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rat. Elijah wasn’t small, but he wasn’t as bodybuilder pumped as the other man. “He’s got one of you on every campus, honey, so take my advice and walk away. You better have done more than get laid today, E.J. Your envelope’s been pretty short the last couple of days.”
    “I’m sorry,” Elijah said. He didn’t say it to the man holding him. He said it to Hope. “It wasn’t like that. I swear.”
    She believed him, and she didn’t even know why, really, except that he hadn’t taken advantage of her when he’d had ample opportunity. That open door haunted her, and the gentleness of his hands moving her into her room.
    It wasn’t like that.
    “Elijah, do you want to go with him? Really?”
    “Yes,” he said. But she could tell he was lying about that. “I have to.”
    “You don’t have to do anything. Come on. Just come with me, okay?”
    “He’s not going anywhere with you, sweetheart. Walk.” The big man sounded bored, but he was also getting aggressive, and the look he gave her was chilling. “I’m not going to tell you again. He’s not worth it.”
    “Are you taking him somewhere against his will? Because that’s kidnapping,” she said, and pulled out her phone. “And it’s a crime.”
    That got the bald man’s attention. So did her punching numbers into the phone. She expected him to let Elijah go and back off—but instead, he grabbed for her. She wasn’t prepared for that. His right hand was huge and strong, and it closed around her wrist as he wrenched the phone from her hand with his left. “Let’s not do anything stupid,” he said. “Relax, honey. I’m just going to borrow this for a while—”
    He’d let Elijah go to grab her and the phone, and that was a mistake. Elijah punched him from behind—a solid kidney punch—and the big guy grunted and swung around, still holding Hope’s wrist. He nearly wrenched her arm out of its socket. Elijah followed up with a fast uppercut and a kick that took the guy’s knees out from under him.
    He almost dragged Hope down with him, but she wrenched free, panting, and grabbed her phone from where he’d dropped it. Elijah pushed her ahead of him across open ground, away from the van. The door slid open, and Hope got a glimpse of faces inside—five or six of them, young men and women. They didn’t get out. One of them made a motion that looked like she wanted Elijah to keep moving.
    The big guy was getting up behind them.
    “Run!” Elijah yelled. He took her hand, and she managed to keep up, even with the heavy backpack dragging on her shoulder and shorter legs. She knew the campus, and pulled him to the right at a dead run as they rounded the building. That led through a water garden that had a path through the center—it looked from an angle as if they’d disappeared into the jets, but the path itself was only a little damp. With any luck, the guy chasing them wouldn’t see it.
    Beyond that was the square faux-adobe of the Liberal Arts building. She and Elijah took the steps two at a time, careened into the hallway, and she pulled him up another flight of stairs and headed down another long hallway toward the Media Center at the end. It was still open, though it’d be closing in thirty minutes; there were a few students still parked in front of computers working on projects, but they hardly got glances, even though she was red-faced and gasping for air. God bless headphones and tunnel vision.
    “There,” she said to Elijah, and pointed. She’d worked as a volunteer helping to set up this room, and she knew it backward and forward … which meant she also knew about the door at the end, behind which lay the routers and servers and cabling. Now she just had to pray that ASU-RV’s notoriously lax security standards hadn’t gotten an upgrade.
    Sure enough, her code still worked on the keypad. The door eased open, and she pulled Elijah inside and yanked it shut.
    “What is this?” he asked. It was dark, but she kept the