Prisoner (Criminals & Captives #1)(67)

And while he was with his guys, I spent the time in a no-man’s-land, not really a captive but not exactly free to go. And I don’t know what I’d do out there, anyway. My picture is on the national news, and I’m wanted by the police. I could be in a lot of trouble. Even though I was a hostage. That should count for something.

I’ve been doing what I always do—hiding in books. One whole afternoon and evening was taken up in a Victorian mystery. After that, it was pirates. After that, Italian travel essays. There’s this turret at the front of the hotel with amazing light, and the guys don’t even use it. I swept it out and cleaned it up, and that’s where I’ve been reading while Grayson had his head down with his guys, which is often. They’re obsessed with getting to the governor—they’ve been waiting for it their whole lives.

They’re going to kill him. Slowly. Grayson hasn’t said it outright to me. Some things you just know.

“Closer,” he says, shoving me to the fake pillar at the side of the big double doors, pressing against me, being a little rough, the way I enjoy.

I close my eyes, soaking up his heat, his force; the intensity of his focus on me feels like a caress. He won’t ever let me go—not ever.

He’s moving his arm beside me.

“What are you doing?” My voice comes out breathy, but then I open my eyes and realize he’s picking the lock. I’m his cover.

The crew is around, watching from shadows. Even knowing they’re out there, I can’t see them.

“What about the alarm?” I ask, nodding my head at the alarm warning sign.

“City stopped paying that contract years ago.” The latch clicks. He loops an arm around my neck. “Wait,” he whispers, holding me close. You would hardly know he was shot a few days ago—he’s strong as a bull. There’s no pain in his expression when he looks down at me with something like…tenderness? Affection?

Something more?

He pulls me in, and his chest feels solid and strong, a wall against my wildly beating heart. It feels good. Maybe I can’t leave. Maybe I don’t want to. I grin up at him through my nervousness. We’re about to break into a library. It’s nothing to Grayson. Over the past days it has really hit me how much crime Grayson and his tribe of guys are responsible for. The expensive cars and the rest of the guy toys and all that nice scotch they drink.

As soon as the street empties of traffic and pedestrians, he leads me in.

Stepping into the library feels like going home, even with all the craziness of breaking in and Stone wanting me dead and Grayson being…well, Grayson. It’s as if we’re on some kind of nerdy outlaw date, picking out books together.

Grayson flicks on a flashlight, keeping it pointed low. The cool metal racks are filled to the brim with old, dusty books. I relax a little, infused with a sense of safety. Books were not quite an escape for me.

And they were never my friends.

They were so much more than that—utilitarian and unbreakable. They were my armor, my wall against the world. Until I had Grayson.

“Where are the floor plans?” Grayson sounds grim. Impatient. Does the library make him nervous?

I like that. It makes me feel powerful. “I’m not sure,” I answer. “Every library’s laid out differently.”

“Well figure it out,” he snaps. “I’m not about to get thrown back in jail because you couldn’t figure out the f*cking Dewey decimal system.”

“I’m surprised you know about the Dewey decimal system.”

He snorts. Then after a minute he adds, “I can read.”

“And write.”

His sideways look threatens punishment if I continue. So of course I do.

“I mean that in the best way. You can really write. The way you threaded that story with your ideas for the escape. The way you knew exactly what to write so I’d feature it. Just enough truth to make it real. Just enough fiction to get a message to your friends.”

He gives me a wary look. “Are you mocking me?”

I roll my eyes. “I’m being serious. You made me so angry I couldn’t see straight. That project meant a lot to me. But what you wrote was really good.”

He looks away. He doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.

“I don’t understand—you guys were so young when you ended up in that basement. I saw the milk carton. You were five. And it sounds like you were all in there together. You were in there six years, and they weren’t sending you to school, so…”

“Perverts who keep boys in basements aren’t real likely to send them to school.”

“And then when you got out of there, you were eleven?”

He runs his finger over a leather-bound ledger. “And the other guys were fourteen or fifteen by then.”

“And you ended up at the Bradford.”

“Yup. Checked into the Bradford Hotel,” he says sarcastically. Because there’d be no checking in. I imagine them prying up the boards. Just kids. And that’s when they started their life of crime.

“So how did you learn to read?”

“Nate taught me,” he says. “Most of the guys were seven or eight when we went in. They mostly knew how to read by then. Nate is brilliant, though. He taught me, and he made the rest of us keep it up. It was a basement, you know? There were musty boxes of books down there. Some encyclopedias from 1920. That’s what I learned on.”