Page 37 of The Prince of New York

“I recommend three dual chargers, that way you can charge six batteries at one time. If you start her off with eight batteries, you might keep her fully charged throughout the day. My wife is the same way. If it’s interesting, she will take a picture of it. But in good news, it also means I get several hours a week of peace and quiet as she goes through all her pictures. You’re going to need several external drives to store her photos. Even using the smaller file sizes, she’ll end up blowing through numerous gigs a day.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Honestly, get drives with large capacity and buy several of different brands, that way you don’t get caught in a bad batch of drives. I’d keep a backup of everything. Nothing upsets my wife more than losing her pictures.”

I could handle that, and I set a reminder on my phone to acquire the drives as soon as we returned to the palace. “Anything else I should get?”

“A cleaning kit for your lenses.” Josh headed to a nearby stand and picked up two boxes. “This should be sufficient to get you both started.”

Fortunately for my sanity, Josh guessed I’d rather be in and out, and he rang up everything with admirable speed and helped organize my new bag, folding all the boxes from my acquisitions and stuffing them into a plastic bag to store for warranty and resell purposes. Once finished, I slung the bag over my shoulder, grunting at its weight, and decided against one strap, else I’d earn a backache I wouldn’t forget anytime soon.

Madelyn, who had entered an entirely different world of wonder, could likely stay in the shop for the rest of the day. Only when she had wandered over to the disposable camera section did I decide it was time to intervene, easing her away from the display after giving her a few minutes to gush over old film cameras and dark rooms.

I foresaw a successful assault on my wallet should I convince her to stay around, as a dark room was not something we had access to.

By the time we made it back to the palace, I wanted nothing more than a nap. However, with the surfacing of my parents, I needed to have a talk with Terry about what to do and how to go about it. If my parents were sniffing at my turf, they wanted something—and they preferred to talk before acting.

That meant I might be able to get a feel for what they were up to.

Had they wanted, they could have made a huge mess of the vineyard, killing numerous people and likely escaping with their lives. However much I distrusted them, I refused to forget the reality of the situation: they were New Yorkers, and while I was a stronger New Yorker, they defined what it meant to be a threat.

Upon reaching the palace, I waited for Madelyn to head towards the elevators in the garage to say, “Terry, is Monty working right now?”

“He is. He’s working with your sister. Why?”

“I’d like to talk to both of you for a few minutes if possible.”

“That won’t be an issue. Val is on duty, and he can stand in for Monty.”

Val, on loan from Montana, tended to be a quieter agent who understood us New Yorkers were skittish, often disappearing in plain sight in an effort to acclimate us to his presence. “Val works. It shouldn’t take long. It’s about the trip to the junkyard.”

“Ah. I see.” Terry lifted his hand to his ear and requested that Monty meet us in my suite. “I recommend that you give Madelyn a two hour break. She could use the decompression time, and that’ll give her an hour to do mandatory work she feels that needs to be done before the end of the day. We took longer than expected today.”

We had, and I worried what the future would hold.

For the moment, I would focus on appeasing whatever talking my parents wanted to do, and my junkyard would make for the best place for such a discussion. As long as I made it through the next few days, there was a good chance everything would work out with minimal risk of injury to myself and others.

I feared Terry was right all around, and that things would get worse before they got better—and that I stood a high chance of suffering through some form of injury or another. As long as Rachel and Madelyn emerged unscathed, I would endure without complaint.

Terry would be safe enough.

Not even my parents would deliberately stir Montana’s wrath, and anyone with a grain of common sense recognized the beast slept, happy and content.

If my parents acted and Terry dealt with some form of injury, Olivia would not handle it well. With her pregnancy, Montana’s king would give the world a demonstration regarding his family, his tendencies, and his magic.

The Monster of Montana would rise again, and it wouldn’t be a one-man army; every talent in the family would stir, and unlike New Yorkers, Montana’s royalty had zero issues with pointing themselves all at the same target and working together to eradicate what had crossed their line.

I would take care to warn my parents to leave the sleeping beast to his rest.

When they perished, I wanted it to be at my hands with as little collateral damage as possible. Only a fool wanted to get into a fight over the bodies with royalty from Montana, and I was many things, but I was no fool.

As I had no idea how Madelyn would react to being given two leisure hours, I braced for hefty disapproval and strode over to join her. “I’m going to be in a meeting or two for the next two hours. Why don’t you take it as a break? Terry is going to babysit me, and you should have an hour or so afterwards to handle anything necessary before the end of your shift, right?”

“I don’t have much left on my plate today,” she admitted. “One of the other aides recommended I take a light schedule because outings like this almost never go to plan.”

“Then just take off for the rest of the day if there’s nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow. If anyone has an issue with it, direct them to me. If you don’t have a computer that can handle working with your pictures, ask someone in the RPS, and they’ll get one for you.”

Madelyn lit up. “Really?”

---