Page 80 of Anchor

Taland grabbed my wrist and didn’t let me push it down. “Why not?”

Because I did it once and it almost killed me. Because I’d rather die for real instead. Because I don’t want to be a coward anymore,I thought. “Because I don’t want to,” I said.

Taland knew, though. He could always read my thoughts in my eyes just fine, and this time, when I pushed the handle down, he let me.

When we opened the door, he followed me, and nobody was waiting for us on the other side.

I could have been dreaming and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Everything was moving in slow motion again, except some seconds passed in fast-forward mode, too. My vision was blurry around the edges, and the people who passed me by in the hallway looked like cartoons rather than real, and I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that Taland Tivoux was right behind me, with cuffs around his hands and a guard’s hat on his head.

Guards don’t hang out in the main area,I told myself, and they didn’t.

Guards don’t wear handcuffs, either.

Too late now.

A couple people smiled and nodded at me, some even said hi because I wasfamousnow—the winner of the Iris Roe. I thought I smiled and saidhiback, which would have surprised them, but I couldn’t be too sure. My voice didn’t really reach my ears as it should, but what mattered was that they didn’t stop me. I kept on walking, turning corner after corner, and I didn’t even turn to look behind me once. I felt Taland’s energy—that was enough. He was still there, and we were almost to the garage.

Then we walked into the elevator that would take us straight inside the garage.

The doors slid closed. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Taland asked.

That we just might die, together, before we make it out of this place, and that I would much rather choose that fate than go back to that mansion and sleep and live without you another day?

Too many words—my vocal cords could never handle them right now.

“This mirror and this handle”—he touched the handle that went along the back of the car meant to help people keep steady—“make this elevator the perfect place for fucking.”

My cheeks burned. The elevator doors slid open again.

A miracle my heart was still inside my ribcage. A miracle I even knew how to find the key locker, how to find the key to Madeline’s Mercedes, and how to find the Mercedes in the spot where I’d parked it some two weeks ago.

All the while, my attention was on the guards in the cabin at the exit of the garage, the ones who were going to open the doors for me to leave.

Can they see me? No, they can’t. Do they have cameras in here? No, please, no. Will they recognize Taland or will they think it’s a guard? No, no, please, no…

“Get in.”

I blinked and suddenly my ears were working again. They hadn’t, not as they should, I realized, until this very moment. Until I spoke and heard my own voice and I was pulled out of this strange trance.

“Yes, ma’am,”said Taland, grinning like always, as he sat in the small trunk of the fancy car, then lay down inside, pulling his knees to his chest. “I’ll be thinking about being inside you.”

My cheeks flushed again.

Why aren’t you worried?I screamed at him in my mind.

Why wasn’t he worried, damn it? He could go back to prison. He coulddie—how could he be so calm and playful about it? I honestly envied him.

When I made to close the trunk, he already had the handcuffs off, and he was touching his chest, the sides of his waist like he was searching for something—and his smile fell then.

“What? What is it?” Was it a tracking device or something? Was it a wound?

Taland shook his head. “Nothing. I seem to have dropped what I took in the Vault while fighting.”

Butterflies in my stomach. That piece of white marble—the script I’d seen him steal. “We’renotgoing back in there,” I warned him, just in case he got ideas in his head.

Taland grinned. “Don’t worry, sweetness. We’ll just come back another time.”

Like hell.

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