Dark Stars by Danielle Rollins (best affordable ebook reader txt) 📕

Dorothy turned slightly and saw a shadowy shape that she could only assume was Donovan wrestling with the shadowy shape she thought was Zora.

“Can’t say it’s nice to meet you,” Zora breathed, and Dorothy could picture her clenched teeth and the tip of a smile on her lips. She didn’t sound scared but, then, Zora never sounded scared.

A creak of the dock and Mac separated from the shadows. Dorothy squinted. It looked like five . . . no six more Cirkus Freaks surrounded him.

She nearly burst forward right then, to hell with time-travel logic. The only thing that stopped her was the knowledge that, even with her help, it would be nine against three. They were outnumbered.

Dorothy swallowed, hard, and stayed hidden. She’d done plenty of terrible things in her lifetime and none of them kept her awake at night. But this one lodged itself beneath her rib cage, making it difficult for her to breathe. She knew in that moment that she would remember, forever, how she’d hidden in the shadows and done nothing while Ash was taken.

She curled her hands into fists, damning herself for being unable to help, to stop this.

“Boom,” Eliza whispered into Ash’s ear, laughing.

Dorothy saw Eliza’s final blow coming and flinched a second before it landed. She heard something crack—bone. Ash hit the docks, unconscious. Zora released an angry scream of rage that cut off in a sound like flesh hitting flesh. There was another thud, and Dorothy knew that Donovan must’ve knocked her out as well. The Freaks left her where she was, grabbed Ash by the arms, and dragged him off the dock.

Dorothy pressed a fist to her mouth to keep from screaming. In that moment, she felt like she was back home, performing another of her mother’s confidence games. It was as though she were reciting lines she hadn’t come up with, acting out a scene instead of making her own choices, all of it an elaborate performance she had no real control over.

More, she thought, remembering her old wish, the reason she’d run away from home in the first place. She’d wanted more than a half-life, more than a fake marriage, more than a long con. But this . . . this was just more of the same.

She closed her eyes, tears gathering below the lids. She hated that there were things she still couldn’t change, hated that the only real power she had was in her own mind.

She hated time travel.

18

Dorothy made sure Zora was still breathing, and then she dragged her away from the edge of the dock.

“Sorry to leave you like this,” she muttered, pushing one of Zora’s braids off her face. “But you’re not going to be happy to see me when you wake up, anyway.”

Zora groaned and started to stir. Dorothy could hear voices in the distance now, then approaching footsteps. Someone would be down this way soon, and Zora would be found. In the meantime, Dorothy had work to do.

She retraced her steps back to the Fairmont, carefully, carefully, making sure to stick to the shadows, as always. Now, more than ever, she couldn’t allow herself to be caught.

She knew where Mac was taking Ash, and so it was no surprise when she caught up with the boat again outside the old Fairmont parking garage. She waited in the shadows until she was certain the Cirkus Freaks had gotten Ash up the stairs and into an empty hotel room. A few moments later, when she made her way up after them, there was no one else in the dank, dreary hallway.

She remembered the next few hours going like this: Mac would come up the stairs, and he would torture Ash until she and Roman came to call him away. Then—and only then—she could break into his room and set him free. That’s how this was supposed to happen, she knew. It’s what she’d seen.

And so Dorothy waited, staring at the peeling wallpaper. She couldn’t help thinking of blood. The blood Mac was going to beat out of Ash in just a few minutes. The blood she would spill when she killed him later tonight. The blood of all the people left in the city, thousands and thousands of people, all dead if she did nothing.

So much blood. Too much. Her future was soaked in it.

She thought, again, about pulling a con with her mother. How many hours had she spent just like this, waiting for a mark to walk down the street or into a restaurant, rehearsing lines in her head and knowing that, if she said even one word out of order, it could ruin everything.

No chance of that happening now, she thought idly. According to everything she knew of time travel, it didn’t matter what she did. The outcome would be the same.

She frowned, turning this over in her head. She’d never thought of it quite like that before. In a con, she had to control every variable of an interaction in order to get the desired outcome. But time travel wasn’t like that . . . it was the outcome that was certain, no matter what she did leading up to it. Right?

Thinking about this hurt her brain. With time travel, she’d found, it was easier to sort out the logic by doing and then analyze the facts of what she’d discovered later.

“No time like the present,” she muttered to herself. A glance around the corner showed no one coming. The hall was empty, quiet. She couldn’t even hear the distant rise and fall of voices, the thud of footsteps.

If her theory was correct, then it wouldn’t matter whether she hid behind this wall or tried to break Ash free or performed a waltz up and down the hall. She wouldn’t be caught because she hadn’t been caught.

She slipped down the hall like a shadow and knelt in front of Ash’s door, examining the lock. She had barely dropped to her knees when she heard a door open and close somewhere deeper inside the hotel.

She froze,