Page 50 of Take the Sub and Run

No one except her father, who’d warned her again and again. She’d finally decided to ignore those warnings, to break the rules, leave her sanctuary, and look what had happened.

The tap at her window caused her to freeze. Terror choking her, she slowly turned to look at the back window. A branch tapped in a steady rhythm against her window.

Someone was out there…in the tree?

A strangely detached feeling came over her. Maybe she’d simply felt too much in the past forty-eight hours, and there was no more room for any emotion, even fear.

Curious and oddly fearless, she climbed to her feet and peered out the window, slapping her hand over her mouth to muffle a shriek when she finally spotted the figure balanced on a large branch just below her window.

Fumbling for the latch, she swung the window up, ducking under the double-glazed pane to stick her head out. She stared at the man in the tree, and he stared back.

Andrei was in the tree.

“Andrei?”

She felt stupid even saying it out loud, because there was no way the man who walked out of her life earlier was now in the tree, tapping her window with a branch.

“Shhh,” he said, barely audible. “Are they still inside?”

Sofie blinked. “What?”

“Are they still inside?”

“How did you… Are you watching me?”

He dropped the branch he’d been using to tap on her window and climbed higher in the tree.

“You're going to fall.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You are.”

“Angel, if I were you, I wouldn’t argue with me right now.”

The cool, smooth tone of his voice didn't negate the hard warning. She responded to that threat in an unexpected way. The tension born of fear that made her shoulders and arms tight relaxed.

Now, they were eye to eye, though he was several meters back, having to stay close to the trunk for the limbs to support his weight.

“Sofie, are they still inside?”

“No. They left.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I saw it on the security video.”

“I don’t think you can trust your system. They must have overridden it to get in.”

Oh. He was right. She remembered hearing it beep the way it did when it was disarmed, so they must have hacked it.

“So they could still be inside?” she whispered.

“Probably not, given that we’re not being all that quiet,” Andrei said, “so… What are you doing?”

Sofie had already thrown one leg over the windowsill. “Escaping.”

“Fuck. Sofie, stop. The branches close to the building aren’t?—”

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