by J. R. Ward
They both strained, her strong body bowing until her boots slipped out from under her and he had to catch her.
“Dan!”
As Anne barked his name, he refocused on her—and she put her free hand to the side of his mask.
“Do it, Dan,” she said. “Or you have to go. I’m okay with dying. Honest.”
He stared into her eyes through his facial shield. His breathing was a freight train in his ears. His body was shaking under his PPEs. His mind was racing through solutions, too many of them getting rejected.
Oh, wait, actually all of them getting tossed.
“Fuck,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
Releasing his mask, he pushed it aside and locked eyes on hers without any barriers. It wasn’t supposed to end like this . . . although even as he thought that, he wondered what the hell their other option was. He and Anne Ashburn were both death-wish idiots, the kind of people who pushed limits, and themselves, until shit got broken.
Danny looked around one last time. Then he shifted his eyes to her arm and wondered, Can I do this?
“It’s the only way,” she said into the smoke and heat. “If you won’t save yourself.”
He didn’t make a decision. He just started moving. Because if he thought for a moment—for one goddamn millisecond—that he was going to hurt her? He was going to vomit the pepperoni-and-onion pizza, side of fries, two Cokes, and a cherry pie he’d had for dinner all over the fuck.
With hands that shook, he pulled off his gloves, unlatched the front of his jacket, and reached in through his bunkers to his woven nylon belt. When he brought the strap out, Anne closed her lids. And shrugged out of her heavy jacket again.
Danny drew the strap around her upper arm, busted the fork in the buckle, and pulled the length tight. She was right with him, reaching across with her good hand and taking the end, cranking it over until her bicep puffed up around the ligature.
Nope, he thought. If she lost consciousness and couldn’t hold that tight, she was going to bleed out. Plus, he was going to have to carry her once she was free because chances were good she was going to go into shock—so he couldn’t keep it in place.
Pushing her hand away, he loosened the length and made a slipknot. “Brace.”
When she nodded, he used all of his strength to make a self-holding tourniquet, and the grunt she let out went through the center of his chest like a bullet. But it worked. Even though her upper arm was well muscled, the nylon bit into her flesh like fangs, going deep and locking in.
With a yank, he pulled her PPE back up so she would be protected from the heat, making sure the tough fabric was flat and tight over her forearm for a clean cut—
Another warning creak from up above had him ducking and looking to the ceiling at the same time.
“Do it!” she yelled.
The long-handled axe was on his belt, and he popped it free and removed the head cover. The grip was insulated, certified to handle up to twenty thousand volts of electricity. Too bad the bitch was not rated to cover the shock of cutting off a piece of your partner.
Just so you could maybe, possibly, probably-not-but-still, save her life.
Anne stared up at him, unblinking, unafraid. And that steely expression on her face reminded him, not that he needed it, that she was the single most courageous person, man or woman, he had ever met.
I love you, he thought. Not for the first time.
“Put your oxygen on,” he ordered. “Or I’m not doing shit.”
When she complied, Danny closed his eyes, but only for a second. Then he masked himself and changed position so he could get a clear swing with good aim. Testing his angle, he lowered the blade so it rested on the PPE sleeve in the middle of her forearm. And then he settled his body into a stance, and thought about all the firewood he had been chopping for the winter.
This is no different, he told himself. This is a piece of wood.
If he thought for one second it was Anne’s flesh and blood, he was going to lose his nerve and fucking maul her.
Clean cut.
One chance.
* * *
As Anne went numb, she watched from a great distance as Danny lifted the axe over his shoulder, his powerful arm rising high. For a split second, the reflection of flames on its polished steel blade made the metal glow orange.
She couldn’t look away, but she couldn’t watch it happen. So she focused on his face, the angry, strobing illumination of the fire making his features animated even as they didn’t move behind his mask. She had thought of him as a surgeon no more than two minutes ago. Who could have guessed he was going to—
Raw human survival instinct made her open her mouth to tell him to stop—but she didn’t get far. The ceiling across the room caved in with the sound of galloping hooves, bricks from an outer wall landing fifteen feet away from them.
She looked at that beam. That slope. How much was above them. “Do it!”
Danny didn’t move.
Until he did.
In a single, decisive surge, he brought the axe down. Blink-of-an-eye time. Nothing more than a quick inhale.
As she was freed, momentum from her pulling back carried her away from the trapping tangle, the blade . . . the hand that she left behind.
The hard landing reverberated not just in her ass but through her whole body, her teeth clapping together, her legs banging into the floor, one shoulder taking the brunt with a holler as her spine torqued.
The cut she did not feel whatsoever.
She brought her arm up, and her brain was so compelled by the absence halfway down that even the fire and the danger went away. The PPE’s tough material had been pulled tight as a result of her leaning away from the axe, and there wasn’t any fraying of the fabric or insulation. There was blood, though, and—
Like time wanted to catch up to itself, everything went from slow motion to speed of light.
