Written in the Stars(33)

“Please,” Cherry groaned. “I’m dying for a drink.”

The whole group, save Elle, migrated toward the door. Something didn’t feel right. It was too easy.

“Wait.” Three sets of eyes landed on her, expressions expectant. Elle tugged on the lobe of her ear. “I don’t think that’s the right door.”

Darcy set her hands on her hips. “It’s got the number fifty-five on it and it matches the key. I’m not wrong about the Fibonacci sequence.”

Elle wasn’t suggesting she was wrong. Not about that. “I think that’s the right key, but we never solved a clue for the door.”

“We don’t need to.” Darcy shook her head, eyes narrowing. “It matches the key.”

Elle chewed on the inside of her cheek. Her gut niggled. “I don’t know. It makes too much sense.”

Darcy looked at Elle like she’d lost her mind. “How can something make too much sense?”

Brendon lowered his arm, holding the key at his side.

Elle didn’t know how to put into words her intuition, this sense of something being off. “It doesn’t feel right.”

Darcy’s brow pinched, her jaw setting.

Elle stared, willing Darcy to understand with every fiber of her being. “Trust me.”

She was asking a lot, she knew, asking Darcy not only to trust her, but her nebulous, indescribable intuition. Nothing solid, nothing real, not in the seeing is believing sense.

Darcy glanced at the clock. “All right. Go with your gut, Elle. Just hurry.”

Four minutes was how long she had to figure out what about that door didn’t feel right. Heart racing, Elle rushed back to the table, double-checking for something, anything, a sign that her gut wasn’t leading her—and the rest of the group—astray.

Nothing. There was nothing she hadn’t touched, turned over. The fog thickened around their feet, rising to their knees. Elle turned, facing the mirror, catching a glimpse of Darcy’s tight-lipped reflection. Elle’s stomach twisted.

Above her head, the clock counted down from two minutes.

Fuck. She couldn’t see anything on the floor, her vision tunneling. Not to mention, the smoke was too thick, practically opaque, and the—

Smoke.

What had Jim said? Elle tugged on her earring. She’d been so excited to get started that she’d stopped paying attention. “Jim said something. Before he locked the door. Something about smoke and mirrors.”

Face slackening, Darcy’s lips parted. “The mirror. Go to the mirror.”

They both made it there at the same time, right as the clock hit seconds.

“What do we do?” Darcy ran her fingers along the mirror’s edge.

“Do something,” Brendon urged.

Elle swallowed down her nerves and gripped the edge of the mirror. This couldn’t just be a prop, it couldn’t. Wait. Prop. Propped against the wall, angled against the wall . . .

It was a long shot. “Let’s try tilting it.”

Forty-five seconds.

Together, she and Darcy hauled the mirror forward to where a barely perceptible chalk line was drawn far enough away from the wall for them to angle it back, careful not to drop it. At sixty degrees, the reflection of the overhead light bounced off the stationary crystal ball and pinged across the room, a beam of light landing on the second door, the one not marked with the number fifty-five.

“Holy shit.” Brendon laughed and jogged over to the lit door, key held out in front of him like a baton. He slipped it inside the lock, turned the knob, and threw the door open. Confetti and a dozen brightly colored balloons rained down over their heads as the buzzer squawked.

They did it.

They won.

Mirth bubbled up inside Elle like an overflowing champagne fountain, laughter spilling from her lips.

Darcy plucked a blue balloon out of the air and spiked it at Brendon, shrieking when he caught it and rubbed it across her head, static making her strands stick up wildly, confetti catching in her curls.

Through the rising fog and falling confetti, Darcy caught Elle’s eye and beamed.

*

“To Elle!” Brendon hoisted his beer in the air. “For going with her gut.”

Darcy clinked her glass of wine against her brother’s bottle and nodded, smile small and conciliatory. But that was fine. There were still bright gold flecks of confetti stuck in her mussed hair. It was the closest Elle had ever seen Darcy to being a mess, and she liked it. A little too much. “To Elle.”

Elle laughed and lifted her candy cane cocktail, complete with peppermint stick garnish, acquiescing to the praise. She sipped through the straw, face scrunching at the shock of rum. Surprisingly strong for being half-priced on trivia night.

That same gut feeling that had driven her to search harder urged her to lift her head. Across the table, Darcy was staring, bottom lip trapped between her front teeth.

Elle chewed on her swizzle stick straw, failing epically when she tried not to smile.

Feedback from the bar’s audio system filled the room, rowdy gripes following. At the front of the room near the bar, a man with a full ginger beard and a shiny bald head gave a rueful wince before tapping the mic. “Sorry ’bout that folks. Who’s ready for some trivia?”

“Cherry’s been outside for a while,” Darcy pointed out. “Doesn’t take that long to smoke a cigarette. Vape. Whatever.” Darcy waved her hand.