Chapter 10
Ten
Everly
I’m holding on by a thread, and the only thing that’s keeping me from falling apart right now is the steady beat of Beckett Benson’s heart beneath my palm.
Joke’s on you, Margot. You wanted me to stop writing from behind the glass.
Consider the glass shattered.
His arm is around my waist, curved around the small of my back. His hand is on my hip. His mouth is against my hair. These are spatial facts. Blocking, we call it in writing. But his heart—that sure, strong beat in his chest—my head is hearing all sorts of things from that heartbeat.
It’s okay.
You’re okay.
We’re okay.
I want to believe him. So I focus on that heartbeat.
Minutes pass—or maybe it’s hours. I can’t tell.
Then, mercifully, a shout echoes from down the hallway. “Got something! East side!”
Footsteps cross the office fast, chair scraping, papers fluttering. The door bangs. Footsteps recede.
Beckett’s arm tightens once—the signal—then releases. The air where his body was is immediately, offensively cold. He gives the closet door a push.
“Now,” he breathes. “Go.”
I’m out of the closet and through the office in a heartbeat. Into the corridor. Not toward the Staff Only door—the thugs went that direction. Toward the Zamboni bay.
The bay is cavernous—high ceiling, concrete floor, the air thick with chemical ice treatment and diesel.
A forklift sits in the far corner of the room, the Zamboni sits in the center like a sleeping beast, squat and yellow and absurdly cheerful.
I keep running, but Beckett slows, something calculating in his gaze.
He jogs to a stop, eyes working over the massive machine.
“Beckett, what are you doing?” I ask, halfway across the room.
He runs a hand over the machine, taps the side. It thuds, heavy and full. “How much water do you think’s in here?”
I frown. E.J. Hartley has never featured a Zamboni in her books—but Sutton Blake has.
So I know exactly how much water is in that Zamboni.
(I’m great fun at cocktail parties. I know a ridiculous plethora of useless facts.) “About a hundred and fifty gallons if they filled it before the event today. Why?”
His gaze falls on me with a smile. “I’ve got an idea to buy us some time so we can find Cole before they do.”
I’ve come up with a lot of terrible ideas in my lifetime—many of them enshrined in paper as a harsh reminder of how difficult it is to write strategic genius without actually being a strategic genius.
This takes the cake for bad ideas.
Because this is the only one that could wind up getting me killed.
“You’re sure you’re okay to do this?” Beckett asks, one foot on the Zamboni. He looks about as sure as I feel—exactly zero percent.
“I’m good,” I say, taking hold of the manual chain release for the Zamboni garage door.
Beckett nods, his gaze intense, and I suddenly know what it feels like to be on his team. He’s the Blue Line, and there’s nothing getting past him.
He flicks off his flashlight. The plan is a go.
I start pulling the garage door chains, arm over arm, the door lifting a foot at a time. The Zamboni engine rumbles and the lights flood the bay, gleaming off the steel door. Beckett doesn’t wait for it to be fully opened. He ducks his head and fires the engine. The Zamboni rolls onto the ice.
I keep going until the door is well over my head, and then I take my place just on the other side, outside the bay.
And now I wait.
The Zamboni rolls to the center of the ice, headlights pouring over the arena. The familiar hum of the engine rumbles in the air. Beckett turns to look back at me, just once, and my heart stumbles over its next beat.
Shoot, when did he turn sexy?
He turns back and kills the lights, plunging us into darkness again.
I barely hear him climb off the machine over the hum of the engine—the soft crunch of his boots on ice—and then nothing.
He’s crouched behind it. Waiting, just like me.
Except he’s in the middle of a dark rink with a utility knife and a plan that depends entirely on timing.
Moments pass as we hold our breaths. And then…
Shouting erupts from somewhere above us, in the stands. A flashlight beam swings across the rafters, then drops toward the ice.
“Someone moved the Zamboni. Get down there. Now.”
My heart jumps into overdrive, thundering in my ears. This is it.
Boots echo down the risers. Two sets, hitting the ice, both immediately wrong-footed, grabbing the boards.
Still silence from Beckett’s direction, the Zamboni engine ticking as it cools on the ice, him crouched behind it, invisible, letting them come.
Then a sharp crack. The utility knife finding the ice-making water-supply hose. A quick slice and a hundred and fifty gallons of warm water pour out across the ice. Lord, please let him have been right about this.
