Page 73 of Dirty Daria

“No plan, willy-nilly, just go in guns blazing?”

“Sometimes there is no time to plan.”

She shrugs.

We head around to the back of warehouse, using the overgrown vegetation surrounding the area as cover. Given that it’s still daylight, we’d be better served wearing desert colored camo. Nothing I can do at this point; my clothes aren’t going to change themselves now.

Some of the windows have been broken, so it’s not difficult to hear what they’re saying. The natural acoustics of the large building carry sound well. The men are planning for an auction. Tonight. Starting with the women who are with them now. It sounds like they are expecting a large number of bidders to attend.

Including—

No, I couldn’t have heard that right.

There’s no way.

I turn to Alyssa and cock my brow in question.

She nods. So, she heard it to.

That explains while Andrei was cleaning his house. Daddy’s home.

Ronan Sinclair is coming to town.

* * *

Alyssa and I make our way back to the cars without doing anything else. I start trying to calculate what we would need to just take them all out. Every last one of them.

“It’s not possible,” Alyssa says, as though she’s read my mind.

“You don’t even know what I was thinking.”

“Of course I do. You want to take them all out tonight, including Sinclair. Which is never going to happen.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You’re good, Daria. But you aren’t that good.”

I narrow my eyes at her. A look that has brought many a man to their knees. She just laughs.

“Bring Mack in, let him help.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“One, how would he have found out about it. Two, half those guys know me. Three, Mack would be too distracted protecting me to be any good.”

“You don’t need protecting.”

“I know that and you know that. But Mack refuses to acknowledge it. In his defense, he’s never seen me in action for real. He just believes that I’m a badass because I tell him so. The only thing he knows for certain is every so often when we’re sparring, I can take him down.”

“Want me to anonymously send him some footage of you doing your thing?”

“God no. The last thing he needs is evidence against me.”

“Good point.” She taps her lips with her index fingers, thinking. “Call the girls in?”

“How many can we get? Realistically. I’m good for two, maybe three if they are clustered, before things go crazy. If we get Roxie over here, and maybe Jen, and you all could do one, maybe two, if we go simultaneously, we know for certain we can get five. It’s just not enough. There needs to be another way.”