by Ella James
“Suri?” Her eyes double in size. “What are you doing?”
“Liz, I’m sorry, but I just can’t—”
“Suri—Suri, no.” She steps in, shaking her head vehemently. “No. You can’t go now. I need you here!”
Her proclamation irritates me. “That’s ridiculous. You just spent the night with your gajillion hooker friends.”
It’s mean, okay? I know it’s mean. But it’s not that mean. So when Lizzy sits down on the bed, drops her head into her hands, and starts to sob, I’m shocked. I step over and throw an arm around her.
“Lizzy—hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so harsh, it’s just, I saw Marchant Radcliffe and—”
“I’M PREGNANT!”
“…What?”
“I’M PREGNANT! No one knows! And earlier today, Hunter said children are…a blight!”
So that’s what she’s been so weird about. “Oh, Lizzy. Oh man. This is big news! But it’ll be fine.” I rub her back as she sobs. “You’ll change his mind. He loves you and you’re getting married.”
“No we’re not! We can’t! I’ll be too fat to—” she hiccups— “I’ll be too fat to wear a dress!”
I pull her into my arms and hold her while she cries about stretch marks and pushing out a “ten pound vagina bomb” and try not to think about Marchant Radcliffe.
It’s going to be a long night.
*
MARCHANT
I’m in the kitchen, about to pop an Ativan, when I hear a knock on the back door. I know it’s Hawkins. I can feel it. And this time, I can shoot him, because he’s trespassing.
I run downstairs and punch the glass out of my gun cabinet, grab a .38 and load it quickly. By the time I get to the kitchen, I’ve stuck the gun inside the back of my jeans, because I’ve managed to convince myself it’s only Hunter. Or Rachelle. Or someone else coming to check on me.
But when I open the back door, I find myself staring at Hawkins—the little fuck.
He hits me in the face. Then two thugs grab me by the shoulders and haul me up against the stone wall of my house. I manage to reach my arm behind myself and dig my hand into the waist of my jeans. I work my sweaty fingers around the gun, and when I pull it free I point it toward Hawkins’ legs. I am stunned by the boom as the bullet hits him in the foot. Blood sprays like a fucking geyser.
He howls, and the goons rush to his aid. I dart back inside my kitchen, slamming the door behind me just in time for the bullet that punches through it to miss me.
I look out the square window, and I see one of the goons pointing a pistol at me. I’m slightly surprised to find that I’m not worried. Then I see Hawkins holding up his hand to them—a silent ‘stand down.’ He grimaces as Goon One helps him stand, and I see that my wild shot probably just grazed him. Pity.
Hawkins hobbles to the door and presses his face against the glass, and his panted breaths makes clouds of fog. “You’ll pay for this Radcliffe. I’ve given you more breaks…than I’d give my own damn cousin.”
And I realize for the first time that it’s not Monday. I don’t know what day it is, but I know I missed the deadline to pay Hawkins. I even had the money moved—but I lost track of time.
Fuck!
Hawkins spits on my door, and then he and his crew turn to go. I realize, belatedly, that they’re wearing dark clothes—hoods, even, unless my eyes are playing tricks on me.
It takes me a few minutes panting, chugging vodka from a bottle in my freezer, to calm down, and when I do, I realize I should call security. But as soon as I wrap my hand around my phone, someone bangs on my door. I mean really goes at it.
Shit. So the little bastard came back for another round. I chug some more Gray Goose and palm my gun. Then I pull the door open, stunned to see it’s Juniper, wearing nothing but thigh-highs, a thong, and a lacy dark blue bra.
Her eyes are wide, her hair a mess. She waves her arms and screams, “MARCHANT! COME NOW! THERE’S A FIRE!”
9
MARCHANT
I don’t need shoes or a shirt. I don’t need anything but my gun. I clutch the .38 as I dash behind Juniper, cutting through the grass beside my cottage and following her willowy form toward the pond. I can smell the smoke already. We come around a few oak trees and I see the flames. They’re bright—so bright they almost blind me. It’s surreal.
