After a sweep of the building showed staff and students evacuating without issue, Zaf went back downstairs to coordinate with the professors checking their class registers. He found the pavement outside Echo a mess of pure chaos, because, routine drill or not, people loved a fuss—and, he was discovering, they rarely checked their bloody emails. Students in particular were shouting useless questions at each other, shoving like trapped animals, and generally fanning the ever-glowing coal of his anxiety.

Well, maybe it wasn’t the students doing that last part. Maybe it was the fact that he still hadn’t seen Danika evacuate, even though he knew full well she hadn’t left with her class half an hour ago.

By the time George returned, Zaf was outside scanning the crowd for cropped, pink hair while using a bellow honed on the rugby pitch to make sure everyone knew, “This is just a drill! You’re safe, and there’s no need to panic. There is no threat to you inside, but we can’t let you back in until the building is secure.”

“But you just said there’s no threat inside!” A nearby student scowled.

Obviously, one of the email ignorers. Give me bloody strength. Zaf sighed. “I know. This is part of the drill.”

“Well, if it’s all just fake, I don’t see why you can’t—”

He speared the man with his flattest look, the one that made his mother smack him on the head and call him a shark. “Do you know what the word drill means, mate?”

The guy swallowed, shrugged, and turned away.

George appeared at Zaf’s shoulder to mutter, “Anyone ever tell you that you have strong supervillain energy?”

“Be quiet. Final sweep?”

“All clear.”

Zaf studied the crowd again. “Did you see Danika? Because I haven’t.”

“Er, no.” George scratched his ear, brow furrowing. “Probably took one of the emergency exits.”

Probably should be good enough, in a situation like this, right? Clearly it was for George, because the man looked annoyingly unconcerned. For all they knew, Dani could be trapped in a supply closet by some evil academic rival whose theories she’d called “woefully uninformed.” Or maybe a cult obsessed with worshipping her had seen their chance in the chaos and swept in to steal her away. Or something.

“All right,” George was saying, “I think that went well. Let’s shut it down.”

“No.”

A slow blink. “Erm . . . pardon?”

“No,” Zaf repeated. “I’m going back in.” Yes, he was paranoid about safety, and no, he didn’t give a fuck. Maybe if everyone was paranoid about safety, his dad and big brother wouldn’t have died in a car accident seven years ago. And if that was a messed-up thought process, oh fucking well. He was a work in progress.

“Back in? Why?”

Zaf pushed through the crowd, ignoring George’s obvious confusion. “Danika Brown,” he called, his voice rising over the chatter and the sound of passing traffic. “Who’s seen her? Pink hair, teaches English lit, about this tall—”

“I know Dani!” chirped a blue-haired girl a few feet away, turning toward him. “I had a seminar with her, last period.”

Relief rolled through his body. “Did she leave with you?”

“Uh, no,” the kid said, twisting the end of her ponytail around her finger. “She stayed behind on her laptop, I think. But I’m sure she’s fine—it’s just a drill, right?”

“Yes.” Zaf nodded calmly. “This is just a drill. What floor?”

“Third. Hey, are you okay? You look—”

“I’m fine,” Zafir said over his shoulder, already running. “Remain calm,” he shouted as he raced back toward the building. He yanked open the power-assisted door so hard it actually smacked into the wall. Fuck. Had he just broken the motor? Never mind. He turned back to the crowd and reminded them, “This is just a drill!”

Then he sprinted in and took the stairs three at a time.

CHAPTER THREE

After what felt like an hour of yanking at the lift doors and making as much noise as possible, Dani was starting to worry just the teeniest, tiniest bit. It had occurred to her, approximately three minutes ago, that if the building had indeed been evacuated due to the presence of dangerous gas, she probably shouldn’t be breathing so deeply to power her yells for assistance. So she’d switched to slamming her hands against the doors while trying not to breathe at all, which seemed less effective but also less likely to speed up her imminent carbon monoxide poisoning. Now she was trying to figure out if she felt light-headed because the poisoning had begun, or because she wasn’t fucking breathing.

It could possibly be both.

