Chapter 10 #2
My hand jerks. The pen veers off the page, slicing a sharp line through the food court.
“Shoot,” I mumble under my breath, steadying my hand, gripping it with the other.
The shaking doesn’t stop though. If anything, it gets worse—a tremor that starts out small, a buzz in my fingertips that travels up my forearms, growing in waves until my whole body trembles. “Pull it together, Evie.”
I pick up the pen again. It slips from my fingers.
“Everly?” Beckett’s voice carries softly from across the storage room. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. But I’m not okay. My breathing is wrong. It’s too fast. Too shallow. And is the room shrinking? No, I know it’s not literally shrinking, but the walls—they are definitely closer. The air is thinner. My lungs pull desperately for breath and come up empty.
We have to get out of here. We can’t stay here.
I pick up the pen again, watch it peck at the paper in my earthquake grip. “They’ll probably get out of the arena soon—that third person, the guy in charge, he’ll find them soon. So—”
“Everly.”
“—we sneak out the doors they came in through, except—”
“Everly.”
“—that’s exactly where they’ll expect us to go.” I suck in a ragged breath. It scrapes both in and out. “Maybe we should go back for Cole’s duffel, get the evidence—”
“Hey!”
Beckett is beside me, his warm hands gripping my shoulders, turning me toward him. His eyes are wide with concern and icy and blue and…I could just swim in them. The world feels like it’s spinning. Spinning around Beckett Benson.
“You’re okay,” he whispers.
“I’m fine.” The automatic response of a woman who has been fine her entire adult life through sheer force of will.
“You don’t have to be fine.”
His words don’t fully process. It’s like I’m hearing them but I can’t understand.
And then the shake enters my voice. “Those men are going to kill us, Beckett.” The words rush out so fast I can’t stop them.
“They said ‘deal with the rest,’ and I have put that line in the mouths of people who do terrible things, and it was always fiction, it was always at a safe distance, but now someone said it about me and I can’t—”
I never get to finish that sentence because Beckett kisses me.
His arms wrap around me, pulling me into his embrace—his strong, sure, steady embrace. And he kisses me.
You didn’t see that coming either, did you?
Maybe you did. Maybe I’m just slow, but it works.
The spinning stops, the static ringing in my ears softens, fades away as his fingers thread through my hair, gentle, safe.
And suddenly I can’t think of anything else except for being here in this cocoon of Beckett’s protection.
I’ve crossed over the blue line into a world where he is the defender and nothing gets past him.
And I’m desperately, perfectly okay with that. My fingers curl into his flannel, pulling him closer.
This kiss, it’s not like the ones in my books. It’s not sweet, it’s not timid—it’s gentle. There’s a difference. Tentative is uncertain. Gentle is certain and choosing softness anyway.
He pulls back, just enough, and I drink in a breath. Lungs full. My eyes drift open, and I find him looking at me, his lips parted slightly, searching and wondering.
“You—” My fingertips press to my lips. “You kissed me.”
Beckett steps back, a sheepish look running its course through his whole body. He drags a hand over the back of his neck. “You were having an adrenaline crash.”
“So you kissed me?”
“You stopped shaking.”
I look down at my hands. Still. Somehow still. Completely, perfectly, traitorously still. Steady as if they’d been typing all night, writing scenes about wanting this exact thing and pretending it was fiction.
Okay, not with Beckett. (Really!) But still.
“What if that hadn’t been an adrenaline crash—what if I was having a legitimate physical crisis?”
Beckett shrugs. “Then I guess it wouldn’t have worked.”
I stare at him. He stares at me. Hockey sticks against the wall.
Shelving unit guarding the door. Somewhere in this building, a man—likely armed—is hunting us.
Nothing about this situation is conducive to romance or rational thought, or any behavior I would allow a character to engage in without writing a strongly worded margin note about pacing and plausibility.
My gaze dips to his lips—his villainous (delicious!) lips.
They tilt into a rakish smirk.
