Chapter 8 Cade
CHAPTER EIGHT
CADE
The Lantern Room was designed to flatter, not illuminate. Smoke-glass lanterns cast a soft amber glow that made faces look like they’d made good choices instead of bad ones.
We’d staked out the quiet end of the bar. Ellis half-leaned on the rail, and I angled toward the service door. His jacket was off, his collar open in a way that looked accidental but probably wasn’t.
We were talking crowd flow like it was the only thing on the table.
“Left aisle in, right aisle out,” he said, fingertip tracing an invisible path on the bar. “If it looks simple, people will follow it.”
“They follow more than arrows,” I said. “They follow whoever sounds like they know what they’re doing.”
He gave a small laugh, eyes on his glass. “Threaten me with responsibility, why don’t you.”
“Not a threat,” I answered. “You’ve already got the voice. Might as well use it.”
That got a real smile, quick and slanted. I didn’t push it.
The room hummed with ice in glasses and low conversation. For once, the night seemed willing to take its time.
Then the calm blew apart.
A loud but muffled crash sounded from below us, followed by the hard, pressurized hissing sound I recognized instantly—a kitchen hood dumping suppression down the line. Strobes punched through the lantern glow, and a brutal alarm tone cut straight through the cozy ambiance.
Portico, I thought. Restaurant level.
“Fire,” I said, not loud, but already moving.
I shouldered the service door, and the stairwell expelled hot, chemical-laced air.
Over our heads, a ceiling tile above the landing bulged, sagged, then dropped.
A pressurized blast of fire suppressant sprayed through the opening.
My reflexes beat my thoughts—I planted a hand in the center of Ellis’s chest and stepped him back.
The wet chemical spray hit my jacket instead of his face, burning my eyes and slicking my sleeve.
Fire suppressant in your eyes ruins a night just as fast as smoke.
“Eyes up,” I said, steady. “Out we go.”
Ellis didn’t argue. He pivoted back into the Lantern Room and put the calm voice to work.
“We’re walking outside,” he told the Lantern patrons like it was obvious. “Left aisle, phones down.”
He pointed, not dramatic—just factual—and people listened because he sounded like the person you listen to.
I took the stairs two at a time and shouldered into Portico.
Live flame.
I saw that a sauté pan had tipped, and the backsplash had flames surrounding it. Fire was already climbing the tile, touching the hood. A towel bar along the wall was starting to burn, and the hanging light over the line was charred along its rim.
The hood was dumping, but the fire had found a way around it.
I grabbed the kitchen extinguisher, checked the hose, and swept a measured, low line across the base of the fire. The thick spray coated the tile in an even layer. The flame jumped off the wall then made one last grab for the light before it finally gave up.
I pulled out my phone and called Wyatt. Luckily, he was already on Main Street for an event and could easily walk over to the hotel.
“Interior Portico,” I said. “Hood dumped, visible flame knocked. Check wall temps and kill the gas.”
“Copy,” Wyatt answered in my ear, calm as daybreak. “Deputy en route. Gas kill on me.”
A guest near the threshold lifted their phone for a hero shot.
“Outside,” I said, two fingers toward the door.
They went.
Somewhere in the service corridor, an adjacent sprinkler head decided it had endured enough and tripped. Water came through the pass in a glistening, shimmering sheet, soaking carpet, and dessert. A server cried out and dragged a loaded tray as a camera crew yelped.
The kind of clean-up that would turn housekeeping into a hazmat team.
“Breakers on dessert station,” I called out to a hotel employee nearby. “Now.”
He ran.
Behind me, the alarm tone kept penetrating the air with its harsh sound; beyond it I could still pick out Ellis’s voice counting people.
“Table six, out,” he said, making sure no one went missing. “Table seven, out.”
The thermal camera finally arrived like a gift.
Wyatt took it in stride, scanned the tile line, and gave me the numbers.
“Surface hot only,” he said. “No climb. You’ve got char, not a full chase.”
“Copy.”
I laid one final sweep along the lip of the hood and shut the can.
Gas thunked off to my right and the hissing sound relaxed a notch. Water from the popped sprinkler kept sheeting through, pushing a river toward an oven. A line cook slid on it, and I caught his elbow and set him on a dry mat.
Wyatt lifted the heat camera and glanced at the screen. “Temps are falling.”
The alarm shut off a moment later, and the whole building seemed to relax.
Behind me, Ellis’s count rolled like a drumline: “Table nine, out. Plus, two staff from the pantry.”
No drama.
Miss Pearl appeared, clipboard as a badge. “We’re in stand-down,” she told the room, steel in her voice. “Y’all can relax, the only thing on fire now is the playlist.”
That’s when a man I’d never seen before found me. He was dressed in an immaculate suit with a scorched temper.
“What the hell happened here?” he asked.
He was obviously a guest mistaking me for someone who worked at the hotel.
“Do you have any idea,” he said, his voice pitched, “what this has cost us? We’re a group of attorneys hosting a sponsor match dinner at your hotel, and now we won’t reach our funding goal.
Contracts, riders, not to mention two million dollars of funding potential in that meeting. And your kitchen just set fire to it.”
“I don’t work here,” I said. “And it wasn’t the kitchen’s idea.”
He looked at the drowned backdrop, the dripping ring light, the river through the room. But he didn’t look at the cooks whose hands were still shaking.
