“Lizzie! Off!” I shoved her away, freeing my right hand. The hand still holding the scrap of metal I’d been using as a screwdriver. I lunged, slicing through the air, making contact with his inner thigh.
“What the fuck?” He screamed, looking down with wide eyes as the leg of his jeans turned red in an instant. He staggered back, still screaming as blood poured from the wound.
I threw myself at him, and he fell backward—too busy screaming and holding his hands over his thigh to keep his balance. He landed on his ass. The gun went skittering away.
“You bitch!” he shrieked. “You fucking bitch!”
“Give me the key to the lock, damn you!” I held the metal to his throat, but he was too smart for that. He knew I could only go so far, so he moved further away. Out of reach.
“You’re going to die, Smythe,” I called out. “You’re going to bleed out. Do the right thing for the first time in your life and let us go.”
“You’re not as smart as I thought you were,” he gasped, laughing in spite of the blood oozing from between his hands. Suddenly, in one quick move, he kicked over the barrel and set the floor on fire.
“Christa!” Lizzie shrieked, running as far from the flames as she could. I followed her, realizing I had just signed our death warrants. I had no clue he would go that far. Why didn’t I think about that? It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
“I have to try to finish with the screws!” I screamed. “I need your help!”
“No!” She pulled at me, trying to lead me away from the fire—in the opposite of the direction we needed to go in just then.
“Lizzie!” I got down on her level. “I need you to be very brave now, okay? You’ve been brave this whole time. Just be brave for another few minutes. We can do this! I know we can!”
She was sobbing, shaking, but she came with me. I dropped to my knees and prayed harder than I ever had in my life that the screw would move easily. I worked in spite of his blood on the metal and my blood on the metal and what that meant, my open wound still bleeding and leaving me open to God only knew what. I worked anyway, and the third screw loosened up.
“Hurry!” Lizzie sobbed as she pulled out the screw. I was getting close with the fourth and final one when the flames were too close for me to continue.
“Is there water here?” I asked, pulling her away.
“I have a bottle!” She pulled it out—one of those liter bottles they sold at gas stations. I soaked a sheet with as much water as I could, then poured some around the plate in the floor to hold the fire at bay as long as possible.
“Put this sheet over yourself!” I wrapped it around her, leaving enough for her face. We were surrounded by a wall of flame by then. I couldn’t make out Smythe in the middle of it, but he was there somewhere. I could hear him laughing as my shaking hand struggled to loosen the screw.
“Christa! Lizzie!”
“Daddy?” Lizzie jumped to her feet. She was right. She wasn’t imagining hearing his voice unless I was imagining it, too. And maybe we both were. Maybe we both wanted him to be there badly enough to believe he was. I wouldn’t stop what I was doing. I had to keep going and get us out, even as smoke started to fill my lungs. My eyes watered. I glanced up just long enough to see rows of crates becoming consumed by flames. How would we get out of there even if I got the plate off the floor?
“Got it!” I screamed, but Lizzie couldn’t hear. She was too busy screaming for her daddy. I spun the screw as quickly as I could, hacking, my lungs burning and my eyes burning and I was pretty sure my hair was burning. Everything was on fire. I pulled the plate from the floor and stood, gathering Lizzie in my arms.
“Daddy!” She was still screaming, pointing. I looked in the direction she pointed and sure enough, there he was. Like a knight in shining armor, barreling toward us. He jumped through a wall of flame separating us.
“Here!” He covered us with his jacket. “Go! Run! Spencer’s on the other side of the fire! Get out of here!”
“Come with us!” I screamed through a coughing fit. Everything was starting to get fuzzy. I struggled to stay conscious. If I could just get some fresh air…
“I’ll be right behind you! I swear to God, I’ll be right behind you!” He kissed me. “I love you!”
“I love you!” I gasped.