My gaze snaps back to his. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like you’re going to do it again.”
He smirks. “I’m not going to do it again.”
“Good.”
He quirks a brow. “Unless you want me to.”
“I don’t.”
Shrug. “Okay.”
I turn away, fix my attention on my notebook.
Except my heart is still racing…doing something that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the fact that his hands were warm and his mouth tasted like maple and…
and I am in catastrophic, irreversible, crash-and-burn trouble.
And I don’t even realize I’m talking until the words are out.
“…maybe later,” I say. So quiet the words barely exist. “When we’re not being hunted. ”
Wait—what? But then something happens to his face.
Beckett Benson smiles at me. Really smiles. Not that lopsided grin from a moment ago. This one’s the real thing. Full. Undefended.
Something inside me catches, roars to flame.
Especially when he says quietly, decisively, “Deal.”
BECKETT
Everly Hart is magnificent.
I want that on the record.
It’s 10:47 p.m. We’ve been trapped in this building for five hours.
And Everly Hart is standing over her notebook with a flashlight between her teeth, drawing arrows on a floor plan as though she’s planning a beach invasion—wild red hair, crooked glasses, hockey stick leaning against her hip like a sword in a scabbard.
It does something to my nervous system that has no business happening during a tactical planning session.
She’s so focused, apparently unfazed by our kiss. And she’s got no idea what it did to me. She nearly catches me staring, watching that spool of red curls tickle her neck. I straighten, try to look like I’m being helpful.
“If you were writing this,” I say. “A thriller. Characters trapped with bad guys. What would your hero do?”
She looks up. Flashlight still in her teeth. “Fy hewwo would figwh—” She removes it. “My hero would fight.”
“Fight three probably-safe-to-assume-they’re-armed men?”
“Well, my hero would have Krav Maga and a conveniently placed fire axe. Standard thriller protocol. Act three, the protagonist reveals a skill set foreshadowed in chapter two and systematically dismantles the opposition in a sequence involving at least one improbable use of the physical environment.”
“That seems convenient.”
“That’s act three, Benson. Convenience is the engine of narrative satisfaction.” She draws a circle on the floor plan. “And then my hero would also deliver a line right before the final confrontation. Something punchy.”
She straightens. Assumes the posture of every action hero in cinematic history.
“‘You came to the wrong mall,’” she says. Deep voice. Full gravitas.
I stare at her.
“Or—‘The only thing getting broken tonight is your business model.’”
“No.”
“‘Ice is my territory. And you’re about to get resurfaced.’”
“That’s objectively the worst thing that’s ever touched my ears.”
She laughs. “Keep it up, Benson. I’ll come up with something even worse for your big moment.”
Her gaze drops back to her notebook, and I step closer, leaning up against the counter beside her. I have some ideas for my big moment.
No, no, I did not say that! Sheesh. “Why thrillers?” I ask. “How does a girl from Minnetonka, who reads Buffy fan fiction, end up writing books about people getting murdered?”
She sets the pen down. Leans against the shelving unit. Less general, more personal. “Lifetime movies,” she says.
“What?”
“After my parents split up, my mom got a job managing a hotel. The Marriott in Edina. She worked nights. After school, I’d take the bus there instead of going home to an empty house.
” She shifts, turning slightly to face me.
“Mom set me up in the employee breakroom. There was a TV, a couch that smelled like industrial cleaner, and a vending machine that liked to eat quarters. The TV had basic cable, but the remote was missing the channel-up button, so you could only go down and back around. Mostly, I kept it on the Lifetime channel.”
“As in Dance Moms—”
“As in women in danger who fight back. Women who figure out the conspiracy. Women who get knocked down and get up. Women who solve the puzzle and save themselves.” She shrugs.
Casual, yet anything but nonchalant. “The movies are ridiculous. The acting is questionable. But the women are never helpless. They’re scared, outmatched, but they think. They survive.”
“And that’s what you wanted to write.”
