Page 53 of Tell Me Why
He waved his fingers closed against his palm once and disappeared, and Tina put her face through the crack in the door, then followed. With similar care, he closed the door again, then indicated that they would go on down the hallway, not toward the stairs.
She followed him on soft feet, feeling absurd in her cocktail dress, but still able to manage something approaching the silence with which Tell moved.
He turned to a door that was on the opposite side of the hallway from their room and tested the knob, then took out a key.
Where.
In the world.
Had he gotten that?
He unlocked the door with a wink and let her in, then closed the door once more behind her.
“Dumb luck that I got it in one,” Tell murmured. “We should be able to talk in here, as long as we’re quiet about it.”
The room was dim to the point that even Tina’s sharp eyes took a moment to adjust, but it was musty and still, by smell, and she heard nothing. She found herself in a storage room of a kind, the type of room that everyreallife needed to have, where the Christmas decorations and the extra serving platters and that one box of stuff from the last move that no one had gotten around to emptying yet lived.
Tell walked through the disorganized space like he was gliding, going to the window and unlocking then sliding open the layers of blinds and opening the window.
“Where did the key come from?” Tina asked.
“Isabella gave it to me downstairs,” he answered.
“You never touched each other,” Tina said, and he grinned.
“Old tricks remember themselves for a long time, once they’ve proven critical more than once,” he said.
“The guards,” Tina said. “Coincidence that they were inept?”
“Probably not,” Tell answered. “She’s very good at arranging things to happen the way she wants them to.”
“Now what?” Tina asked.
It wassucha relief.
To just be able to ask. Tell had a posture - literally one foot out the window - that suggested that he wanted to get moving, but so far he hadn’t pressed her to actually follow.
“Now we go out and meet Isabella at the tree, like we agreed,” he said, looking out the window, then back at Tina. “I’m going to need you to sit at the tree and be uninteresting while I scout the rest of the gardens and take care of any problems that might exist.”
“Problems?” Tina asked.
He shook his head.
“You don’t want to have that conversation,” he said. “Just be still and defend yourself if necessary.”
“To what extent?” Tina asked. “If they threaten to drag me back into the building, do I kill them?”
“Oh, I’ll be there long before you have to make that decision,” Tell said.
“What happened in Moldovia?” Tina asked. He shook his head, then leaned out to find purchase with his foot outside the window.
“Nothing I want to remember,” he answered.
She had more questions.
About red dawn.
About Moldovia.