He kissed Lizzie, then practically pushed us through the fire. Spencer was waiting, as promised, and held the jacket over my head as he led me out the door with Lizzie still in my arms. I managed to wait until we were outside in the fresh air before I staggered, and Lizzie leaped out of my arms just before I sank to the ground.
Chapter Twenty-Three – Pax
There he was. The monster who had made my life hell. Writhing on the floor in pain, blood all down his leg and hands. He was pale from blood loss—judging from the pool on the floor under him, she got him good.
But he was still alive. Weak, but alive. Just like I wanted him.
“Pax!” Ricardo ran to me. “We have to get out of here! This entire place is about to come down!” I looked around, really seeing everything for the first time. Sure enough, flames were licking the walls, reaching up the ceiling.
“Give me a minute!” I called back. “Get yourself out of here!”
“Pax! He’s a goner, man! You’ve got everything you need now! They’re safe!” He held an arm over his face, coughing. “We’ve gotta go! You owe it to them!”
I looked down at Jonathon Smythe, whose life would be over in a minute whether or not I put a bullet in his head. He glared up at me—hateful even when he was on the brink of death. Everything went through my head, all at once. The faces of the people he’d hurt, the ones he’d killed.
“Why did you do this?” I screamed, then coughed as smoke filled my lungs.
“Why do you think?” he asked.
“Because I made you pay for what you did!”
“No! You never got it!” His voice was getting weaker all the time. The flames were dangerously close, but at the rate he was going, he would never feel it. “You think you’re better than me! You’re not better than me, Pax. Remember that. You sent me to jail when you’ve killed! You’ve hurt people! But you sat in judgment of me! So how does it feel to hurt? You deserve every minute of it.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Ricardo begged. He wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer, I could tell.
“Just go!” I pushed him in the direction of the door, which by then was barely visible for all the thick, black smoke pouring out through it.
“Not without you! Come on!”
I looked down at Jonathon again. He smiled. “You’ve brought pain to everyone you love. Congratulations.” He rested his head on the floor, too weak to even lift it anymore. Even in his last moments, he wanted to cause pain. He wanted to get in my head and ruin me, long after he was gone. Bleeding out was too good for him. Too painless.
I reached out to the closest stack of crates and pushed it over. He held his arms up, screaming, as the fire-engulfed wood came down on top of him. And I felt nothing.
“Let’s go.” We turned and ran from the building as beams from the ceiling started coming down everywhere.
They were waiting for us out there. Fire engines raced toward us, lights flashing, sirens wailing. It was all sensory overload, enough to make my head ache. None of it mattered, anyway. I only wanted them. Where were they?
Then, I saw them. Christa was on the ground with Lizzie kneeling beside her. I ran to them, stumbling, coughing, and sank to my knees to take them in my arms.
***
I wouldn’t leave Lizzie’s side no matter how many nurses told me visiting hours were over. I sat by her bed and held her hand, even while I was wearing an oxygen mask. My skin was sooty and I had minor burns to my hands and arms. I wouldn’t leave until I was sure she was all right. “I only have minor injuries,” I reminded them time and again.
“Yes, but you need treatment. Your daughter is safe now. She’ll probably sleep fo
r quite a while.” The nurse, a kindly older woman, pointed out the bags hanging over my daughter’s head. “This is nutrition. This is fluids. This is antibiotics. They’re all moving through a pump right now. She’ll be good as new in no time. She just needs her rest.”
“And she needs to know I’m here with her. When she wakes up, I want to be here.” I turned my eyes toward Lizzie’s face. She wore an oxygen mask like mine after breathing in so much smoke. My poor baby. She did nothing to deserve what had happened to her.
Christa cleared her throat from the bed on my other side. I held her hand in my other hand. “He didn’t touch her,” she whispered.
“You’re sure?”
“She told me so. She told me she knows what rape is and he didn’t so much as touch her.”
Relief washed over me again, just like it had when I first saw them together in the middle of the fire—alive, even if they were in mortal danger. Still alive. “That’s good to hear.”
