was the best I could do in the time we had. The closest hole I could think of. In case you didn’t notice, those guys were actively chasing us, and we needed a place to hide. Like, quickly. Don’t worry; I don’t think they saw us come in here. There’s no way they could have.”
She snorted. “Going into a place without an escape route. And you call yourself a criminal.”
I turned to her, one eyebrow raised. “And I suppose you could have done better? With all your experience at running and hiding? You don’t exactly strike me as the sort of woman who has to think too much about escape routes.”
She got extremely close to me—close enough that I could almost feel her lips against my own, and would definitely have been able to kiss her if I’d wanted to—and whispered, “I’m the sort of woman who knows that when you run, you make sure you can keep running if you need to, rather than trapping yourself in a hole without an exit. But as long as we’re here, and it’s dark and quiet, and you think it’s safe, I guess I’ll just have to deal with it, hm?”
I gulped, her nearness sending my body into shivers, and tried to turn my brain toward what she’d actually said.
The exit route. Right. The idea that we should have been able to escape.
“I’m not going to let them get you,” I whispered back, letting my feelings for her start to bleed into my voice. Letting it soften and grow heavier. “I’ll never let them have you. I’ll protect you with my own body if I need to.”
“I’d rather you not, actually,” she answered, her voice suddenly just as low and heavy. “Protect me with your body, I mean. I mean, it’s incredibly romantic and all that, but… I don’t exactly like the idea of you being in danger. Or in the line of fire.”
And at that moment, I realized that there was something more between us than either of us had acknowledged. Something deeper. Something more important.
I leaned forward, my lips nearly brushing against hers when I spoke again. “Then I guess it’s a good thing there’s an emergency exit in the wall right behind you. We won’t be able to take the van, but if something happens, we’ll be able to get out of here without them ever seeing where we go.”
She poked me sharply in the ribs, then, catching me by surprise.
I yelped out loud—and then poked her back.
Alice jumped backward, though, neatly evading my finger as if she’d been expecting it, and laughed in victory. “And you couldn’t tell me that there was an exit there when I asked? You had to get all sexy and smoky before you gave up the piece of information?”
I spread my hands in an I-am-what-I-am gesture. “Hey, I can’t help it if you find me smoky and sexy. I was just talking.”
She darted forward, jabbed me in the stomach again, and then ducked backward. “How long are we staying here, then?”
I glanced at the opening to the parking structure, considering. It was early, still. We’d spent several hours sleeping at my old hideout—which had been important enough that I was willing to risk the time—and then got back into the city first thing in the morning.
The problem was, now that we were in the city, we had an escape plan in mind, but no way to execute it if someone was watching the airport. I didn’t think it was going to be safe for us in this city at all, but my experience was telling me that it would be a whole lot safer to be out and about if we didn’t have to deal with full daylight. Or the visibility it brought with it.
“I don’t want to go back out until it starts to get dark,” I said quietly. “Our goal is still the airport. But we’ll get there a whole lot easier if we’re doing it in the dark.”
She considered that for a long, silent moment, and then suddenly scooted over until she was leaning up against me. Placing her head softly down on my shoulder, she sighed.
“So we’re here for a while, then,” she murmured.
I just nodded. No use restating the obvious. It was going to be an extremely long, extremely tense day.
There was no answer from Alice, though, and within five minutes I heard a soft snore that indicated that she’d actually fallen asleep. Leaning up against me, her