t been able to get a job in months. All it took was a quick Google search to find a transcription of my court hearings and my mugshot, something even the least tech-savvy HR representative could do. Sure, I had gotten off with a not guilty verdict, but the people’s court of law had made their decision early in my case: I was a criminal. And I couldn’t fault their logic, because I was most definitely guilty. I’d only escaped a prison sentence thanks to Alex’s invisible meddling in my court case.
Not to mention, the rare job offers I’d received in the past few months weren’t the jobs I wanted. They were all mindless minimum wage jobs, the types of jobs society thought fit for a near-felon. Not like my current job, where just the thought of going to work had my fingers itching to work a keyboard.
I had almost no money thanks to being unemployed, and most of my savings had been spent in the last six months, so I was stuck living in the motel. Even though I started my job with Alex and Dev the week before, I refused an advance on my paycheck, wanting to earn my status based on talent rather than my sister. Plus, I wanted to save that money for something worthwhile, not blow it on an overpriced apartment in town until I had at least a small amount of savings. I normally wouldn’t balk at living with my sister - I had taken her up on it too many times in the past - but one glance in Alex’s direction had the slight relief at Ames’s offer dissipate.
“You don’t want me living with you, Alex. You’re my boss.” I offered him the out, refusing to impose on my boss if he showed the slightest hesitation.
But he barely looked at me, focused on wrapping a strand of Ames’s hair around his finger as she continued to angrily shove my belongings into trash bags. “She says you live with us, you live with us.”
I tried to argue, but he held up a finger, and I shut my mouth. His friendly eyes, which were his default in front of me and the rest of his little group, darkened into something much less inviting. I could see, then, where he got his reputation for being ruthless. How he threatened a mob member when he was a lowly tech guy and came out with a contract for a security job within the mafia. These eyes didn’t allow for an ounce of argument, and his next words only solidified my fate. “If I have to freeze your accounts and ruin your credit to force you into our guest house, I will.”
By the end of the day, I was living in the guest house.
* * *
I waswilling to admit that moving into the guest house, or rather the adjoining bedroom in Ames’s home pottery studio, was much more luxurious than the run-down motel where I had been living. But it also meant I couldn’t find a good reason to excuse myself from events like these, where my sister and her friends could chat early into the morning without pause. No moaning about a long drive home when you could walk the fifty or so yards to your bed.
I checked my watch, wondering when I could beg off ‘hanging out’ and instead go back to my room. After the proposal story - or rather, the engagement story - dinner, dessert, and more drinks passed in quick succession. Rain steadily beat against the roof, so everyone was stuck inside rather than sitting around the fire pit, where it’d be easier for me to melt into the shadows.
I stopped scratching Chaos, who had been entertaining me thus far, and after an angry meow, he stalked off. Setting down my unfinished champagne, my eyes caught on something that piqued my interest for the first time that night.
Wren was drunk. I glanced around the room, wondering if anyone else would step in as she sipped another glass of champagne, but it seemed like I was the only one who had noticed her complete descent into drunkenness. I saw her throwing back drinks all night, her voice going soft as she got more tipsy, a flush rising in her cheeks as the alcohol worked its way through her system.
Or rather, failed to work its way through it.Asian glowwas what she always called it, flipping her hair behind her shoulder as if the term were about an increase in beauty rather than a redness around her eyes and on her cheeks as her system failed to process the alcohol. I waited for someone else to catch sight of it, the flush growing darker with each glass she tipped to her lips. It was the first time I had seen Wren even close to this drunk.
