Her hand stays twisted in my coat, and the words she whispered upstairs are still lodged somewhere beneath my ribs.
You came for me.
They hit harder now than they did the first time.
Because I remember exactly how I got there.
An hour earlier, after leaving her house and crossing back to my own, I had opened a beer and sat down without bothering to change out of my department pants. The bottle stayed untouched on the table while I stared at nothing and thought about a white bra hanging from a lampshade, a covered canvasshe had guarded like classified information, and the way her voice changed every time she called meChief.
I was still sitting there when the smell reached me.
At first, I thought the smoke had followed me home from shift, trapped in my shirt or hair. Then light flickered against my wall from the wrong direction.
I looked outside.
Smoke was rolling from Kaia’s house.
Everything in me locked, and I was moving before the thought finished.
The command truck sat in my driveway with my gear in the rear compartment. As I dragged it open, my radio cracked with Tessa’s voice, followed by Kaia’s address and the report that the caller was trapped upstairs.
The wordstrapped upstairsnearly stopped my heart, but training took over before panic could.
My hands kept moving. My boots went on, my coat came over my shoulders, and I secured my helmet and tightened the SCBA harness by muscle memory.
Every movement was fast.
Every second still felt too slow.
By the time I forced my way through the front door, smoke had swallowed most of the lower level. I kept low and moved toward the stairs, following the structure of the house as it revealed itself through heat, walls, and brief breaks in the smoke.
Visibility was almost gone. Smoke rolled thick across the room, and heat pressed through my gear as I pushed forward. My shoulder slammed into the easel near the wall hard enough to send it pitching sideways, and the paint-splattered cloth covering the canvas caught on my coat and ripped free.
My own face stared back at me.
Unfinished, painted with enough detail that it felt like being watched by someone who knew too much.
Me.
Kaia had painted me.
The realization struck somewhere beneath my ribs, hard and impossible.
Then I saw the small black sketchbook on the floor beside the easel, knocked loose when I hit it. The edge had already started to curl from heat.
I grabbed it.
I should not have. There was no reason to take anything from a burning structure except a person.
But I shoved it into one of my coat pockets anyway.
Then I reached the stairs, and the painting stopped mattering. From that point on, every thought narrowed to one thing: finding Kaia, getting her out, keeping her alive.
Her fingers tighten in the fabric.
The memory breaks.
I am back in the yard with smoke in the air, fire behind us, and Kaia still in my arms.
