Super•Villainous

XXXIII

Almost too swift to register, Atticus maneuvered our bodies in the air to salvage our fall, curling an arm around my waist and holding my front flush to his chest in a way that terrified me, because I could no longer see where we were falling, torn between watching him versus the ceiling drift further out of reach. I jolted when we touched ground at the bottom of the staircase, lurching from the force of acceleration and gravity telling my body to keep going down, down, down, but Atticus held me steady to him with only my feet smacking uncomfortably into the hard stone, until he slowly laid my back to rest on the ground. He held himself up on one hand that was splayed beside my head, and his knees cracked into the stone on either side of my own. His breaths came out only a little heavier than normal. In my heart, I knew we should have been scraping ourselves painfully off the floor, nursing broken bones and fractured skulls.

"Are - are you okay?" I asked, considerably more breathless than him.

He nodded tersely. "You?"

I laughed that he found the need to ask, having absorbed the brunt of the impact for both of us and likely shattering his kneecaps in the process. What little I could see of his expression morphed from serious to concerned. Probably wondering if I was completely mental.

"This is just another Saturday night for me." An exaggeration, but not by much. I was the Queen of Misfortune, survivor of kidnapping and various other catastrophes. And because my mouth moved faster than my brain, I added, "For you, too, I imagine."

"You have no idea," he said, and he sounded pert enough that I didn't feel bad.

I blinked more of the dust out of my eyes. The ground still shook around us at random intervals in tune to the conflict going on in the entry hall, but the noises were muffled through inches of stone and all that felt a world away. Someone else's problem. We had enough of our own.

A large piece of shrapnel from the cement fixture blocking our exit collided with my temple and another cut down my prone forearm, drawing blood, so I pointed out, "Perhaps we should move away before that thing collapses on top of us."

Because if there was a chance of it doing so - any chance at all - it would, so long as I remained beneath it. I didn't fancy the idea of death, but I would feel infinitely worse if I dragged Leigh's brother off to eternity with me.

I expected him to leap away, to practically fling himself across the room in embarrassment for the very intimate position we found ourselves in. That was what Tempest would have done, only Atticus did not. He watched me for a moment longer. I felt caught on his gaze, like a snake charmer staring down a cobra. I didn't know what would happen if I looked away first, but I knew in my gut that to do so would be a dangerous invitation.

Slowly, he peeled himself away and offered me a hand up. When I took it, his shoulders sagged and his eyes fluttered shut as if my touch offered him relief, but it was dark and I couldn't be sure of anything.

"This way." I started down the short corridor I'd walked only a handful of times before, feeling my way along by touch. "There's a light switch in the Archive."

"You sound familiar with this place," he observed.

I gave a shrug that he couldn't see. "Familiar enough. I intern down here, which is far less glamourous than it sounds."

The tips of my fingers snagged on a cool, round doorknob towards the end of the otherwise unfurnished corridor - the training rooms were in the other direction, a left from the stairway. Luckily, no one bothered to lock what they deemed to be an unimportant room in the most protected place in the country, so we entered the Archive easily and I flipped on the light, whose steady stream of electricity thankfully persevered through whatever chaos went on in the entry hall above.