Page 36 of Written in the Stars
Elle wasn’t suggesting she was wrong. Not about that. “I think that’s the right key, but we never solved a clue for the door.”
“We don’t need to.” Darcy shook her head, eyes narrowing. “It matches the key.”
Elle chewed on the inside of her cheek. Her gut niggled. “I don’t know. It makes too much sense.”
Darcy looked at Elle like she’d lost her mind. “How can something make too much sense?”
Brendon lowered his arm, holding the key at his side.
Elle didn’t know how to put into words her intuition, this sense of something being off. “It doesn’tfeelright.”
Darcy’s brow pinched, her jaw setting.
Elle stared, willing Darcy to understand with every fiber of her being. “Trust me.”
She was asking a lot, she knew, asking Darcy not only to trust her, but her nebulous, indescribable intuition. Nothing solid, nothingreal, not in theseeing is believingsense.
Darcy glanced at the clock. “All right. Go with your gut, Elle. Justhurry.”
Four minutes was how long she had to figure out what about that door didn’t feel right. Heart racing, Elle rushed back to the table, double-checking for something, anything, a sign that her gut wasn’t leading her—and the rest of the group—astray.
Nothing. There was nothing she hadn’t touched, turned over. The fog thickened around their feet, rising to their knees. Elle turned, facing the mirror, catching a glimpse of Darcy’s tight-lipped reflection. Elle’s stomach twisted.
Above her head, the clock counted down from two minutes.
Fuck. She couldn’t see anything on the floor, her vision tunneling. Not to mention, the smoke was too thick, practically opaque, and the—
Smoke.
What had Jim said? Elle tugged on her earring. She’d been so excited to get started that she’d stopped paying attention. “Jim said something. Before he locked the door. Something about smoke and mirrors.”
Face slackening, Darcy’s lips parted. “The mirror. Go to the mirror.”
They both made it there at the same time, right as the clock hit seconds.
“What do we do?” Darcy ran her fingers along the mirror’s edge.
“Dosomething,” Brendon urged.
Elle swallowed down her nerves and gripped the edge of the mirror. This couldn’t just be a prop, itcouldn’t. Wait.Prop. Propped against the wall,angledagainst the wall...
It was a long shot. “Let’s try tilting it.”
Forty-five seconds.
Together, she and Darcy hauled the mirror forward to where a barely perceptible chalk line was drawn far enough away from the wall for them to angle it back, careful not to drop it. At sixty degrees, the reflection of the overhead light bounced off the stationary crystal ball and pinged across the room, a beam of light landing on the second door, the onenotmarked with the number fifty-five.
“Holy shit.” Brendon laughed and jogged over to the lit door,key held out in front of him like a baton. He slipped it inside the lock, turned the knob, and threw the door open. Confetti and a dozen brightly colored balloons rained down over their heads as the buzzer squawked.
They did it.
They won.
Mirth bubbled up inside Elle like an overflowing champagne fountain, laughter spilling from her lips.
Darcy plucked a blue balloon out of the air and spiked it at Brendon, shrieking when he caught it and rubbed it across her head, static making her strands stick up wildly, confetti catching in her curls.
Through the rising fog and falling confetti, Darcy caught Elle’s eye and beamed.
