

I wasn’t about to ask the staff, and asking Vlad might make him blow his lighter fluid. The next time I saw him, I’d pay up on that debt.Until then, I distracted myself by wondering how Maximus was doing.

Despite how coldly he’d ended our relationship and how hard it was to be near him, I still owed him an apology for believing that he’d been behind the carnival bomb. Out of all the people who were angry at me, he had the most right to be. Once clean and redressed, I looked out my window at the darkening sky and tried not to w. I wondered if Gretchen ever would.At last, I went back to my room and took another shower. My father, a retired lieutenant colonel, understood and seemed willing to forgive me.

There, I spent a not-so-pleasant couple hours with Gretchen and my dad, trying to explain that someone had planted the gas line bomb and that same person would’ve considered my family excellent bait if he-or she-realized I’d survived. To quickly assess the difficulty of the text, read a short excerpt: What reading level is Twice Tempted book?