For a moment, I hold my breath. And then fog lifts, a white wall billowing up across the rink in every direction. It swallows the flashlight beams whole.
“What’s—”
“Can’t see anything!”
They sound close—scary close.
From somewhere inside the white lifts Beckett’s voice. “Hey!”
One word. It’s enough.
The flashlight beams lurch toward the sound. Both of them. Boots scrambling on ice, losing purchase, finding it, moving fast toward the garage opening, toward the bay—toward where they think he is.
Beckett’s shape materializes out of the fog. He doesn’t look at me. He looks back once—confirming they’re behind him—then ducks through the garage opening into the bay.
The footsteps don’t slow down.
A clang against the doors—intentional, loud. Good. Now get out of there!
I make myself as small as possible as another shape surges through the cloud, and then a second one, just behind him, broader, slower, and they both vanish into the bay.
Come on, Beckett, get out of there.
My heart threatens to burst from my chest. My hands shake, hovering over the chains, trying not to rattle them.
There’s a commotion, something hard making contact with something metal. And then a body ducks through the opening. I don’t wait. I don’t verify. I don’t think.
I pull the chain.
The door drops, a curtain of steel rolling forward and then down, then a crash into the concrete that trembles through my bones and into my teeth, sealing off anyone left inside the Zamboni bay.
I can hear them inside, their frantic footsteps as they assess their situation. A massive, immoveable chemical drum blocks one door. The forklift that put it there blocks the other. And the key—tucked safely in my jacket pocket.
The doors shudder from the inside. The bay door creaks upward for a moment, and I scramble for the lock, diving toward the latch. I turn the small handle, the latch hooking into place.
“Open this door!” Whichever of them it was, his voice is muffled. Furious.
My hands are trembling as I sit back on my heels, giving myself just a second to catch my breath.
I’m alive.
Footsteps appear behind me, and I nearly jump out of my skin when Beckett emerges from the fog, his flashlight glowing through the dying clouds.
“Did we get ’em?” he asks, breathless.
I wipe the hair away from my face feverishly. “I think so—I saw two of them go through.”
Beckett frowns. “There are three of them.”
The word three washes over me like a sheet of ice.
There were three of them. Two locked in the Zamboni bay. One still in the building. “Yikes?”
Beckett takes my hand again. “Run!”
My lungs are burning as we burst from the arena back into the amber glow of the mall. We have to get away from the rink, away from the last place they knew we were.
We pass Blake’s. We pass the furniture store. We’re deep into the mall, and now my legs are burning, adrenaline pushing me to move faster. Not slow down.
My head is swimming. I can’t breathe.
Beckett stops abruptly. “We gotta get out of the open. Let’s go.” He pushes me in the direction of the nearest storefront. The Penalty Box.
I duck through the gate and Beckett follows.
He nods toward the back of the store, his hand pressed to my back. “Storage room. Go.”
He doesn’t need to tell me twice. I’m already weaving through the shelves, eyes set on the destination.
The storage room door shuts behind us, and Beckett wastes no time dragging one of the massive shelving units across the floor, blocking the door. For a moment, neither of us moves. Beckett stands beside the shelf, heaving breaths, looking at me.
I’m trembling. Shaking deep in my bones.
Finally, Beckett steps into the space, his flashlight pouring over the inventory. He pauses on a barrel of hockey sticks in the corner. He picks one up, tests it in his grip. Whatever he’s testing, it seems to get his approval, because he picks up another and holds it out to me.
I blink at it. “What’s this?”
“A weapon.”
I blink again. “I’m sorry—are you expecting me to deflect bullets with a wooden hockey stick? I mean, I’m pretty handy with my golden bracelets, but I’m out of practice—”
Beckett casts me a flat look. “Calm down, Wonder Woman. It’s better than nothing. Or would you rather keep using your camera bag as a club?”
My hand hovers over the stick for a moment, then I take it.
“All right,” Beckett says, his voice gentle, as though talking to an easily spooked animal. “Let’s just catch our breath and figure out how to find Cole before those guys do.”
Twenty minutes go by, and my heart’s finally back to a reasonable pace—as reasonable as can be expected when you’re being hunted by bad men in a snowed-in mall.
My flashlight points at the ceiling, illuminating the small stockroom. My notebook sits splayed across a worn counter in the back as I try to work out an exit strategy on a page that keeps blurring. If they come from the east corridor, we go west. If they block the service tunnel—