Page 101 of You'll Be the Death of Me

“I did it for fitness more than anything, but who knew I would actually need it someday? Come on.” He pulled her down the hallway just as an alarm started blaring.

“Looks like Amy called security,” Dell said, trying to keep up.

“I expected she would. We don’t have much time,” Cole said in a rush.

Dell looked back to see the man climbing to his feet off the floor. Amy stepped out into the hallway, waving an angry fist.

“You won’t get away with this, Mr. Lewis!” she shouted.

Dell was still shaking the fog from her mind. “Why am I so dizzy? What did they do to me?”

“Mild olfactory sedation,” Cole answered. “Helps with the transition.”

“Is that why the waiting room smelled like clean sheets and vanilla to me?”

“Yep. This way.” Cole towed her around a corner back toward the elevators.

“What did it smell like to you?”

“Peppermint tea.”

“Sneaky bastards,” Dell muttered at the thought they’d essentially drugged her into a cooperative state.

They arrived at the elevators, but instead of pushing the call button, Cole turned them toward a stairwell door. “I don’t haveelevator clearance for the top floor, so we’re going to have to take the stairs the rest of the way.”

“The top floor?” Dell asked as they stepped into a cold concrete shaft. “Isn’t that where you go to—?”

“Move on, yes. But that’s not what we are doing.”

“What are we doing, then?”

Cole cast her a grin over his shoulder. “Getting out of here. For good.”

The alarm continued blaring. The sound shattered off the stairwell walls in a painful din, but Dell didn’t mind feeling like her eardrums were about to burst if it meant escaping.

“I am happy to see your rule-breaking bender continue!” she shouted over the sound.

Cole was taking the stairs two at a time, pulling Dell behind him. If she had needed oxygen, she would have been huffing air. “Beatrice was always pushing me to take more risks and assert myself, so let’s see how she likes this.” The defiance in his voice sent a thrill tingling down Dell’s spine.

“How much farther isup?” she asked.

They kept spiraling round and round, rising higher and higher inside the tower. Dell heard a door clang open somewhere below them and footsteps echo up the chamber.

“We’re almost there,” Cole said. “Don’t slow down!”

Dell sincerely wondered how many floors the building had. “What are we going to do when we get there?” she gasped.

“I found some more fine print in the rule book.”

“Oh?” Dell said, and rounded another landing to the next floor. She silently hoped no one burst through a door above them.

“Yes. There’s a whole section on posthumously visiting earth. Of course it is expressly forbidden without permission—”

“Shocking.”

“And doing it requires generating a level of energy only supervisors have access to.”

“Okay, but I don’t think Beatrice is going to be on board with lending a hand.”