All of a sudden, Danny’s grip was biting through her heavy jacket and he had her up off the floor and over his shoulder. As he took off at a run, she bounced around and tried to figure out where he was going—and then she saw it. The most recent collapse had wiped out part of warehouse’s outside shell, and though it wasn’t a clear shot to an escape, it was better than the flames—
The world went tilt-a-whirl again as Danny swung her off him and started shoving her over a landslide of debris, through the gaping hole that was about five feet from the ground.
People reached for her. People on the outside . . . were reaching for her. Firefighters—it was Moose, Danny’s former roommate, who helped pull her out.
Except then she did the math.
“No!” she yelled as she kicked and fought. “Not without him, I’m not leaving without—”
There were voices, a volley of talk around her as she was dragged over rough concrete blocks and bricks, splinters of beams and hunks of metal.
“Danny!” she yelled. “Get Danny!”
A gust of wind pushed the smoke back into the building and his hooded head and mask were briefly revealed, his arms pinwheeling as he tried to get over the avalanche. Their eyes met one last time, and even though they were separated by so much, she could make out the blue of his stare—or at least told herself she saw it—
The entire building collapsed without warning, the three floors dominoing down, ash, soot, smoke, and flames joining the rush of dusted concrete, brick and mortar, that exploded out of the hole.
“No!” she screamed. “Danny!”
chapter
5
Tom had been waiting for three years for this call. This screaming trip across town. This pull-up-to-a-scene with screeching tires and sweaty palms, this choking panic, this paralyzing fear.
This reality that his sister was trapped in a burning building.
The slide show in his head was single frame, from the past and without a soundtrack: Anne at seven stuck up in a tree,
jumping down so he could catch her; her at ten pedaling like mad on her bike to keep up with him and his friends; her at twelve with a jackknife slice across her leg, telling him he needed to take her to the ER, but not to say anything to Mom . . .
Her at their father’s grave, dressed in black, sitting next to their weeping mother in front of a hundred firefighters.
And then finally, on her first day on the job, wearing the navy NBFD shirt tucked into the same work pants he wore.
From the moment he saw her in that getup, he had known that this reckoning was coming. But good luck trying to get Sister to slow down, ease up, chill with the risks. No matter what he had said to her, she had refused to listen to him, and as he jumped out of his SUV at the scene, he hated her to his core at the same time he would have given up his own life to save her.
Their mother had already buried one member of the family. Anne had always seemed determined to make it two.
Tom went dead run to the clutch of ambulances by the incident command post. The warehouse beyond was a roaring fireball, more like a meteor that had crashed to earth than anything built by man, and he prayed Anne was out of there.
As he came up to Chip Baker, he demanded, “Where is she?”
Before the IC could respond, the question was answered. As the warehouse collapsed, three firefighters burst away from the disaster like they were being chased out of the building by demons, their escape path accessorized by a mushroom cloud of smoke and orange flames. Two of them were carrying someone.
“Sister!” Tom yelled.
He bolted toward them. As he came up to her, he wanted to do the medical assessment himself, and settled for searching her sooted, streaked face—or what he could catch of it. She was screaming and twisting against the holds on her arms and legs, the strobing effect of the engines and ambulances turning her suffering into stop-motion animation.
“Medics,” Moose said as the men kept running. “We need medics!”
Anne just kept fighting the men carrying her. “Danny!”
With a wrench and a kick, she nearly got free, one of her arms going flying and sending out an arc of blood into the air, the splash of red backlit by the flames.
Tom grabbed the firefighter holding her knees and yanked him away. “You’re hurt!” No shit. “Anne, stop fighting, you’re bleeding—”
“Dannnnnnnnnny!”
The EMTs rushed over with a flat board and neck immobilizer, and he and Moose lowered her to the ground.
Tom knelt down. “They’ll get him. They’re going to get Dannyboy. Sweetheart, look at me, I need you to calm down—”
Her wild eyes latched onto him through the tangle of her brown hair. “He’s still in there!”
More of that blood spooled out from her left sleeve, and he grabbed her elbow and cocked the joint up—
When he saw the stump at the end of her arm, he couldn’t process what he was looking at. No hand. Where was her fucking hand—
“We got this, Tom.” One of the medics shoved him back. “Let us work on her.”
“Where’s her hand?”
But then the board was under her, the neck brace was in place, and she was being assessed.
Where the fuck was her hand?
“Danny?” she shouted. “Don’t worry about me, you have to get him out of there!”
Tom looked toward the warehouse just as another collapse happened like there was a controlled detonation taking the structure to ground. If Danny wasn’t out, he had to be dead. No one could survive in that debris field.
As Tom refocused on Anne, a cold numbness hit him on the top of his head and flooded down his body. The sleeve of her PPE had been cut at the shoulder and removed by the EMTs, and what was revealed made no damn sense. A makeshift tourniquet had been applied to her bicep, the red nylon belt locked in place by itself. Down below? A surgical slice, the white of the bones glowing against the deep red of the muscle and the pale stripes of sinew and skin.
