At that moment, a text comes through my phone, and a little spark of hope flares in my stomach. Except it’s not Quincy.
Unknown:Stop snooping.
Unknown:Whatever you’re doing at Avernia ends now.
I reach for Lexington’s forearm, dragging him toward a flashing light at the back of the building. We weave through rows of bookshelves and oversize leather couches, passing the glass study rooms and club meeting areas until we get to an alcove around the corner from the elevators.
“I’m not rotting in here, waiting for someone to notice we’re missing,” I say, handing him the journal. I search the staircase, looking for something large enough to bust us out, finally finding a hammer in a custodial cart tucked in the corner.
With both arms, I pull the hammer above my head.
“Are you sure you want to destroy Avernia property?” Lexington asks.
“Would you rather wait for someone to come rescue us? Or for whoever’s upstairs to find us?”
“What if the people upstairs are harmless?”
“And what if they aren’t?”
Waiting around for people to save me is what got me into this whole mess in the first place. The more I do it, the more my life just wastes away, and I spend it living in fear that I’m not actually capable of anything.
I don’t want to be a slave to the terror in my bones. I want to conquer it.
Lexington sighs.
Swinging my arms forward, I drive the hammer into the surface of the glass. It cracks a little but does not break.
Sweat slicks down my neck. The footsteps upstairs sound like they’re getting louder, a stampede threatening us from above.
I swing again, causing more of the glass to shatter. Fractured spiderwebs obscure the tempered, frosted material.
“Do you want me?—”
Ignoring him, I study the cracks, trying to make sense of how best to get it to break completely. The quicker, the better.
Distantly, the sound of a fire alarm begins blaring, but when I shake myself a little, it becomes nearly inaudible. My thoughts are loud, white noise humming between my ears and drowning everything else out.
I turn the hammer in my hands, staring at the claw on the back. Squinting at the door, I raise my arms again and aim for the center fracture. The moment the edge of the claw connects with the stressed glass, the entire door shatters, revealing the outdoors and freeing us from inside.
Several people mill about on the Obeliskos lawn, staring up at the building. Lexington and I file out quickly, breathing like we just ran a marathon unprepared.
Otherwise, everything outside seems normal. The air is cool beneath the night sky, but I still feel flushed from the trepidation of getting stuck inside.
“What the hell was that?” Lexington pants, turning back to look at the library. The lights flicker and then come back on completely, illuminating all the windows. “Are we being pranked or something?”
The fire alarm inside still blares, and glass still covers the ground where I busted the door open, so I know we didn’t imagine what just happened. Somehow, that makes everything feel worse.
“Elle?”
A sigh of relief tumbles past my lips at the sound of Sutton’s voice. My body hitches toward him the moment I turn and see him approaching, but I catch myself at the last second, remembering we’re not supposed to be seen together.
Hugging him is definitely out of the question.
“I heard the fire alarm was going off at the Obeliskos, so I came to check it out…” He trails off, glancing at Lexington beside me. His jaw clenches, and he swallows, swinging his jade gaze back to mine. “Is everything okay?”
“We just got locked in the library,” I say, breathless still, the aftershocks of fear coursing through me. “The power went out, and then the automatic locks latched, and we had to break out.”
Sutton looks past us at the broken door, sliding his hands into the pockets of his long overcoat. “I see. And did you pull the fire alarm?”
