Page 52

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."