Just as they reached it, a hard-edged boom echoed, shaking plaster loose from the walls and dropping ceiling panels. Gage grabbed Anna and pulled her into the stairwell doorway. The alarm went dead. So did the lights.Not good, Gage thought. This had gone from possible emergency to a definite problem.
Anna coughed, and he looked at her in concern. Daylight drifted in through the windows, but red emergency lights had come on in the stairwell, making it look like hell. It felt like a warning.
“You okay?” he asked. She nodded. “Good. Come on.” He pulled her with him, heading up the stairs. “How many floors?” he asked as he started up the next flight.
“It’s a thirty-story building, and we started on ten.” Anna was still lugging her camera with her. From the protective way she was holding it, he doubted she’d be willing to hand it over. Though when he looked again, he realized she was clutching it more than cradling it, her knuckles white with tension. She was putting on a good show, but she was scared. No wonder—this wasn’t a situation any civilian ever expected to be in.
Time to distract her. “Tell me about yourself, Anna Middleton.”
She gave a shaky laugh as they rounded the next set of stairs. “What? Like a first date?”
“Absolutely. I take all my dates to dingy stairwells. Can’t beat the atmosphere, you know?” He was relieved when she smiled a little, looking slightly less tense. “So tell me. You seeing anyone?”
She laughed again, this time with less tremor in the sound. “You, apparently, if this is our first date. I’ve got to say, as first dates go, it’s certainly…unique. Not that I have a lot to compare it to, lately.”
He glanced at her. “You don’t date much?”
“I’ve been taking a break from the dating scene,” she said. “A couple of bad experiences have made me a little gun-shy.”
“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you on a date?” he asked.
“Besides this?”
He grinned at her. “This is a nice hike with a nice guy.”
She pulled a face. She was puffing a bit—it seemed that she needed to get more exercise. She shrugged. “I went through a sliding glass door on a date when I was a teen.” She pulled back the collar of her shirt, showed a network of fine white lines. Scars. “I don’t know how it happened. We were out at a club—someone must have put something in my drink. I never found out whether it was my date or someone else. Next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital. When I got out, my mother pulled me out of school and hired a tutor for me until it was time for college.”
Gage stiffened, imagining a young Anna in trouble and hurt. “Did the police go after whoever did it?”
“How could they, when I wasn’t even sure who was responsible? My date claimed he had no idea. And who knows? Maybe he was telling the truth. Besides, growing up in DC, you learn the only good scandal is one that happens to someone else.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to stir up bad memories.”
“It’s okay. They’re better than nothing.”
“You do that often?”
She glanced at him. “What?”
“Go for the sarcasm.”
“Why not? It’s better than self-pity.”
Gage glanced at the number painted on the door they were passing: 21. Anna was having difficulty breathing. Sweat trickled down the sides of her face. She swayed and leaned against the wall, and Gage caught her elbow. “You gonna make it?”
She nodded. “Should’ve kept going to that spinning class.”
He kept hold of her arm as he started up again. “Does it seem odd to you that we haven’t run into anyone else? That’s over ten flights of stairs we’ve climbed so far. Aren’t there people who work on these floors?”
“Not on all of them. Some are used for recordkeeping—we only go up there when we need to pull a file. And two of the floors are being renovated right now. The only people on them would be the construction team, and they’re probably still on their lunch break. Most of marketing and editorial are in New York at a conference—and the ones who got left behind will be dragging out their lunch breaks since their bosses aren’t here to see. Plus, some probably used the other staircase or decided to go down instead of up, like Marcella and Linda. Do you think they’re all right?”
He hesitated, unsure how to respond. He didn’t want to lie, but he didn’t know her well enough to gauge her likely reaction to bad news. “The explosion was on that side of the building.”
She stopped. Her throat worked. “Oh.” The word came out flat and dull. “I—I—”
“We can’t know for sure where the explosion hit. And stairwells tend to be pretty well protected—solid walls, no windows. They could be fine. But right now, we need to focus on getting ourselves to safety. That has to be our priority. We have to assume that everyone else is looking after themselves.”
She mustered a weak smile. “Okay,” she agreed. “That makes sense.”