Page 184 of My Unhinged Alphas
I wrench free of him and lunge toward the doorway, toward the room, toward the fire and the smoke and the stupid, impossible thought that if I can just get back inside fast enough I can do something, anything. I can’t stand out here while they burn?—
Knox catches me around the waist and hauls me back hard enough that my feet leave the ground for a second. “No.”
I fight him. “Let me go!”
“You go in there, you die.”
“I don’t care!”
That’s not true.
Or maybe it is for the one second I say it.
The smoke is rolling thicker now. Fire is snapping across the ceiling of the second room too, slower than the first, but coming. I can barely see through the hole anymore, just orange and movement and falling debris and nothing that looks survivable.
I twist in Knox’s grip, trying to get free. “Havoc!” I scream. “Vale!”
No answer.
That’s worse than if I heard them screaming.
Knox turns me to face him and grips both sides of my head, forcing me to look at him instead of the fire. “Lena.”
I’m crying now, which makes me angrier than anything else. My eyes sting from the smoke and panic and the force of it all. “No, no, no, you can’t?—”
He kisses me. Just like that.
Hard and sudden and warm in the middle of all that heat and terror, cutting straight through the words in my mouth. It isn’t soft. It isn’t romantic. It feels like a decision. Like something he gives me because there isn’t time for anything slower.
When he pulls back, I’m too stunned to fight for half a second.
That’s all he needs. He pushes me backward through the exterior doorway onto the walkway, one hand still on my shoulder to keep me moving, his eyes locked on mine.
“Stay out here,” he says.
My voice breaks. “Knox?—”
“I’ll be back.” He says it like an order. Like a promise. Like the difference between them doesn’t matter right now. Then he turns and goes back into the smoke before I can stop him.
I try to go after him. I barely get two steps before someone grabs me hard around the arms and yanks me back. I twist on instinct, half-wild with it, and find myself staring at a firefighter in a yellow helmet and breathing mask, shouting something I can’t hear over the fire.
“Let me go!” I scream.
He doesn’t. He drags me farther back from the walkway, putting his body between me and the room as another team rushes past with hoses and axes and a violence of their own, organized, trained, indifferent to the fact that for me this is not a structure fire, not a job, not an incident.
It’s them.
“There are people in there!” I shout, coughing on the smoke. “Three men, three men are still in there!”
The firefighter says something into the radio clipped to his shoulder, then tries to push me farther back again. I fight him for half a second, then stop because the sound of the water hitting the flames changes everything. Steam bursts up in white clouds. Somebody smashes a window three rooms down. Orders get shouted. Boots pound over concrete. The whole motel seems to tilt around the effort of containing something that already feels too far gone.
“There are three men in there,” I tell another firefighter who comes toward me. “One of them went back in. The other two were trapped. Please.” I hear how thin my voice sounds and hate it.
The woman in front of me, older, soot-smudged, calm in the terrifying way competent people are calm, nods once and says, “We heard you.”
That should help. It doesn’t.
I stand there in the parking lot with smoke in my lungs and ash settling on my skin and watch the room burn while strangers try to save the people who somehow stopped being strangers to me before I noticed it happening.
