CHAPTER 88

The silence was so thick she felt she would choke on it. Her ears strained for every tiny sound: a rat scampering across the floor, the breeze whistling softly through the broken windows,the flap of a sheet of plastic that hung against the wall. Her eyes searched the gloom and she tried not to jump at every shadow.Really, she didn’t understand why Gabriel’s business couldn’t have been in a nice restaurant, or at least somewhere with electricity!

She was so busy eyeing a pile of mysterious refuse that she didn’t notice Gabriel stop suddenly and ended up bumping into him. He held his body rigid, so completely still that Natalieswore his heart had even stopped beating.

Her search for the gloom revealed nothing, but her clutch on his sleeve grew tighter. She opened her mouth to ask what was going on when he broke the silence with a single word,“Latoya.”

The woman seemed to appear from nothing. Her dark skin gleamed in the pale light, a