“I know. Believe me, I felt the same way you do.” She squeezed my hand as hard as she could, which wasn’t hard considering the burns she was facing. The doctors put her under an extreme dose of various medications once it was revealed that she’d handled Smythe’s blood with an open wound on her hand. He tested negative across the board while in prison, but who knew what he’d been up to over the last year?
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Tired. Sore. Smoky.” She lifted a strand of hair and held it to her nose. “So gross.”
“You look beautiful to me.”
“Oh, thanks. Your standards are so high right now.” But the smile on her face was a loving one.
“I’m the luckiest man in the world. The very luckiest.” Instead of smiling more, the way I expected, she frowned. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You don’t look like you feel so lucky. I know that frown. I know that look in your eye. I realize it’s not over yet—not really—but there’s something weighing on you. Isn’t there?”
I could’ve lied. I even considered doing it. But what would be the point of that? Instead, I nodded. “Yeah. I can’t help it.”
“What’s happening in your head, sweetheart? You ran into a burning building for me—the least I can do is listen to you.”
“You saved my daughter’s life, so I’m still in your debt,” I reminded her.
“Okay. You can repay me by telling me what’s on your mind.” She smiled again. “You can’t win, Pax. It’s better that you figure that out now.”
I couldn’t help chuckling, even with all the nasty, black emotion roiling through me. I was holding the hands of the two women who meant the most to me, but I still couldn’t shake Jonathon’s last words. “He told me he did it because I thought I was better than him. I sent him to prison and thought I was better than him, when I’m no better than he is.”
“Well that’s a lie. You know that’s a lie.”
“Do I?”
Her bloodshot eyes went wide. “Paxton! Come on! He was a monster, and the world is better off without him in it. He didn’t go slowly or painfully enough, as far as I’m concerned.” She didn’t know about me pushing the crates onto him and burning him in his last moments. I wasn’t sure she needed to know about that, then or ever. I didn’t feel guilty about it, so it wasn’t like it would come between us in the future. There were secrets like that in ever relationship, I told myself. Nobody ever needed to know every last little thing about the person they were with. It was better that way.
“You’re right. He was a monster. But I killed people, too.” My voice was barely a whisper, and I could tell she was straining to hear my words. I didn’t want Lizzie to wake up while I was speaking and hear what her father had to say for himself. She needed a parent she could believe in. “In the service, you know. And on the force. I killed when I had to.”
“I know you did. I did, too. But that was different. That was war, that was a job.”
“I know. But I never really felt a lot of guilt over that. Should I have?”
“There’s no room for guilt in moments like those. You have a choice to make.” Her eyes went soft, far away. “I mean, I made a decision back there in that room, when he came at us. I could let him do what he was going to do, or I could cut him as badly as possible. I chose to cut him.”
“You made the right choice.”
“He almost killed us anyway.”
I looked at her burned hands. “Yeah, but you did everything you could to get out of there. You freed yourself. Hell, you barely needed my help at all—I should’ve known you would be able to take care of yourself.”
“Jerk,” she chuckled, then went into a coughing fit. I dropped Lizzie’s hand just long enough to lean in and make sure she was all right. Hearing her cough that way tore at my heart. She had made the ultimate sacrifice for my little girl.
“You okay?” I asked when she finished, and she nodded. “You look exhausted.”
“I am exhausted,” she said with a smile. “But I’m happy. I’m extremely happy.”
“Really?” I touched her face.
“Yes. Why shouldn’t I be? I have the best man in the world sitting at my bedside.” She touched my face—gingerly, with the less injured of her two hands. “You are a good man. You’re a good leader. You’re good at everything, including loving the people who mean the most to you.”
“Which includes you.”
“And I’m the luckiest woman who ever lived.”
“Even though I pushed you away?”
She shook her head. “We all do things when we’re under that sort of stress. All of us. We deal with it in our own ways. I can’t judge you.”
