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But a bark.
I stood at the top of the stairs and looked down the hall at the last door. The one farthest from me. More barking. It was Charlie.
The hallway seemed to grow longer as I moved, too slowly even as I charged, battling the nightmare, the demons who kept replaying that reel, over and over and fucking over again.
“Sofia!”
Something crashed behind me, a beam falling, the ceiling opening to the sky. Choking, I went forward, reaching the door. Charlie’s barking was continuous now.
“Sofia. I’m here.” I touched the door handle. It burned. Wrapping my T-shirt around it, I turned it.
In the nightmare, it was locked. It was always locked, and I had to break the door down. That’s what always slowed me down. I could never reach her in the nightmare. Not when it was my mother. Not when it was Sofia. But this time, it turned. I pushed.
The room was filled with smoke, too thick to see through.
“Charlie!”
He barked, and I followed the sound to another door. Another fucking door.
It must have been the bathroom.
This one too opened. My heart pounded.
Charlie sat beside Sofia, who lay unconscious on the floor. He barked and licked her face and wagged his tail briefly and barked at me again, rising to all fours, then sitting again, licking her face again and again.
I dropped to my knees.
Outside, lights flashed, and someone shouted orders.
“Sofia?” I touched her face, slid my hand to her chest to feel her heartbeat. I don’t know if it was ash or smoke or what that had my eyes blurry, but I picked her up. Charlie barked at my feet and followed as I covered her mouth and nose with my T-shirt and ran down the hall, fire raging inside the house now. When I got to the stairs, I backed away. Too late. I’d have to find another way. Back to the room where I’d found her, I went to the window and leaned out, breathed in the fresh air. I called out to the men below. Two fire engines and three police cars stood parked below, and in the distance, an ambulance was driving up to the house.
The instant they saw us, they raised a ladder. One of the men climbed up.
Sofia moved in my arms, choking, coughing. I looked down at her and couldn’t help smiling just a little.
She was alive. I wasn’t too late. She was alive.
“You’re here.”
A fit of coughing stopped anything more she would have said. When the firefighter reached us, I handed her to him. He hoisted her over his shoulder and descended the stairs. I looked down for Charlie, who’d gone back into the bathroom, backing as far from the approaching fire as possible.
Someone yelled for me to get out, but I ran back in, grabbed the sheet off the bed, and wrapped him in it, holding him to me. An intense heat had me running back toward the window, and, with Charlie bundled in my arms, I climbed out and down.
They pulled the ladder away from the house and trained their hoses on it, raining water down over it.
I went to Sofia, who was lying on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance with an oxygen mask over her face. Her eyes opened and closed, and she reached a hand toward me. Someone brought a bowl of water for Charlie, and I set him down to drink.
Sofia sat up and pulled the mask off. She looked at the house behind me, then looked to me.
“Raphael?”
That was when everything hit me. All of it. The fire, the timing of it, the destruction of Guardia Winery—because it was destroyed—the loss.
The near loss of her.
I stumbled and gripped the door of the ambulance to steady myself.
Was this Moriarty’s work? Was this the form his vengeance took?
Was this what I myself had planned to do? Had thought I could do?
“Raphael?”
I turned to see tears streaming down Sofia’s face.
I drove myself to the hospital two hours later, when the fire was finally under control and no longer threatened the adjoining properties. They’d given Sofia a sedative after checking her out, so she was asleep when I got to her room. She’d be fine. I was in time.
Stepping out of her room, I first called Lina to tell her Sofia would be okay. She already knew about the fire. Of course she would. The manager would have called her grandfather as soon as he heard. After reassuring Lina that Sofia would call her as soon as she was awake, I dialed another number, a man I knew who had ties to the police department, who’d done some investigating for me in the past. I wanted to know if the police ruled it arson. I’d smelled gasoline in the house. That meant someone had intentionally set the fire. I also told him what Lina had told me and asked him to confirm. That Marcus Guardia was the one who’d been this close to buying Villa Bellini. After that, I went into the hospital room to wait for her to wake up.
