“Road trips will do that to you,” the woman said cheerfully. She took Gretchen’s purchases and tallied them up. “Anything else, dear?”
She crouched down and snagged a Milky Way Midnight off the candy rack, adding it to the pile. It gave her an idea.
“And—can I just leave that up here for a sec?”
“Sure,” the cashier said, totally unruffled. “You’re the only customer. Everybody sensible is staying indoors today if they can. Too damn cold. No offense, dear.”
“None taken. It’s work, otherwise I’d be inside too.”
“A woman’s got to make a living,” the cashier agreed.
Damn, Gretchen really hoped they outran the weather. Not that they’d have much of a chance if she kept dallying on this snack run.
But she darted quickly into the back aisles and found what she was looking for. She felt like she was making a purchase so frivolous that she ought to be buying it covertly, in some back alley under cover of darkness.
85% darkness, according to the fancy chocolate wrapper.
If she changed her mind, she didn’t have to give it to him. But she was curious how Cooper would react to the genuinely bitter darkest-of-the-dark chocolate.
“Just this too, please,” she said.
The cashier rang her up and wished her good luck at getting out of range of the blizzard before it hit.
Gretchen headed out, juggling the two paper coffee cups and the bag of snack goodies, and it was right when she heard the bell chime behind her that she saw it.
Black car. Tinted windows. Idling.
Idling where whoever was inside it would have a perfect line of sight to their car.
She replayed her memories, trying to recall whether or not she’d seen the car tailing them from as far back as the prison.
Could be nothing. Could just be somebody trying to keep warm while—
While what? While someone else runs into the store for them? The cashier and I were the only ones in there. She said it herself: it’s been a quiet day.
She couldn’t rush to conclusions. The driver could be checking their GPS. They could even have pulled over for a little shut-eye—for all she knew, this was someone who had been driving all night and was in desperate need of rest before they wrecked. It could be a lot of things. Tinted windows weren’t even that uncommon anymore.
Sure. All of that was true.
But her instincts said otherwise.
But you can’t trust your instincts.
Her family had told her that, time and time again. She wasn’t a shifter. She didn’t have super-senses or an inner animal to warn her when something felt primitively off in a way that humans couldn’t pick up on.
She was weak, vulnerable, and small. Supposedly. Feeling like she was anything else had only ever gotten her in trouble—and if she forgot that, she only had to look at the scar on her shoulder.
But then again, all she was really doing was being confident in her paranoia—and sometimes paranoia was justified. Especially in her line of work. And she had been a Marshal for a long time—and dammit, she was a good one. She had never been able to completely square that with the old warnings.
So she had a choice to make, standing out here shivering in the cold. She could trust all those old lessons and assume that she was just unreliable and weak.
She trusted Martin, who had been the first person to teach her that she was someone worth trusting, who had been the first person to tell her that her instincts were good and that she could handle herself just fine.
Or maybe she could trust herself. And when she thought about that, she knew exactly what to do: her gut, her head, and her heart all agreed.
She made sure the lids of the coffees were firmly shut and then put them in the plastic bag along with everything else, standing them upright so they wouldn’t spill. There. She was being careful.
Then, throwing caution to the wind, she walked over to the black car and rapped her knuckles against the driver’s side window.