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“I’m sorry.” Her voice crackles with a pain that makes me sit up again. “I wouldn’t interrupt if I didn’t have to. But Axel has to come out. Everyone is asking him to come to the Oriane.”
Confused, I bring my eyes back to Axel’s and study his curious gaze. “H-he’s injured.”And still inside me. Pulsing. Desperate.“He’s off work for the next few weeks, Viv. I don’t know what you—”
“He has to come out. I’m sorry. You know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.”
“Motherfucker.”Broken. His spirit is broken. It’s the only way I could describe the man whose cock literally turns soft and his forehead drops to my chest. “This was karma,” he rumbles for my ears only. “I fuckin’ told you we weren’t supposed to have sex.”
Worry flames in my stomach, along with the familiar rejection, but when he lifts his head again, I find a boyish smirk moving across his lips.
“I fuckin’ told you, Sully.” Rolling his eyes and pulling out so I whimper at the loss, he supplements the hurt with a gentle kiss to the center of my forehead. “At least I’m still mostly dressed.”
Sniggering, he pushes off me and stands at the end of my bed to fix his shorts, and because I don’t move, he bends to collect my underwear and jeans. “I can’t open the door and leave until you dress, Han.”
“So maybe I’ll stay naked.” I look up at the ceiling, dejected and sad, but I blindly fold my legs and put my panties back on. “Lock you in here,” I grumble. “Stay until we both get to orgasm.”
“Maybe when I get back.”
He pulls my jeans the right way out and feeds them along my legs to dress me. It’s a tender gesture, to take care of me after sex. But my stomach still roils with dread. With an ache that leaves me anxious.
“I’ll come back after I’m done at work.” He rests one knee on the end of my bed and presses a kiss to the center of my stomach. “So long as it’s before midnight, we’ll call it the same, singular event. Then I won’t feel so bad about fucking you to sleep.”
“Loophole.” I sigh, but I push up and snatch my bra to slide it on. “You can’t work, Axel. So whatever it is they want, it’s not in a fighting fires capacity. Which means,” I push off my bed and bend to put on a pair of sneakers. “I’m coming with you. There’s no danger for either of us, since the crew is already there working. I won’t be running into the hotel to fight a fire, and neither will you.” I steal a clean shirt from my closet and drop it over my head, before finally peeking back at Axel to make sure he’s dressed and decent.
Then, unlocking my door, I glare into my best friend’s not so playful eyes. “What the eff, Viv? This isnotcool.”
“I’m sorry.” Her cheeks are pale, and her lips are puffy from worrying them. “The crew is trying to reach him, but couldn’t. And I figured I knew where he was, so I said I’d come back—”
“It’s fine.” Axel hobbles closer on a single crutch and waits as we clear the doorway. “My phone is in the truck, since I wasn’t supposed to be on call. Lieutenant Rosa requested me back?”
“No, he, uh…” She takes up my flank as I follow Axel along the hall and grab up my keys and shiny new phone. A dozen missed calls with her name on them fill my screen, but my cell was on silent. “A Lieutenant Ruiz was the one I spoke to. I don’t know where he got my number, but…” she wrings her hands. “He said the whole firehouse was requested. There are people trapped inside.”
I stop at the front door and frown. “But he’s injured, Viv. He can’t go in.”
“No, but I could be on the radios while others go in.” He swings past me—literally swinging on his crutch—and through the door. “Who’s inside?”
“Um…” her voice crackles just enough to make my stomach hurt. “They said it’s a recovery. Lieutenant Rosa is inside. And Cootes.”
“Recovery?” He stops just outside the door and spins with a violence in his eyes that takes me back just ten minutes. When we were in my room, making love and pretending we weren’t both freaking out about it. “You mean search and rescue, right?”
When she doesn’t immediately agree, he charges forward so he and Viv are barely a foot apart.
“Recovery is a big word, Vivian. You mean search and rescue.”
“I don’t…” Her lips quiver so her worry transfers and eeks into my blood. “They said recovery.”
Axel
9 DAYS LATER
Bagpipes play in the wind, and firefighters stand in a line to salute our fallen comrade.
This is the future we face, the possibility we accept when we walk into a burning building andhopeto come out again.
While I was in Hannah’s home, taking her body and telling her secrets I should never have spilled, and my crew was outside, fighting the blaze and hoping to put enough water down to buy time, Lieutenant Rosa was walking the halls of an old hotel looking for his kid. And because I was off work with an injury, he had to pull Cootes away from her position on the pumps and bring her inside to aid in the search.
We all train to perform each other’s jobs. We drill every damn day, to make sure that, if one of us is unable, the rest can fill out the crew and make a callout safe for us all. But that night nine days ago, Cootes was doingmyjob. She was walking in my shoes, and filling the role I would have, had I not been injured.
Nine days ago, while I was fucking Hannah Sullivan in her bed, The Oriane’s ceiling collapsed and crushed Ainsley Cootes, ultimately leading to her death.
