Page 57 of Broken Arranged Mate
This is the perfect opportunity for me to think about what they’ve said, but my chest is still aching from everything with Oren, feeling too tender for me to fully reconsider, so I turn my attention back to our situation.
Based on everything we’ve seen so far, these guys don’t seem like seasoned criminals. First of all, anyone who knew what they were doing would not have taken in the four of us.
The second that any one of our men—Oren, Aidan, Emin, or Dorian—realizes we’re missing, they’re going to have a hard fucking time on their hands. Likely, the guys are already on their way and ready to kill someone.
Before, they would have just been angry with us. But now they’ll get to take out all that energy on the men upstairs—that is, if we don’t get to them first.
“Hey,” Veva whispers, drawing me out of my thoughts, her eyes moving to mine. “You still know how to pick a lock?”
“Of course,” I whisper back, eyes darting to the door, under which I can see a shadow moving, a different guy just outside it. “But I don’t exactly have my lock-picking kit at the moment.”
“Here,” Kira says, leaning forward and shaking her head a bit until one of her bobby pins falls from her hair and onto the ground. “I amnotgoing back to that fucking market.”
Emaline reaches forward with her foot, sliding the pin along the ground to Raegan, who pushes it up, bending her knee to slide it into Veva’s hand.
Then, Veva hands it to me, pushing it into my hand forcefully so I don’t drop it.
“I’ve never done this backwards and without looking,” I say, sucking in a breath and closing my eyes. “But I’ll try.”
I run my thumb the length of the pin, feeling the thin metal warm against my palm. My fingers are shaking slightly—from adrenaline, from anger, from the chill of this basement. I take a deep breath and try to steady them.
Letting out the breath, I focus on bending the pin, creating a small L-shape at one end—the end that will become my tension wrench. The other end I bend into a slight curve with a tiny hook at the tip. This will serve as my pick.
As I work, I think about Dorian teaching me this in the yard, his voice soft and patient with me as I tried and tried and tried. When I got frustrated, he told me to take a breath and try again.
“Why am I even learning this?” I’d snapped, putting my hands on my hips—something I’d loved to do once I turned ten. “Isn’t picking locks a bad thing?”
“Ash,” he’d said, leveling his gaze with mine, looking serious. Dorian, it seemed, always looked serious—Gramps was instilling into him that since he was taking over, it was his duty to approach everything like an adult, even as a kid. “You’re the granddaughter of a very important person. You know how you’re doing with training?”
I’d crossed my arms, thinking about the self-defense and fighting I’d done alongside them. “Sure.”
“Well, this is the same. If anyone ever tries to lock you up, and you know this stuff, you can get yourself out of there. You won’t have to wait for someone to come and save you.”
Now, I wrestle the pin into the lock on Veva’s handcuffs, closing my eyes and listening, feeling the vibration of how it turns.
Then, with apop, the cuffs come open, and Veva moves her shoulders a bit, a silent celebration, then we sit still as the warm diffusion of her magic floods between us, not scorching, but hot enough to feel.
A second later, the ropes around our wrists turn to ash.
Across the dim basement, Kira helps Emaline to her feet while Raegan pushes her hair away from her face, fixes her hat, and starts to rub feeling back into her hands while glancing toward the door.
“He’s coming back,” I whisper, scanning the room for anything we can use as weapons.
My heart pounds against my ribs as I take stock of our situation. While we were waiting, I counted five of them in this building, maybe fewer. Five of us, five of them. Though Emaline and Raegan might not be much help in a fight.
With Veva’s magic on our side and the element of surprise, we’ll be able to make it out.
“Should we sit back down?” Raegan asks, “Pretend like we’re still tied up, then go at them?”
I chew on my lip, thinking. “We need to get them to open the door. How can we get them to do that?”
Ten minutes later, we’re seated on the floor again, gathered around the pole like we were never able to freeourselves, with the exception of Emaline, the only one small enough to fit on the shelf above the door.
Veva flexes her hand, and a man’s voice rings out from the other side of the door, like it’s come from a phantom.
“Oi! Hello—anyone there?”
Heavy footsteps creak overhead in response.
