Page 64 of The Princess and the Fraud

When the doors closed, they sealed us in. “He’s a mind reader,” I teased. “What areyoudoing on the third floor?”

Aaron lifted a bucket, one I hadn’t notice he’d been holding. “Didn’t realize I needed to point out the obvious, but getting ice.”

I made a face at him for throwing my words back at me. “There’s an ice machine on the eighth floor.”

“It’s broken. For an expensive hotel, there really are quite a few things wrong with it, aren’t there?”

“Judgey, are we?”

“Hey, I’m just?—”

Before I had a chance to say anything, the elevator came to a jerky rest on the seventh floor. We both awkwardly stood staring at our reflections in the doors, waiting for them to magically part. They didn’t.

Instead, all the lights flicked out, plunging us into pitch darkness.

“Lovisa?” Aaron’s voice was a disembodied, curious sound.

“Yeah?”

“When I said that there are quite a few things wrong at the hotel,” he began, faltering. “It seems I’ve jinxed it.”

I would’ve laughed if we weren’t engulfed in blackness. “Hit the open button.”

“I can’tseethe open button.” A second later, there was a slapping sound as his hand, presumably, hit the side of the elevator. And then the click of the buttons on the panel. Nothing happened. “It just stopped. Is that… normal? We’re not about to plummet to our deaths, right?”

I only had a second to flash through worst-case scenarios before my confusion cleared.Use the east elevator,Paige had said. “She locked the elevator,” I realized aloud, closing my eyes at the implication.

“She locked the elevator,” his voice repeated.

I blinked, but the darkness was so thick that my vision was unchanged. “There are two elevators, and protocol is to lock one after nine on the weekdays, so only one is running.”

“You can just lock an elevator from the outside? That seems unsafe.”

“She’s supposed to lock it on the ground floor once she makes sure it’s empty.” I let out a breath as I gripped the towels tighter to my chest. “She doesn’t work the front desk normally. She—she didn’t know.”

I could almostfeelAaron shift on his feet. Had he moved closer? “You’re not afraid of elevators, are you?”

“No.” I looked in his direction. “Are you?”

“No.”

Great, so neither one of us would panic like some cliché rom-com. Instead, our mutual level-headedness made this an awkward hell.

The ice in Aaron’s buckle rattled as he shifted it in his grip. “Not even the emergency button works? Do you have your phone on you?”

“Company policy is that we don’t carry our phones with us.” The response came automatically. “But I do have my walkie.”

“Is there a reason you aren’t using it?”

I would’ve hit him if I could’ve seen him. I unclipped it from my belt. Holding down the button, I lifted it to my mouth. “Is anyone there?”

Nothing.

“I’m stuck in the elevator at the hotel. Does anyone copy?”

And again, no one responded. I closed my eyes again, letting out a breath through my nose. Since it was after hours, there probably wasn’t anyone left at the country club, at least not with their walkie-talkies on and in range. Alderton-Du Ponte’s walkies were different than the hotel radios, too, so Paige, in blissful unawareness at the desk, wouldn’t even realize until I never came back from the laundry room.

Hopefully she’d realize.

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