Page 50 of Wicked Love
A bang of a door somewhere in the distance had us striding forward faster, trying to keep our footsteps as quiet as possible. We hurried down the first hall with a P label, and I scanned all the side halls we passed. Where had I noticed stairwells in the PhysEd building? To the left of the main entrance, and near the back, which relative to the library, would be right around…
I turned at another hall and spotted a door at the end of it.
Slade let out a near-silent whoop of approval and saluted me. “That’s our Dex. Couldn’t make it through any of this shit without you.”
We hustled down the hall and were relieved to find the door opened no problem. It was a matter of seconds before we were stepping out in the humid air of a first-floor hall near the swimming pool. Logan smiled, now knowing exactly where we were—and how to get out of here—just as I did.
“We’ve got to get off campus,” he said, and pulled out his phone. His smile fell away. “No texts from Maddie. If she’s okay, she’d be wondering where we are.”
He tapped in a quick message as we hurried to the front doors. I listened for the ping of a text in reply, but nothing came. My stomach knotted all over again.
We eased out of the PhysEd building and peeked around the corner toward the front of the library. A few students were walking in and out, but none of them were Madelyn. I couldn’t make out her blond hair beyond the windows in the doors. And a police car was parked a few spaces down. We couldn’t go back into the library without being seen.
Logan sucked a breath through his teeth with a hiss. He looked at his phone again, but the screen had remained blank.
We’d gotten to relative safety—but what the hell did we do now?
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
Madelyn
Ilanded on my ass inside the back of the van with an audibleoof.The doors banged shut, and I whirled around to find myself staring at my mom, Summer, and…
“Lee?” I snapped in disbelief, my gaze jerking from one of the guys who’d grabbed me to the other. “Eric?”
As Holland climbed into the front of the van and started the engine, the two guys made nearly identical sheepish expressions. I hadn’t seen my cousins—sons of Mom’s older brother—since Christmas, which was pretty much the only time I ever saw them since they’d gotten old enough to move out on their own several years ago.
“What the hell is going on here?” I demanded, my gaze veering from them to Mom.
“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” Mom said in a cajoling voice, her eyes clouded with concern. “I didn’t know what else to do. We’ve gotten so worried about you, and you wouldn’t talk to me or Summer. Having a full intervention was a last resort.”
Oh my God. I glared at Eric, the slightly older of the two guys. “And you thought dragging me off the street into the back of a van was a good idea?”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Aunt Lindsay gave a convincing story. We were just doing what she asked.”
A growl escaped me. I looked to Summer next. “I can’t believe you went along with this. Itoldyou I could handle everything.”
Before she could answer, my phone pinged with an incoming text. I reached to answer it, but Summer plucked it right out of my hand and shoved it into her back pocket.
“No way,” she said. “You shouldn’t be talking to anyone but us right now. Especially not Logan.”
“What are you talking about? Logan hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Her lips pursed. “I know what you’ve said, Maddie, but it’s also been obvious that something big is going on, something that’s freaked you out, and he’s mixed up in it somehow. It seems like he’s gotten inside your head and dragged you into something dangerous. Just come clean about what’s going on, and we’ll figure out how to help you.”
The van shifted with a turn, and I had to brace my hand against the wall to stop myself from sliding on the carpeted floor. My stomach was tying itself into knots.
Had the text been from the Vigil guys, wondering why I’d disappeared? Or from Beckett with another update about the escalation in his conflict with Doom’s Seed? I had no idea what might be happening to any of the guys I cared about right now, and they’d start panicking if they couldn’t get a hold of me.
I needed to get out of this situation.
“There’s nothing to come clean about,” I said in as firm a voice as I could muster. “Nothing’s going on. I have class in half an hour—you’re going to force me to mess up my education now? Why don’t we stop this and I’ll meet you for a regular dinner or something tonight?”
I’d thought that leaning on the education thing was the right call since Mom knew what my dream career meant to me, but her expression didn’t budge. “We’re doing this now. The sooner you start opening up, the sooner we can resolve this.”
“Who knows if you’d even show up for dinner or anything else if we let you go,” Summer muttered.
The words stung even though they were completely true. I’d tossed out that offering only to escape the intervention—I doubted I’d be any more ready to spill my guts tonight than I was at the moment. I gritted my teeth.