“We’ll be in touch,” he said, which is lawyer talk for I will make this somebody else’s problem.
But Wyatt stepped in with his wedding-friendly smile. “The hotel’s GM will put you in touch with legal. Right now, sir, let’s focus on everyone’s safety.”
Miss Pearl handed the man a napkin.
“Quote for later,” she said, gentle as a shove. “We’re grateful no one’s hurt and proud to support Riverfield.”
He blinked, recalculated, and stalked off. Beck intercepted him by the pillar with a neutral face and a pen.
I set the extinguisher back on its hook, scanned once more for any heat pretending to be gone, and finally let my shoulders drop.
I turned, and Ellis was there, close enough that he noticed the foam on my shoulder. He swiped a clean line with his thumb, caught himself, and made it professional by pressing a bar towel in my hand.
“Hydrate,” he said, the way I say it to rookies at the fire station.
He twisted a cap from a water bottle and handed it to me, his eyes on mine long enough to feel risky.
I drank.
“Nice cadence,” I told him.
“Yours too,” he said, meaning the radio.
For a second, we stood with our shoulders almost touching, the stove cooling behind us.
It was nothing.
But at the same time, it was very much not nothing.
“Cade,” Wyatt called, stealing my focus. “Walk the floor?”
“I’m with you.”
I passed the empty bottle back, and Ellis took it like he’d been handed more than plastic.
We hit the service stairs where the dropped tile had fallen. Fluorescent glare, bad footing.
Behind us, Ellis followed with a second bottle and a producer brain that hated not knowing the end of a story.
Halfway down, his shoe found a stripe of foam and his weight shifted wrong. I didn’t think. Hand on his belt, palm at his hip; I anchored him to the rail and to me. Heat through fabric, and a quick breath against my jaw, the oh in his throat.
“Got you,” I said, low. “Wet stairs, they deceive.”
His laugh was all breath and apology. “Noted.”
I let go first and he opened his eyes like he was turning a dimmer up slowly. Wyatt cleared his throat—the kind reminder of a man who pretends not to see things he saw.
“Back to work, gentlemen,” he said.
“Copy,” we said together, which was ridiculous but exactly right.
We came off the stairs into the back corridor, the part of the hotel that always smells of steam and secrets. White residue tracked in shoeprints, and the air burned with a chemical taste at the back of my throat.
The alarm was gone now, replaced by radios and the clanging sounds of someone reorganizing pans.
Ellis checked his notes, a man making sure the world added up.
“Eighty-four accounted,” he said, and then put a cold bottle in my hand.
“Good number,” I said, and drank.
He watched my throat for one second too long and pretended he hadn’t.
“Just… don’t get hurt,” he blurted.
“You just… don’t block my exits,” I answered, quieter than I’d planned.
We stood there doing nothing we could put in a report. My fingers twitched; his did, too. Then a radio flared to life, boots and a rolling cart cut between us, and the spell broke clean.
Wyatt rounded the corner, clipboard in hand.
“Floor’s clear,” he said. “The duct’s cooling. Portico will smell like a chemistry set for a few days, then it’ll just be a story.”
Wyatt gave Ellis a nod I didn’t see him hand out often. “Good pull.”
“Thanks,” Ellis said.
Beck appeared with a damp towel over one shoulder, shirt sleeves rolled, PR smile holstered perfectly in place.
He took in the corridor, the agents, the staff, us, and addressed the nearest cluster of servers.
“Lantern Room reopens tomorrow,” he said evenly. “Tonight, we did what matters.”
Miss Pearl ghosted past with a tray of water and a look that calmed the room. “Romance stays battery-powered, people stay breathing.”
As she passed us, she tucked a fresh towel into the crook of my arm without breaking stride, then let her eyes lock on the inch of air between our not-quite-touching hands. The smallest, satisfied curve touched her mouth, and then she was gone.
Somewhere in Portico, somebody let out an easy laugh, and the building’s pulse settled.
“See you tomorrow,” Wyatt said to me. “We’ll walk the lane.”
Then he turned and looked at Ellis and added, “Could you tell Beck and the rest of the hotel staff that the stairs will be mopped soon?”
Ellis nodded, thanked him, and then faced me like we were back at a quiet bar, and the world hadn’t tried to cook itself. Up close he had a smear of foam on his jaw. I lifted the towel; he didn’t move. I wiped it away and pretended that wasn’t the most reckless thing I’d done all night.
“Thanks,” he said.
The word meant too many things.
“Hydrate,” I said, because my mouth didn’t trust my heart.
He started toward the mezzanine. I watched him get smaller until the corridor turned him out of sight. My phone was in my hand before I’d told it to be, screen bright on a blank text.
I typed a draft: You did good work.
Too plain, so I erased it.
You kept eighty-four people from becoming an incident report.
Too firefighter, too bleak. Erase.
You don’t have to pretend to hate me when the room is loud.
Absolutely not. Erase.
My thumb typed anyway: Don’t get hurt.
I stared at it, heard my own advice, and deleted the line until the cursor blinked at nothing. The radio muttered my callsign. I pocketed the phone like contraband and went to find Wyatt’s clipboard, because we still needed a few signatures.
In the glass of the service door, I caught my own reflection. Foam-sprayed jacket, eyes that hadn’t slept, a hand that remembered a belt and a hip and the half-second it took for gravity to accommodate. I let the door swing, stepped back into the work, and left the unsent where it belonged.