Page 4 of Clever Deceit

I WAS HOT. LIKE ROASTING hot. Burning hot. And I couldn't breathe. The air around me was scorching and dirty, like someone had put a hot pillow over my mouth. A pillow that smelled bad.

Only it wasn't a pillow; it was the air.

It was smoke.

I shot out of bed, turned my face toward the doorway, and saw the cause. Smoke was billowing into the room, dense and black and poisonous, and beyond that, I could hear the crackling of the flames eating at the floors and walls of the house. Flames were devouring the staircase down to the main floor—and had us trapped up here.

Flames that were going to kill us.

Panicked, I turned back to the bed and the man I knew was supposed to be in there, but when I threw back the covers, intent on getting him up and moving toward the window, he wasn't there. I whirled around, searching the rest of the room, but all was darkness. And when I looked toward the bathroom, wondering if maybe he was in there, I saw that the lights were out and the door was standing open.

The panic increased tenfold in my heart, and I spun around, looking for Warren. Where was he? Had he gone downstairs after I fell asleep, maybe for a drink of water or something? Was he trapped down there, or already out of the house, waiting for me to get out on my own?

I rushed toward the window, heart hammering and lungs screaming, and jerked it open. When I leaned out, the cold air hit my face and cleaned my lungs of the feel of heat and smoke and...

And I jerked and opened my eyes on a completely different scene.

I wasn't in Warren's room. I wasn't even in his house. I was in my room in my mother's house, where I'd gone to sleep earlier tonight—or maybe last night—with the window open. A breeze rolled in with the morning sunlight. That must have been what I’d felt on my face.

It had woken me from the nightmare.

I sighed and sagged into the bed, glancing over to the bear spot where Warren had been. Beside me, on the bedstand, he’d left a scribbled note to say he and my mom had taken Silver out for a walk. I lay back on the pillow, then realized that I didn't want to be in bed anymore and sat up. I needed water. I needed to get out of this room.

It had been one hell of a long day, and I'd have to come back to go to bed, no matter what I did, but for right now...

It wasn't the first time I'd had this nightmare, unfortunately. I'd been dreaming the same thing every night since the fire happened. And I always woke up with the same thought: It was ridiculous to dream such a thing. We'd gotten out of that house safely, without injury, and I wasn't sleeping in Warren's bedroom again anytime soon. The house was still somewhat intact, but the fire damage was so extensive that he'd had to move into a trailer on his property so a contractor could come renovate the house.

But we were safe.

There weren't any more fires happening.

Unless Tony McCarthy came and set another one—and that was the part, I thought, that scared me. That was what my subconscious was warning me about.

Because I had no idea when Tony was going to show up in my life again. Or what he might do to me—or Warren—when he did. I shivered in the morning light.

All at once, a knock on the front door drew my attention, and I glanced around in a panic. Who the hell was that? We didn’t have anyone due to come around anytime soon, and I didn’t want to have to deal with any unexpected visitors, not after what had just happened.

I headed down the stairs to the door and peered through the peephole. On the other side, an older man in uniform stood, waiting for me to answer. I pulled it open cautiously, my hackles still very much up.

“Hello,” I greeted the man, narrowing my eyes. I was just daring him to make a wrong move right now, daring him to show me that he couldn’t be trusted. I would have taken any excuse I could to kick him off the property, make it known that he wasn’t welcome there. But I saw a kindness in his eyes, and I tried to push that thought to the back of my mind. I had to remember that not everyone was here to try and catch me out. Not everyone was on Tony’s payroll.

As far as I knew, anyway.

“Sorry to disturb you,” the man told me, nodding. “I’m Rocco, the fire chief.”

“Oh,” I murmured. I extended my hand to his. The night of the fire had been such a crazy blur, I hadn’t had time to take in the faces of any of the people who had helped us.

“Can I come in?” he asked. “I’d like to talk to you about what you saw that night.”

I hesitated. I didn’t want anyone inside the house, but the information I gave him could have helped crack this case—I had to share what I knew, didn’t I?

“Sure,” I replied. “I’ll get you a coffee. Just wait in the living room, it’s right off the hall...”

I headed back through to the kitchen, my mind racing. I wanted to trust this guy, and I was pretty sure I did, but what if there was something more to him turning up here than I knew? I was sure the McCarthys had their fingers in plenty of pies all over the city, and this could have been an attempt to get me to spill what I knew so they could use it against me. Yes, I might have been paranoid, but didn’t I have reason enough to be, after everything that had happened? I had been through damn hell and back in dealing with Tony, and now he had made an attempt on the man I was falling for. I wouldn’t have put anything past him.

I would have been stupid to.

I made the coffees and carried them back through to the living room, doing my best to keep my face as neutral as possible. I didn’t want him reading more into my expression than I was willing to give away, and I knew I had to keep myself as neutral as possible. Hell, if I was acting too shady, he might think I was the one who had started the fire—even if I would never in a million years have done anything to hurt Warren.