I feel nothing but the burning of my muscles as I run toward the main house—nothing but that and the determination to get everyone out.
By the time I get within ball-throwing distance, the fire has engulfed most of the back left side of the building, and people are pouring out two sets of rear doors toward the right, even though our fire plan directs them to the front. I don’t see Rachelle, and I feel a sick jolt of fear for her.
Where is Hunter?
Where is Suri Dalton?
Where is Hawkins?
My throat knots up as I realize this fire is his doing. My doing. If someone dies, it will be my fault.
I lean down in the bushes to be sick, then push through a frenzied group of escorts, clients, and staff, and run through one of the flame-framed doorways.
Heat engulfs me. My first breath burns my lungs, makes me cough on the exhale, makes my eyes tear.
Shit is falling from the walls and ceilings. Shit that’s burning. The damn black smoke clouds the place so thickly I can hardly see. As I move past the bar into the great hall, where the stairs are, I catch something hard and heavy on my shoulder. It erupts in searing pain that burns itself out as I dash around bookshelves, past couches, screaming, “IS ANYBODY IN HERE?”
Fuck, it’s hot. My bare chest and back feel like they’re burning. I turn a circle in front of the elevator, struggling to get my bearings.
The ranch can’t be on fire. It can’t be burning.
I’m on the move again a second later. I find one of the chef’s assistants covering her face with a towel in a downstairs hall and shove her out an emergency exit at the end of it. I find one of the newer girls—Bree—in a first-floor room, sobbing and screaming into her phone. I break the glass out of a window and send her out, shoving her a little as she crawls over the windowsill, into the grass, which is burning in some spots.
I’m coughing badly now. Every breath is more difficult to pull than the last. I’m dizzy—yeah. I realize that. I just don’t care.
Getting upstairs is surprisingly easy. There’s a hidden, staff stairwell near the exit door at the end of this first-floor hall that doesn’t seem to be burning yet, and that’s the route I take.
I catch a string of violent-sounding Spanish—one of the clients, I guess—behind me. I whirl, but no one is there. I take the rest of the stairs two at a time. As I reach the door at the top of the two-floor stairwell, I think I hear Hawkins’ laughter. But I can’t be sure. I’m probably hallucinating.
I shudder through a coughing fit before I stick my head into the second-floor hallway and call, “Is anybody there?”
I call out several times before someone screams, “MARCHANT!”
I whirl, and there’s Rachelle, stomping toward me. Her blonde hair is sweat-plastered to her head; her eyes are wild. She grabs my arm—“Are you fucking crazy?”—and hauls me back down the stairs.
The place is going fast. I can’t believe it. The hall where the staff stairwell is, the one that leads to the great hall, is lined with fire along the baseboards. Fire writhes in patches on the ceiling. Beyond it, where the hallway meets the great room, I can’t see anything but light. I think I hear screaming from that direction, but Rachelle starts to choke and cough, and I know I need to get her outside. I tug her out the nearest exit, throw her over my shoulder, and rush around the inferno, cutting through the grass to get her to the front of the building.
I sling her down by a bush that’s not too close to the blaze and grab her face so I can see her eyes. They’re red, just like her cheeks and forehead. “You okay? You breathing okay?”
She nods, and tugs on my arm until I help her stubbo
rn ass up, and together we go through the crowd, checking on people, trying to account for others, and asking if anyone saw where the fire started. For some fucked up reason all I can think about is Suri Dalton, and I don’t see her anywhere.
I see Libby DeVille—soot-smeared and crying—and I grab her arm. “Where is your friend?”
“Huh?”
“Where is Suri Dalton?”
Libby turns a circle, mouth agape. “Where is she? She was just here like one second ago!”
“I’ll go find her,” Hunter says.
“Oh my God, where’s Cross?” Libby’s eyes are huge. “I thought I saw him earlier, but—”
“I’ll find them.” I run around the house, dodging patches of fire on the lawn, focused on finding Carlson and Suri Dalton. I remember a foggy scene from the hospital hallway: me, dickishly asking if she had a thing for Carlson, but I push that aside as I round the house on the pool side. It’s covered tonight, and debris is raining down on the smooth cement. I want to push it back, because a pool is good in a fire, right? I don’t have time to waste, but still, I stop beside it. I’m dizzy as fuck and shaking with adrenaline and crazy, but I want to push the cement cover back. It’s not a huge pool, but it might do something.
