Page 38 of Igniting Her

“That doesn’t make the boundary optional.” Cassie heard the captain in her own voice and did nothing to remove her.

Ellie put on the blouse and fastened it. “No.”

Her agreement should have ended the exchange. Instead, Ellie’s gaze moved to the folded towel, the harness, the bed where she had placed her surrender in Cassie’s hands and called it a choice. Understanding altered her face slowly.

“You can let me give you control,” she said. “You can’t let me know why you need it.”

“Enough.”

Ellie flinched as if Cassie had raised her voice. She had not. She had only used the one the whole station obeyed.

Cassie hated herself for recognizing the difference and continued anyway. “Get dressed, Ridge.” There. Exactly where the wall stood.

Ellie pulled on her jeans. She did not argue, slam a drawer, or make one of the jokes Cassie had once considered exhausting. Quiet meant the thing mattered. Cassie had learned that much about her.

At the bedroom door, Ellie paused. “For what it’s worth, I wasn’t asking how she died.”

Cassie’s hand closed at her side.

“I was asking who she was.” Ellie left the room.

The front door opened and shut without force. Cassie remained beside the bed until the sound of Ellie’s car disappeared down the hill.

Only then did she sit.

By full dark, the house still bore the shape of an afternoon organized around four o’clock: water rings on the bedside table, a damp towel, and the impression of Ellie’s body in the sheets. Cassie separated the toy from the harness, cleaned both, and laid them on a fresh towel to dry. She hung the damp towel in the bathroom. She carried the glasses to the kitchen. None of it restored the room to what it had been.

Ellie’s question followed her through every task.

Who was J. Calloway?

The frightening part was not that Ellie had asked. It was not even how quickly the name had turned pleasure into threat. It was the first unguarded second after the question, before Cassie reached for the wall.

For one moment, she had almost answered.

11

ELLIE

By 2:14 p.m. on the first day of A shift, Ellie and Cassie had been professionally impeccable for hours. Cassie had assigned her to the nozzle, corrected one line in her medical inventory, and asked whether she had eaten lunch. Ellie had answered every question without giving the words anything they were not allowed to carry. Nobody looking at them would have guessed that days earlier Ellie had left Cassie's bedroom with a dead woman's name between her teeth.

Then the tones dropped.

“Residential structure fire, four-eleven Harrow Court. Multiple callers reporting occupants trapped, smoke and flame visible.”

The day room emptied before dispatch repeated the address. Ellie ran for the bay. Turnout pants up, suspenders over her shoulders, coat fastened, hood and helmet in hand. Mo was behind the wheel by the time she climbed into the rear cab. Jamie took the seat opposite her; Teak and Priya locked in beside them. Cassie settled into the officer’s seat and keyed the radio for the update.

“Three occupants reported,” Priya said, reading from the tablet. “Adult male caller is outside. Says his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter are still inside. Daughter’s bedroom is second floor, rear.”

Ellie pulled her gloves tight.

The quint cleared the bay in seventy-six seconds and climbed away from the harbor. Harrow Court sat where Santa Vera’s older streets met the first canyon slope, a steep pocket of small stucco houses built close enough to share heat. Smoke appeared above the roofs before they turned onto the block.

Cassie’s voice came over the cab speaker, level and stripped of everything personal. “Family inside. Life safety is the priority. Nobody advances past the protection of the line.”

Four acknowledgments followed. Ellie’s came last. “Copy, Captain.”

The house was two stories over a narrow crawl space, pale stucco blackening beneath the eaves. Heavy smoke pushed from the second-floor windows on the Charlie side. Fire showed intermittently through a rear window, brightening each time the wind pressed up the hill. A barefoot man stood in the street in pajama pants, one arm bleeding where glass had cut it. He ran toward the quint before Mo stopped rolling. “My wife went back for her,” he shouted. “They’re upstairs. Back room. Please.”