Page 186 of My Unhinged Alphas
Chapter 30
Havoc
Knox dropslike somebody cut his strings.
For half a second, nobody moves.
Not because we don’t understand what happened. Not because I thought he was invincible. I’m not stupid. I watched him go back into a burning room after two men he could have left behind if he were built like most people. I saw the smoke in him by the time we got out. I felt his grip slipping on my arm while he was still forcing Vale’s weight forward with the other hand.
Still. Seeing Knox on the ground does something ugly to me.
“Knox.”
Vale is half-folded beside me, coughing like his lungs are trying to turn themselves inside out. Firefighters are suddenly everywhere, hands on shoulders, masks, radios, boots, bright yellow moving through steam and soot. Somebody shoves me down onto the curb and I nearly swing on reflex before I realize they’re trying to get an oxygen mask over my face.
I yank it away long enough to point at Knox. “Wrong man, genius.”
They ignore me. Rude.
Two of them are already on Knox, one checking his airway, the other working fast and practiced, and I hate how still he looks. His face is gray under the soot. Ash in his hair. Mouth open just enough to make him look unfamiliar.
Vale says his name too, but it comes out shredded by smoke. “Knox?—”
“He’ll love this,” I mutter, because if I don’t talk I might actually start thinking, and thinking is rarely my best feature in moments like this.
They get the mask on me, and cold oxygen floods in.
I didn’t realize how badly my chest hurt until now. Every breath feels scraped raw. My eyes won’t stop watering. My throat is wrecked. Vale is in even worse shape, one medic trying to keep him upright while another checks his pupils with a penlight he absolutely deserves to hate.
Lena is white as paper. She keeps trying to step forward and getting blocked back, not by force, just by competent people who know panic when they see it and have no time to negotiate with it.
Knox still isn’t moving.
And the thing is, I’ve always assumed if Knox and I ever ended up with one of us dragging the other out of danger, it would be the other way around. I always figured I’d eventually get him killed by being myself. Too reckless, too amused, too willing to lean into the bad option if it looked interesting enough. Knox has spent years looking at me like I’m half a mission liability and half a headache with legs. I took a certain pride in that.
Now here he is, face blackened with soot, laid flat on the pavement because he went back for me. For us.
I lower the mask long enough to say, mostly to Vale because he’s the only one close enough to hear it, “You know, I always thought Knox would eventually kill me.”
Vale looks at me through one swollen eye, still breathing through his own mask. “Still might.”
I grin despite myself. “Instead he saved me. Deeply insulting.”
That almost gets something out of him. Not quite a laugh. Close enough to count.
Then Knox coughs.
The medic at his side barks something I don’t catch through the mask and radio noise, but I don’t need the words. Knox drags in one ugly breath, then another, and his eyes crack open with the exact expression I would expect from a man waking up surrounded by strangers and incompetence.
I laugh into the mask. It sounds half-insane, which feels appropriate.
“Told you,” I say to nobody in particular. “Too stubborn.”
A firefighter presses me back down when I try to stand. “Stay seated.”
I lift the mask long enough to tell him, “You people are very controlling.”
He takes the mask and puts it back on my face like I’m an unruly child. Again, rude.