I kneel down and push the leaves of a withered fern aside, finding the button that controls the cement pool cover, and sit there coughing and cursing as burning shit bounces off my back.
There’s something I’m supposed to do, but I can’t remember it anymore.
As I wrack my mind, one of the last remaining first-floor doors flies open, and several men run out. They toss a cursory glance my way but keep moving toward the garden. It looks like they’re—what the fuck? Are they packing AK-47s?
No way.
What the fuck?
I’m on my feet, ready to follow them, when someone grabs me by the waist. I whirl around, howling from the pain of grabbing hands on my sore skin—and find myself facing Suri Dalton. Her face is soot-smeared and red, her hazel eyes huge.
Relief washes through me. I grab her by the arms just to make sure she’s real.
“Marchant, look,” she cries, wriggling out of my grasp and whirling toward the house. She starts to cry, and without understanding what the fuck she’s rambling about, I shove her forward. “Go around to the front! Give this place a wide berth; shit is falling. Find Rachelle and Hunter. Tell Hunter I just saw a bunch of cartel thugs—”
“They’re here for Missy!” Suri grabs me by the elbow and tugs me toward the fire. “Look up, Marchant! What do we do?!”
“There’s nothing we can do—” I say, looking into her eyes— “short of turning on the— I should turn on the emergency sprinkler system! Follow—”
“CROSS!” she screams, pointing, and I look up this time. “THAT’S CROSS UP THERE, MARCHANT!”
I follow her finger to find Carlson in one of the smoke-fogged, upstairs windows. I squint a little, and it looks like he’s carrying someone on his shoulders.
I turn to Suri, planning to tell her that I’m going back inside—but suddenly the cartel thugs are rushing past us, a whole fucking bunch of them dressed in fatigues, barking in Spanish, and pointing machine guns at the window over the pool, where Carlson stands.
Suri screams, and one of the Mexican fuckers looks her way, and I know that face: Jesus Cientos—a notorious drug lord who, I’m told, bought Missy King. Motherfucker’s come to take her back, and he burned down my ranch to do it!
My aim is steady. I fire twice, and he goes down. The men around him jump on my ass—or try to. I shove Suri into the trees, then lead them around, toward the side of the house. Bullets whiz past me. I shoot back: BAM BLAM BAM click click— fuck! This fucking gun only holds five rounds!
Another of them topples into a bunch of shriveled ferns. I hear the first wail of the sirens, and the rest scatter. Seconds later, there’s an explosion of glass above me, and I look up to see a bulky shadow fall toward the pool.
Then there’s water spraying everywhere, a fire truck rolling through the grass, men and women in uniforms hauling hoses and ladders. I’m walking backward, looking up at the main house. It’s almost gone. It’s already gone. Where is Suri Dalton?
I cup my hands around my mouth. “Suri? Suri!”
I shout her name for the longest time, dragging air into my stinging lungs, watching the place go down in pieces while it’s sprayed with hoses. But they’re too late. Way too late.
The air is black, the world is orange and red. It’s hell and I feel like hell. And suddenly a police car is here, pulled up beside the pool. I stare at its lights, and for a second they are lights on the top of a car outside a mortuary in New Orleans. I’m going to jail for assaulting a doctor, and I don’t fucking care. As quickly as the memory comes, it goes.
Where is Suri Dalton?
I stumble forward a few steps—so close the heat stings me—and find myself staring into the eyes of a middle-aged police officer with a thin mustache.
“Marchant Radcliffe?”
I nod.
“I’m Officer Dirk Eilhert with the county police. I’m not sure where you’re headed off to, but I’m gonna ask that you stay put. We need you to—”
“No!” I shake my head. “I need to make sure everyone’s okay.”
“We’ve been working with the EMTs and we’re told no one is trapped inside.”