The fact that she had been moved roughly out of the building and jogged across the ground with that thing just looped on there like that made him want to yell at someone. What if it had unraveled? She could have bled out. And what the fuck had happened in there?
“Time to transport.”
The EMTs got to their feet and picked up the board by the grips. Tom took the IV bag without being invited to, and no one tried to stop him. They knew that when it came to his sister, he was going to help, and he was going in the ambulance, and if anybody had a problem with this, they could fuck themselves.
“Danny!”
As Anne continue to struggle, he spoke to her. “Stay tight, sis. You just stay tight.”
That hand. Dear God . . . her days as a firefighter were over.
It was what he had wished for all along. But not like this. He didn’t want it to happen like this.
* * *
Danny lay facedown and sprawled under a great weight, his body that of a soldier slain on a battlefield. Water was dripping on the back of his helmet and somehow finding a way into one of his ears . . . before it penetrated the cracks in his broken SCBA mask and got into his nose and mouth. It was definitely not blood. The shit moved too fast and it was cool—and it tasted like ash.
Yup, there was a big fucking crack in his SCBA mask, the seal broken, but at least the oxygen supply wasn’t compromised and enough air got pumped that he had something worthwhile to breathe. Which was good.
The rest of everything was bad. He couldn’t hear anything from his radio. And he had no sense of how long he’d been down. The air tank had a lifespan of about thirty minutes, and he’d been with Anne only six to seven—
“Anne . . .” he moaned.
Abruptly, his brain jammed with what he’d done to her, and he tried to reassure himself that at least he’d gotten her out. He’d seen her carried away. That was the last thing he remembered before he’d been hit.
What motivated him to fight was the need to find out what had happened next. Did his tourniquet stay in place? Or had the knot slipped or the length broken or . . .
Shit, he had to get out of here to make sure she was okay.
No vision, though . . . he couldn’t see a frickin’ thing and he couldn’t feel anything below his waist. Paralysis? Shock? Weight on his legs? He was on his stomach, he knew that much, and one of his arms was bent at a very bad angle. He should probably sense some pain there, too, but it was a no go.
With a curse, he tried to move something, anything—nope. He was totally trapped. After a couple more tries, he managed to shift an arm around—the one that wasn’t twisted like a pipe cleaner—and he strained to turn his head an inch. When he tried his legs again, they were immobile, and for a split second, he knew pure terror. Were they not moving because they were pinned, or had whatever had fallen on him severed his spinal cord along the way?
Refocus. Inside his PPEs, he was sweating, and maybe bleeding—he didn’t know. But the heat wasn’t bad, so he suspected the fire was at least contained. Also, the ambient noise level was down, although maybe that was his shock talking. Or not talking. Whatever.
He had to get to Anne.
“Help . . .”
Okay, that didn’t carry far. He took a deeper breath. “Help . . .”
He had a glow stick and a whistle in his chest pocket. If he could just get to them, maybe he could make some noise, throw some light, that would give the crew something to find him with?
“Help . . .”
With dwindling strength, he gave the whole movement thing one last try, even though, assuming he had a spinal cord injury, that was ill-advised. Grunting, straining, he lifted his head and managed to free his left arm. It cost him, though. What little vision he had went on the fritz and something started to hurt in his chest.
Heart attack? Maybe.
He was young, but that was what his father
and his grandfather had died of. Widow-makers were what the docs called those occlusions . . .
Not that he had anyone to make a widow.
Anne was the only woman who had ever held his interest longer than it took to have an orgasm. And she was never going to be the marrying type. Hell, she’d cut her own arm off before she’d let anybody put a ring on—
Oh, God, what had he done to her?
Groaning, he patted around with his gloved hand, feeling for something he could bang with or—wait . . . was this a pipe? No way of knowing, but it damn well felt like a cylindrical, super-hard object as he fit his palm around it.
With the speed and strength of someone a hundred and eighty years old, he managed to grip whatever it was and knock it against whatever he could find. Wet wood made a thucking sound that didn’t carry more than his voice did, but the concrete floor?
He got a good ring out of it.
Danny hit the pipe over and over again, training all his focus on raising his arm the five inches he could and bringing it down, over and over again. With every strike, the thing weighed more and made less noise.
Eventually, he gave up. And realized he was having a lot of trouble breathing.
The oxygen feed was dead. His thirty minutes up. So he’d been unconscious for almost twenty.
And still nothing but that dripping. No voices calling his name. No sirens. No debris removal. Yeah, sure, there was no more collapsing going on, but gravity had already won the grudge match against the warehouse and was doing victory laps around the ruins.
It appeared he was going to die here—and what exactly did that mean?
As he posed the question, he waited for the slide show of his life to roll out, that whole flash-before-the-eyes thing that people talked about.
When his mental screen stayed blank, he thought, Probably just as well. There wasn’t much he wanted to revisit. But shit, shouldn’t he go out with something better than . . . nothing?
All right . . . fine. He was pissed he didn’t know how Game of Thrones ended. And he was going to miss the taste of cold beer on a hot rooftop in August. And damn it, why the hell had he bothered to quit smoking?
