“I—I think so.” I gulp. It’s eerily loud. “Are you?”
“Fine.” A pause. “The elevator just stopped. Power’s out.”
Not blindness, then. Not yet, at least. Just a regular, run-of-the-mill mechanical failure trapping me in a metal box with the man who makes my brain short-circuit on a good day.
Cool.
Cool cool cool.
Totally fine. This is fine. Everything is fine and definitely not on fire.
“Can you see anything?” I ask. I’m still not one hundred percent sure that this isn’t all some figment of my imagination.
“No. It’s pitch black.”
I hear rustling, then a click. A small glow appears—Bastian’s phone flashlight. The beam illuminates his face from below, casting shadows in the hollows of his cheeks.
“There,” he says softly. “Better?”
“Well, ‘better’ is relative.”
“How so?”
I force out a laugh. “I mean, we went from ‘actively trying to murder each other’ to ‘trapped in a small metal box together,’ so I guess that’s technically an improvement. Strictly speaking.”
Bastian doesn’t laugh. The flashlight beam stays steady on my face, and I wish he’d point it literally anywhere else because I’m pretty sure my expression right now is doing things that would get me fired if this were a normal workplace situation.
Which, let’s be real—this stopped being normal about three emotional breakdowns ago.
“We should call for help,” he says, already pulling up his phone. I watch his thumb swipe across the screen. Once. Twice. Three times.
“Let me guess,” I say before he can fill me in. “No signal?”
“Yeah. No signal,” he confirms.
“There’s an emergency button,” I point out, gesturing toward the panel I can’t actually see. “Red one. Usually near the?—”
“I know where the emergency button is, Eliana.”
“Well, excuse me for trying to help,Bastian.”
He sighs, a sound that seems to fill the entire elevator shaft. “I’m sorry. That was—” He stops. Tries again. “I’m not great with enclosed spaces.”
Oh.
That’s… unexpected.
“Strange for someone who sleeps in a coffin.”
In the gloom, his confused expression is downright hilarious. “Huh?”
“You know, because you’re a vampire,” I explain. “Cold-blooded, immortal, sucks the life out of everyone around you…?”
A beat of silence. Then—is that a laugh? It’s hard to tell in the darkness, but I swear I hear the faintest huff of amusement. Barely perceptible. Not exactly blowing the top off the Richter scale.
But it’s there.
“I don’t sleep in a coffin.” He’s still growling, but it’s several notches less enraged than it was a few minutes ago. “I sleep in a king-sized bed with Egyptian cotton sheets, thank you very much.”