When she heard a voice shouting her name on the other side of the doors, she wondered for a moment if she was hallucinating as her body suffocated on ricin. Then she pulled herself together, patted the trio of gemstones hanging beneath her dress, and shouted back, “Hello?” Bang, bang, bang went her hands against the door, her left wrist aching and swollen because she’d wrenched it a little, back when she’d tried to open the lift. “HELLO?”

“Danika!” The voice was closer now, much closer, and almost familiar over the scream of the alarm.

She hesitated. “Zaf?”

No answer. But there was an odd, metallic wail, as if an iron elephant had been struck down, and then a high screech. She leapt back instinctively from the doors, and a second later, a tiny slice of light appeared right down the center. She caught sight of one dark eye and almost collapsed with relief.

“Hang on,” Zaf called through the gap, and then there was another wail and the door opened a little more. She saw his blunt fingertips at the edge of the chrome and realized he was actually succeeding in the endeavor at which she’d so tragically failed.

“You can’t just pull the thing open! You’ll hurt—”

The alarm cut out abruptly, plunging them into silence. Dani clapped her hands over her ringing ears, as if the quiet was attacking them, before blushing at her own silliness and lowering her hands. Zaf, meanwhile, continued the superhuman and technically impossible—shouldn’t it be impossible?—feat of forcing open the lift. Unfortunately for him, these doors were the least of their issues. Dani had been trapped long enough that her death by poisonous gas was assured, and Zaf had likely doomed himself to the same fate by rescuing her. For some reason, she was intensely upset by that, and also felt a little bit like swooning.

Must be the formaldehyde inhalation.

Zaf gave one final heave, and the doors opened. She had an instant to register the sight of him: tall and broad and heavily built, his usual resting bitch face veering into furious territory, his warm, brown eyes gentle enough to negate the effect. For some reason, the contrast—the hard precision of his features versus that soft, liquid gaze—made her shiver. The light shone behind him like a halo, and he looked even larger than usual, and it hit Dani like a giant, cosmic fist that this whole nobly-rescuing-her-from-death situation was almost certainly a sign. As in, a sign. The timing and the drama were too significant to ignore. The universe might as well have pointed flashing neon arrows in the direction of Zaf’s delicious shoulders and screamed, This one, then, since you’re so impatient.

Dani stared. Really? Him? Are you certain? After all, sleeping with a friend hadn’t ended well for her last time. Plus, Zaf could be a teeny bit uptight, and then there was that excess of chivalry and the habit some men had of reading commitment into copulation . . . She opened her mouth to ask Zaf if he might, against all her previous instincts and assumptions, be up for no-strings shenanigans. Then she remembered that they were dying, which made the whole thing immaterial, and anyway, he looked to be in a foul mood. His jaw, beneath its short, black beard, was tight, his lush mouth was a hard line, and his thick hair was an outrageous mess, perhaps because he’d just forced an elevator open with his bare hands.

Before she could comment on that strange, if impressive, behavior, he reached into the lift, dragged her out by the front of her dress, and plastered her against his massive chest. An almost silent “Alhamdulillah” rushed out of him on a sigh. Dani was just thinking, rather ungratefully, that he better not have creased her bodice, when he wrapped his arms so tightly around her that she could barely breathe.

Or maybe that was the mercury vapor.

“Why the fuck were you in the lift?” he demanded, his words hard, the rest of him . . . not. She was quite certain he was nuzzling her head like a cat. “You don’t use the lift in emergency situations!”

“I know that,” she griped, her voice muffled against his chest. And what a lovely chest it was, like a big, meaty pillow. His belly was nice, too, both soft and solid. She wondered if she could get away with grabbing his arse, since her brains were probably melting out of her nose as they spoke. “I was already in the lift when the alarm started. It just sort of . . . shut down.”

He growled. He actually growled—she felt the sound rumble through him. “This shitty old fucking building. The outer doors weren’t even closed.”

“The emergency button didn’t work,” she said, enjoying the tension in his body as he wrapped himself around her. “I was trapped in there for hours.”

“Er . . . I don’t think it was hours.”

“One hour, then,” she corrected.

“Danika, it’s been twelve minutes since the alarm started.”