Excerpt

Out of order.

Grainne came to a halt in front of the elevator, staring at the metal sign. Beyond it sat the dual set of elevators with their doors closed, as though mocking her. The elevator was her only way out of the office park, except…she shuddered.

The ten foot high fully-enclosed turnstiles between the office park and the walkway beyond loomed in her mind. Those would take her to the staircase leading to parking just as the elevator would. Some even used the stairs for additional steps on their fitness tracker.

A security guard sat at the open guard station, his attention on his device, and not the woman standing there, frozen.

Grainne had avoided turnstiles since that fateful day on the New York subway. The memory of having her head trapped in that freak accident…and that tiny little turnstile was nothing compared to what her company had installed. The turnstiles that loomed just out of sight were the stuff of nightmares, one entrance and one exit of twelve terrifying metal bars that surrounded a person when they went through, leaving them helpless. The entire thing was designed to keep people from being able to go over or under by their sheer height and scale. She hadn’t even known such things existed until she started this job.

If she had any other choice, she wouldn’t have stayed at the company when she discovered the giant turnstile. But bills didn’t know about phobias, nor did the landlord care.

She could force herself through the piddly little single rod ones if she absolutely had to. Not without trauma, of course, but she managed it. Bars were her issue, not the turnstiles that were made of plastic, or whatever that was, that swooshed open. She could cope with those, though she didn’t like it. But anything with that bar, like the one that had slammed down on her that day, sending her to the hospital—after she had been freed from its clutches—made her breakout into a cold sweat. Nobody knew about her turnstile issue except the therapists she saw on an irregular basis, and she wasn’t sure they took her seriously. Her phobia was so rare that there wasn’t even a name for it. She’d looked it up in Latin and gotten as close as she could. Timor Portae Vertibilis, which roughly translates to fear of a revolving door.

“What’s this?” She asked the security guard, gesturing to the placard signaling her doom while trying to keep her voice from shaking. In some ways, he reminded her of the man who had to free her from the turnstile, minus the cigar, but including the soft belly.

That man had been her savior. This man was the opposite.

“Elevator’s broken.”