Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
NELL
My hand closed around the knob. It didn't turn. It wasn't locked. There was no lock on the outside. There was someone on the otherside of the door, holding the knob.
One of my detail. My nostrils flared. I recognized it was the bigger one. I hadn't bothered to learn either of their names. Just Thing One and Thing Two. This one was Thing Two. He had a fondness for licorice.
"Let me out, or I'm calling the cops."
"Sorry, Ms. Odhiambo. Alpha's orders."
"I said I'll call the police."
"I wouldn't advise you to put law enforcement in harm's way, ma'am."
The fuck? Did he just make a threat? I got the sense that he'd do it. These weren't regular men. The Blackwoods had enough money that they likely owned at least one precinct.
I yanked at the door. Pulled at it with all my anger. It didn't budge.
Something rose in my chest — not anger, below anger, something more animal than anger — and what came out of my throat was not a sentence or a threat or any of the professional vocabulary I had spent ten years honing.
It was a growl.
I pulled again. Harder. Put my weight into it. Both hands on the knob. The door moved. Not much — an inch, maybe two — but it moved. There was a grunt from the other side. Short. Involuntary. The sound of something large that had not expected to be moved.
Thing Two wasn't going to move. Not enough for me to get out. I let go of the knob. I needed space. Needed to think.
I stepped back from the door.
I turned to my phone. Full bars. No service.
That had never happened. Unless there was a storm. Or an outage.
Could he have…?
I moved to the window. The city bustled below me. I could make out the people below. Many of them held devices to their ears or right in front of their faces. They moved through the street, uninterrupted.
I turned away from the window and glared at my phone. Just because Magnus Blackwood had blown my back out last night and ruined my vagina for all other men with his knot, that did not mean I was going to roll over for him.
My laptop was open on the desk.
I crossed to it. The Wi-Fi bars were full; connected, cheerful, ready for me to surf. I opened the browser and —
Error.
I tried another page. Error.
The Wi-Fi was run through the building's internet infrastructure, which was separate from the cell signal, technically functional, and apparently filtered at the source.
Every page came back with the same result.
Not a network error. A filtered error. Which meant someone had gone into the building's system and interrupted the service for my apartment.
I closed the laptop with more composure than I felt.
There was a part of me that may have been getting off on this game of wits. It wasn't often that I was outsmarted. By a man, no less. I was not going down without a fight.
My eyes went to the wall by the kitchen. To the landline jack above my blender. I was certain it was untapped. The problem was that I did not own a handset. But that wasn't the only wall-mounted communication link.
The building's intercom system was by the front door. It connected to an outside line. If I could get to it without going through the door, if I could access the panel from inside—
Wait.
I turned away from the intercom and walked to my bedroom.
To the closet. The purse was exactly where I'd left it when I'd first come home from the Blackwood estate.
The small black one. The one I'd been carrying the day I went to the park and watched men transform into animals and tear each other's throats out.
Inside, underneath my lip gloss and a crumpled receipt, and the debris, was the burner phone.
I turned it on. Three percent battery.
I thought about calling Addie. Dismissed it in the same breath. Addie was a Blackwood now. She had Vidar's name and Vidar's loyalty.
I hit redial. It rang four times. Five. Six.
"Nell?"
"Elias, thank God."
A pause. The sound of him sitting up, sheets moving. "Nell. What — why are you calling on this number?"
"Magnus Blackwood has trapped me in my apartment."
Silence. A longer silence than I wanted from a man I had called for help.
"Elias?"
"Yeah, I heard you. You said Magnus is doing this? I thought you two were business partners."
"We… are."
Another pause. Elias was younger than me, but the texture of his pause sounded like an older brother who sensed his little sister made out with his best friend after curfew.
"I'm surprised Magnus has taken on a new… business partner when he's getting married in a few months."
There was that word again. Marriage. Why was everyone thinking that since I slept with this man that I would…
"Elias? How do you know Magnus is getting married in a few months?"
"He's been engaged to Rosalind Lobo for as long as I can remember."
That was not my name. Rosalind Lobo sounded like a Barbie doll who matched her shoes to her underwear, but that was not kenough.
She sounded like someone you played Candyland with, not chess.
She sounded like the kind of woman waiting for a prince to come kiss her awake, not someone who would snatch his sword and slay the beasts alongside him.
She sounded like the kind of woman who bedazzled her phone.
The plain black burner phone was warm in my hand.
Two percent battery.
I looked at it for a long moment. At the number on the screen. At the closet around me.
Magnus was engaged. He had been engaged the whole time.
The cabin. The garden. The elevator. The desk. Last night — his hands and his mouth and his there will be no other woman for me delivered in the dark with the conviction of a man who meant every word he said.
And he had been engaged the whole time.