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Bright orange light had me snapping my eyes wide. The fire roared in my ears as the flames spread, licking higher, catching on the back part of the chair.
“Fuck,” I managed through the dam in my throat, wincing as I shakily reached for the strap around my forehead. My fingers sloppily tried to work the buckle, putting my elbow back into the fire.
I jerked away reflexively, my stomach dropping.
“We don’t give up,” Corvus reminded me, and I held onto his voice, willing it to be louder than the wind of the fire rushing past my ears. Singeing my hair. “Wenevergive up.”
I thrust my elbow back into the fire, latching onto the buckle with renewed purpose, my fingers stinging and numb all at once.
The buckle came loose, and I let my head fall forward, choking on the cloth still tied around my neck. I worked on that next, coughing as the smoke wafted into my face, filling my lungs and already aching throat with its scratching claws.
As soon as my head fell free, I curled my body away from the flames, racing against the growing fire to untie the cloth and buckled straps on my right arm.
This wasn’t the clean, sharp, pain of a perfect cut. It wasn’t the press of fingers into flesh, caught up in a moment of bruising passion.
This pain didn’t call to the broken parts of me, giving me release. It fuckingburned.
It doesn’t hurt,I growled in my mind.It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt.
Another arm freed and I threw myself forward, using both tingling hands now to untie the rest of my binds, the fire licking at my back. Any second now and the baggy t-shirt was going to catch.
“Come on.Come on.”
One leg out and the shirt caught, the breath of the fire blowing hot air up my back.
I shifted my hips away, crying out at the pain in my belly as I threw myself to the floor with one ankle still strapped in, rocking back and forth over the cold cement floor until the fire went out.
The acrid smell of burned hair assaulted my nose and I choked on it as I fumbled with the last strap, kicking the chair when I was finally, fucking blissfully free.
Palm pressed into cement, I willed my body to ignore the burns, the aches, the exhaustion andget up.
The chair was almost entirely engulfed in flame now and black smoke stained the ceiling, billowing out toward the close walls, rushing downward.
“Stay low, Sparrow.”
I made for the door, pausing when my hand wrapped around the handle.
The cameras.
“We need to know what he knows. What he’s seen,” my mind spoke with the voice of Grey, and I hunched, covering my nose and mouth in the crook of my elbow as I made for the screens, tapping the spacebar to open them up.
The monitors came to life, reflecting with flickering orange light from the fire burning behind me, warming my back through the remaining tatters of the t-shirt hanging from my frame.
My hands hovered over the keyboard.
“The folder with the video feeds,” Grey reminded me. “Go to it.”
I did, clicking through video feed after video feed, finding a feed of Sanctum and then another. One that looked to be positioned across the street. Another that rested behind the bar in the underground fight club.
There were three in and around the Crow’s nest.
Two in mine and Becca’s shared apartment at Briar Hall. One in the living room. The other in my fucking bedroom. The angle was awkward and I struggled to figure out where it could be coming from.
There seemed to be countless others. One in front of Diesel’s house. Another near the Docks.
These had to be top grade gear. Otherwise there was no way we wouldn’t have noticed them. Was there?
I couldn’t count the number of times I’d swept the apartment at Briar Hall, that the guys had swept the Nest, after my stalker had pushed his way into our lives.
