The Serpent's Curse by Lisa Maxwell (read an ebook week .TXT) 📕

spent the last few weeks waiting and planning, but things had changed, and now everything was moving too quickly. Thanks to Theo, they knew that in a matter of days the Order would bring the Delphi’s Tear back into the city and install it within the inner chambers of their new headquarters. If that was allowed to happen, the chances of ever retrieving the ring would become much more unlikely—maybe impossible. With the shortened timeline, it had become obvious that they needed help.

Abel had finished his explanations, but he hadn’t quite come to his point. Viola could read the mood in the room, though. Already she sensed that things would not go so easily as Cela and Abel had assured her.

When Cela glanced back at the two of them, her expression was guarded. Cela had been cordial ever since Jianyu had woken, but Viola knew that Cela had still not forgiven her for attacking Jianyu. For attacking her.

Cela’s constant suspicion grated, but Viola accepted it as her due. It was no more than she was used to, after all. Hadn’t she lived with looks just as sharp for as long as she could remember—from her own family, and later from those in the Devil’s Own who did not understand why Dolph should put so much trust in a woman? If a lifetime of judgment had not broken her, neither would Cela Johnson’s. No matter how deserved that judgment might be.

“The bottom line is that this isn’t our fight, Abel,” the one called Joshua said with a frustrated sigh. He was a stout man, whose shirt stretched tight across his stomach whenever he moved. He was maybe a year or two older than Abel and had a quietness about him that Viola had appreciated when they’d first met more than a week ago. This quietness gave his words more weight somehow. “We have pressure coming at us from all sides with the strike looming in Philadelphia, and now you’re asking us to go stirring up trouble with the Order? If we do that, we’ll be putting a mark on the back of every Negro in this city.”

“We’re already wearing that mark,” Abel said.

“Well, I damn sure don’t need to make the one on my back any bigger,” another man argued. He was older still, and his face wore the kind of weariness of someone who worked too much and for too little. His hair was tightly curled about his head and had a reddish cast when the light hit it.

“I understand, Saul,” Abel said. “But maybe by working together, we can make those targets a little smaller. Maybe we don’t have to fight alone.”

“Or maybe helping these folks does the opposite,” another said. “We have families of our own to protect.”

Saul’s wife, a woman with skin as dark and smooth as ebony, placed her hand on Saul’s knee. Her hair had been pulled back from her narrow face in a serviceable braid, but the humidity of the day had it curling around her temples, not much different from what Viola’s own hair was doing at that moment. “We got children, Abe. Are you really asking us to put them at risk for a fight that isn’t even ours? I’m sorry, but Joshua and my husband are right. We can’t get involved.” She sounded sorry for it, but unwilling to be moved.

Joshua leaned forward again. His deep-set eyes looked like they had already seen too much. “Look, Abe, I know that you and your sister like these folks, and I’m sure that you want to help, but we have real issues to solve right now. We have the meeting with the steel workers next week. If we can’t get them to open their labor union to our men, it’s going to set us back at least ten years. You should be focused on those problems, not some treasure hunt.”

“It’s not a treasure hunt,” Cela told them, speaking for the first time since they’d gathered.

“You’re right,” Aaron said. “What you’re talking about is robbery.”

“Cela, honey, we’d like to help, but not like this,” said another woman from the end of the table. She was older than the others, with a broad face and a bosom to match. “You know what they would do to us if we were caught helping with this crazy plan of yours, don’t you? More than a hundred people—our own people—were murdered last year in cold blood for doing nothing but trying to live. We’re barely through May, and this year’s numbers look every bit as bad. This here city is still simmering with unsettled anger from what happened less than two years ago after that plainclothes officer got himself killed.”

“Because we aren’t even allowed to protect our own women when a white man attacks them,” Aaron added.

The woman nodded in agreement. “You know what we lost during those days.” She pursed her narrow mouth. “Can you really ask us to risk starting all that up again?”

Cela kept her tone even, her gaze steady. “Hattie, I know exactly what we lost,” she told the other woman, emphasizing the word in a way that made it seem almost personal, and Viola couldn’t help but wonder what Cela and Abel had lost.

“Then you should know better to start trouble where there wasn’t none before,” the older woman told her, sitting back in her chair with her arms crossed, like the point was irrefutable.

Viola remembered the unrest two years before. A plainclothes police officer had been killed, and his death had started a chain reaction of violence. The trouble had been mostly kept to the Tenderloin, though, because the police’s violence had been focused on the colored people who lived there. It hadn’t really touched the Bowery, and it certainly hadn’t touched her. And anyway, Viola’d had her own troubles at the time.

Cela’s brother, Abel, had been listening quietly to the conversation without saying much, but he spoke now. “I can’t ask any of you to step up and put your lives