“You can’t be real. I mean, you must be something I made up in my head. How can you possibly love me?”
“Listen.” She stared hard, intensely. “I love you because you’re you. And anything that sick son of a bitch told you was a lie, made up to excuse himself. He told me he did everything because you put him in prison—like that was your fault, like you made him do what he did and then punished him for it. He hated you because you made sure he paid for what he did. That’s all. He wasn’t sorry for what he did, he didn’t regret a minute of it. He only wanted to make you pay for making his life miserable—only he was the one who really did. He was a sick, sick pup with no concept of right and wrong. He lived to inflict pain. Please. Don’t take anything he said to heart.” She took me by the back of my neck and pulled me to her until our faces were only inches away from each other. “You won. You outsmarted him and you won.”
The door opened then, and we both looked up to find Ricardo walking in with flowers. He placed one bouquet on Lizzie’s bedside table, then the other on Christa’s. She smiled radiantly. “Thank you so much.”
“Thank you,” he murmured. His voice was raspy. We were all a little worse for wear thanks to the smoke we’d breathed in. “You were incredible in there. I couldn’t have done better myself.”
“That’s a high compliment.”
He smiled at her, then looked at me. “Can I speak with you in the hall?” I nodded, kissing the back of her hand before getting up to join him. Once we were alone, he leaned against the wall.
“Coroner looked at Smythe’s body—cause of death is exsanguination.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
He nodded. “Yeah, it is.”
“He would’ve burned to death if he didn’t bleed to death, and vice versa.”
“Also true.”
“He was already mostly dead.”
“Hey. I’m not arguing with you. I’m just telling you what the final cause of death is.” He looked me up and down with very tired, bloodshot eyes. “I’m not judging you, man.”
“I feel like you are a little.”
He shook his head. “I wish I had done it. That’s how I’m feeling. I’m jealous of you that you got to do it when I wanted to.”
“I would’ve let you do it with me if I knew that.”
He chuckled, shaki
ng his head. “No, man. It was yours to do. I’m glad he’s gone.” He straightened up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to check in with my fiancée. I haven’t exactly spent much time with her in the last week.” He jerked his head in the direction of Christa and Lizzie’s room. “I think you need to do the same.”
“I don’t have a fiancée,” I argued.
“Right. For how long?” He was still chuckling to himself, coughing a little, as he walked away. Then, he stopped just as I was about to go back into the room. “By the way,” he added, looking at me over his shoulder, “the fact alone that you were worried that I would judge you sets you apart from that guy. Don’t let him get to you now. He’s gone.”
“Thanks.”
“Consider it your Christmas present.” I almost didn’t know what he was talking about, but it hit me. It was Christmas Day. I had completely forgotten about it. He shot me a knowing smile.
Ricardo always did like to have the last word.
Chapter Twenty-Four – Christa
“And how are we feeling today, little miss?” The nurse smiled over her clipboard at my roommate, who was conscious and sitting up for the first time in two days. She had slept through, never so much as opening her eyes.
“Better,” she whispered with a shy smile.
“That is so good to hear.” The nurse patted her hand, then turned to me. “And how about you, miss?”
“Also better, thank you.” She checked my vitals and agreed that I was, indeed, better. Then she left us alone.
“How are you, honey? You can be honest with me. I won’t tell the nurses. Or your dad.”
Lizzie smiled a little more genuinely than she had at the nurse. “I guess I’m okay. I guess I needed the sleep, too.”
“I bet you did, after everything you went through. A week in that terrible place.”
She nodded. “I can’t wait to eat something.”
“I bet you can’t.”
She looked at me. “Thank you for what you did. You did the right thing.”
I went cold remembering the moment when I sliced into his leg. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t feel victorious in that moment. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t love hearing him scream, watching the life drain from him. I hoped he reflected on his life in those last moments and saw everything he did with a clear eye. I hoped that was his final punishment, understanding how his entire life had been a waste. That all he had done was cause pain and loss.
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