“Are you sure? When did they tell you that?”
“Just now.”
“Who’d they get that info from?”
“Manager. I believe the name was Rachel.”
Rachelle. My shoulders loosen. “Good.”
“Do you have any idea how the fire—”
“Hell yeah I do.” I point to the body by a burning chunk of house. “Jesus Cientos did this. Mexican drug lord motherfucker.”
“I know who he is, sir. How did he go down?”
I look from the body to the cop. “I shot him.”
His eyes widen even more, and I wonder if I should be saying these things. He writes something on his clip board, and says, “I need you to wait until we can take you down to the station for your statement—”
“No.” I shake my head. “I’m not leaving. I’ll do it here.”
It takes forever for the right person to arrive, and I forget what I tell him the moment the words leave my mouth, but they work, because he leaves me with his card.
I talk to Rachelle, to Hunter and to Libby. I help people into their cars and thank the firefighters as they start coming down from their ladders. I don’t see Suri Dalton.
Smoke is pouring off the building. It’s black. Nothing but a stone shell.
I wander around it a few times, aware that other people are here, but not sure who they are or what they’re doing. It’s so dark. It doesn’t matter.
Someone comes and wants to talk about insurance, but I tell him to come back later. “It was arson,” I say. “Just ask the cops.”
I drift toward the pool and stand there, looking in the direction of the gardens, of my cottage, where my guns are. I pull a .38 out of my pocket, suddenly surprised that I have it.
I don’t want that thing. I don’t like guns. I throw it into some bushes, beside a fountain, and walk toward the pool.
My skin hurts. I’m hot. I need to get in the water.
I walk in with my eyes on the blackened shell before me. I’m choking on the smoke, but I don’t care. I’m not leaving.
The water’s cold—surprisingly so—and for a second my whole body freezes up. I know I should probably get out—I’m gonna send myself into some kind of shock, going from hot to cold like this—but the sensation is mind-numbing. I take a few more steps into the water, deep enough now so it laps at my chin.
I look up at the sky, an army of stars blotted by writhing smoke. An army of stars, looking down on the ruin all around me. I sink in to my nose, and as the water seeps into my ears, I remember something I heard a long time ago. Something I read somewhere I can’t even begin t
o remember, but for this sentence: “For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.”
I look up at the stars again. Then I open my mouth and inhale water.
*
SURI
The cops are still here, so I’m not alone. There are a few firefighters, too, asking me to stay away from the building as I walk around it, looking in the charred grass for my grandmother’s emerald ring. I know I won’t find it, but I have to look.
As I search the dark grass with a flashlight app on my phone, I remember how blistered Meredith’s skin looked when they loaded her into the ambulance, and how lost Cross looked beside her. That was the first moment I’ve felt at peace about Adam’s and my breakup. At peace about Cross and his choices, and about what happened between the two of us. Before the ambulance doors shut, Cross hugged me, and it felt like we were friends again. After the ambulance doors shut, I thought about the look on Cross’s face—one of total devastation—and I knew Adam wouldn’t have looked that way about me. He would have been upset and unhappy, sure, but never devastated. Honestly, I can’t say I would have been devastated if that had been Adam in the ambulance.
I glance up at what remains of the building. Made to look like an English manor house, the “main house” was made of stone and wood. It’s situated between two smaller replicas; one of which got burned some, the other of which did not. The main house, of course, is all but gone.
I wonder how hot the fire must have been to crumple the stone. The building is still pouring smoke, emitting enough heat to make me sweat from thirty feet away. In some places, you can see down to the charred twigs of the house’s foundation. In one spot, I can see what’s left of a large bed-frame.
It’s hard to believe that a few hours ago this place was fully operational and now it’s just…decimated. Gone, the beauty of the rugs and bookshelves. Gone, my luggage and clothes. Gone, the open bar, the plush beds, soft rugs.
Less than three hours ago, I was consoling Lizzy about her pregnancy. How did that night turn into this? How could anyone be so filled with hate and evil that they chase a victimized woman into another country and try to kill her?