“That’s what I wanted to be.” She twirls the pen in her hands. “A twelve-year-old sitting alone in a hotel breakroom watching women survive things—that rewires you.” She looks at me, holding on for a beat, stealing my breath away. Then she turns away, letting out a breath. “Then I found Batman.”
“Batman.”
“Yeah. Adam West. Channel thirty-eight. It was right below Lifetime, so during commercials, I’d just bump down.
And then I just stayed.” Her face changes to something I haven’t seen—an unguarded glow.
“Same principle. No superpowers. Just preparation, intelligence, and an unwillingness to quit. A utility belt and a plan.”
“And Robin.”
She laughs, her lips curving softly upward. “Well, of course. Every hero needs a Robin. I mean, who else is gonna chime in with ‘Holy homicide, Batman!’?”
She looks at me, smiles.
I want to kiss her again.
The thought arrives with zero warning, a breakaway pass flying right past my defenses. She’s leaning against the counter with her glasses crooked, a pen she seems to have completely forgotten about sticking out of her bun of wild curls. And those lips—
I know what it’s like to kiss her now, and it’s rewritten everything I thought I knew about my feelings for the coach’s daughter.
I manage to pull my attention away from her lips, her question ringing in my ear.
“Oh, so you’ve seen it?”
I clear my throat. “Oh yeah. I was eight when my dad died. My mom worked nights too. I had a television and a very limited list of channels I was allowed to watch. Adam West just barely made the cut. I watched it religiously, every day after school for years.”
Something shifts between us—a shared connection. Common ground. Something that’s untainted by our history.
For years, we were watching the same show in different lonely rooms on opposite sides of the city.
“Same bat-time?” she says softly.
“Same bat-channel,” I finish.
She holds my gaze a moment and then turns back to the map, pulling it closer so I can see—inviting me into her space.
Something in her scrawled labels catches my eyes. “I don’t know if this matters, but this store”—I tap a store in the far end of the mall—“that’s not a Build-A-Bear anymore.”
Everly frowns. “What?”
“It’s an electronics store. The Build-A-Bear closed a few years ago.” She lifts her head to look at me, all scrunch-nosed. “I thought you mapped this whole place?”
“Well, I did. But I didn’t go down there because it’s a dead end. There are no tunnels on that end because all the walls are exterior.” She pauses, pursing her lips. “I just pulled that wing from memory.”
Then I see it happen—the click, the shift, the exact moment an idea arrives in her writer’s brain—because her eyes go wide and her whole body seems to light up.
“My laptop,” she says.
“What about it?”
“It’s got a built-in LTE. I got the upgraded model because I like to write in places that don’t always have Wi-Fi.
” She’s talking faster, words accelerating.
“Cell service is down. But LTE uses different bands. If there’s even a fraction of signal—enough for a data packet, not a voice call—I might get a message out. An email. A 911 web portal. Something.”
Listen, I’m trying not to judge, but…“You’ve had a laptop with cellular capability this entire time?”
“It’s dead! I spent the whole evening writing in the arena. The battery is totally drained.”
“Where’s the laptop?”
“Still in the furniture showroom. I left it by the sleeper sofa when we heard the banging.”
“Okay, so new plan—”
She’s way ahead of me, pen slashing through the previous sketches.
“We get the laptop, get the charger, find Cole—hopefully not dead—and get out of here.” She stops scribbling, turning the map toward me, fresh ink gleaming in the light.
“The showroom is on the main concourse. There’s no path from the tunnels, not without going out of our way, so—”
“We move fast. Got it.”
She nods. “Stay on the east side. The emergency lights are out past Blue Line Books—it’s a dead zone, gives us twelve feet of total darkness.”
“You mapped the dead zones.”
“I mapped everything. I am the most prepared unprepared person in this building.”
“That’s going on your tombstone.”
“It is not going on my tombstone, because we are not dying in a mall.” She picks up the hockey stick like she means business. “Let’s go.”