Chapter 2
Steel edged stairs tap beneath my boots as Blaze drags me up the first two flights of concrete steps. The walls scarred with colourful graffiti, tags and names and painted flames. Dim bulbs light the landings above and below each turn of steps, but none of the wall lights are on, the plastic coverings for the strip bulbs black and smoky. Leaving the stairwell in shadow.
My pulse pounds in my sore nose, pain along my jaw, my temple, from smacking into the large, masked man before I rushed into the maze back at the farmhouse. Blood is thick in the back of my throat, my tongue dry, lips cracked. And I wish I had never gone out.
I wish I’d never agreed to go out with Della. I wish that Terry, one of my father’s nicer guards, would have tracked me down at that abandoned little farm and dragged my arse home. But my phone is in Della’s car, the tracking app within it, which means that no one knows where I am.
Blaze’s hand is like a ring of tight fire around my bicep, the toes of my boots scuffing the top step as he moves towards the hall, pulling the door open, pushing me through it. I stumble into the hall, his grip keeping me from faceplanting the floor. With his thumb, he punches the button for calling the lift, staring at the closed silver doors, scratched with more graffiti, more tags. Our reflection a blurry image in the metal.
It’s silent in this building, as though no life exists here, the world quiet all around as we wait for the elevator to drop to our floor, take us, presumably, up to whatever level of hell he thinks appropriate for me tonight.
It wasn’t ever like this before. When I lived here. There was always noise, people, movements, shouting, screaming, kids playing. It’s as though everything here has died.
I glance up at Blaze from beneath my lashes, not expecting his dark brown eyes like burnt tree bark to already be on mine. I flinch as our gazes connect, but he doesn”t react at all. No more grins, no more silent laughter in the harsh slash of his cruel mouth. He just stares, unblinking, at me, and I can”t look away.
His face blanketed in shadow, carving his dark, strong features into a ghoul-like design. I hold his eye, sucking on the inside of my cheek, wanting to hear him speak again. I almost want to say something just to force his hand, but I don’t, my mouth dry, tongue tied.
Blaze McCoy was my hero once upon a time, and now it is like looking upon the devil himself.
He was always so good, always protected me.
I glance over my shoulder, to the dark stairs at our backs. The hollow space in the centre of the sharp turns of the stairwell. Think of a body there, fallen from the thirty-ninth floor. The noise of it smacking off of the railings on its way down. The thud as it finally hit the bottom. All too fast and too slow. The echo of it through my head. A drum sounding the end. It felt like slow motion, even though it happened so fast.
I think of our earlier conversation, how I told Blaze I didn’t want him to have gotten in trouble, for what we did, when he saved me. What happened in this stairwell all those years ago.
I meant it.
He’s a ghost that haunts my memories, a welcome spectre in a pit of black.
I never wanted anything to happen to him.
“Come,” Blaze says roughly, breaking through my haunting thoughts, his hold a little looser on my arm.
I turn back towards the lift, swallowing dryly as he pulls me into it. Only when the doors clap shut, closing us in, does he release me, roughly shoving me so I land hard against the opposite wall with a crash.
“Why’d you bring me here?” I ask it now, unable to not as I right myself.
The light above our heads flickers as the lift cranks and clatters on its ascent, and I silently pray for it not to go out, I don’t want to be stuck in this lift. Darkness is not my friend, but I feel as though I am about to become very well acquainted with it.
“Are you thick?” Blaze asks, without looking at me. The fingers of his left hand push into the pocket of his jogging bottoms, and he roots around for a moment before pulling free a lighter, silver metal, markings on it I can’t see obscured by his fingers. “I told you to shut the fuck up,” he says calmly, plucking a single cigarette from his other pocket and lighting it as he places it between his lips, smoke clouding up towards the ceiling.
“Blaze,” I lick my lips, breathing deep, tasting blood, sweat, tears, desperation. “I want to kn-”
Blaze’s open palms smack into the front of my shoulders, slamming me violently back into the side of the lift, making the entire thing tremble and I think of it snapping free of its cords, plummeting us all the way down to the ground floor.
But just as suddenly, his body is covering mine, the hot, hot heat of him flush with my front, blistering against my cold skin, radiating through my damp clothes. He leans in, pinching his cigarette from his lips, holding it just out of my line of vision, but I can feel it, warmth, knowing it’s so close, knowing it could burn.
He brings his empty hand up, curling his fingers over my shoulder, his big hand smothering the entire space between my neck and shoulder, he squeezes. Staring into my light eyes with ones as pitch as a starless, moonless night sky.
“You wanna die, Pretty Girl?” Blaze whispers, repeating his earlier question, his voice a deep husk, his breath ghosting down the side of my neck, nose grazing along the bone of my jaw.
Back pinned against the metal wall, his hand crushing my collarbone as he splays his fingers, thumb at the hollow of my throat, pinching me in his grip.
It is conflicting, the way he is both so hot and so cold with me. Calm and aggressive. His words wreaking havoc on my soul. The soft, seductive violence of them. A blaze so beautiful it lures you closer to take a look at its blue flames before spitting embers and engulfing you in its flames.
I look up at him, ignoring the way his cigarette just singes my hair, “All the time.”
His dark eyes flick between mine, his face a blank mask. He draws back, just enough to suck on his cigarette, the smell of burning hair ripe in my nose. His tongue curls over his cupid’s bow before he rolls the cigarette back between his lips, smoke billowing from his nostrils like a fire breathing dragon.
He says nothing, and then he’s stepping back, retaking his hold on my arm, and the lift dings, signalling we’ve reached the destination floor.
The doors fumble open, rocking the entire carriage as Blaze drags me forward, seemingly unfazed by the barely working mechanics of the thing.
The entire floor is in darkness, the long hallway, concrete floors and walls bare just like they were when we were children, are covered in yet more graffiti, other substances that could be blood, could be mud, staining the rest of the blank canvas.
It’s cold, like ice up here, and it is already feeling like winter, even this early in November, but up this high, wind seeming to find its way in from somewhere on this level, it is bitterly cold.
My heart pounds, a mixture of the unknown, his hand still touching me, fear and confusion, all of it making it thud harder and harder. I think of my pills, for my high blood pressure, and panic only worsens my state.
“What are you doing?” Blaze is in my face, pinching my chin, his brow drawn low, “Emmy, stop hyperventilating.”
My chest heaves and heaves and my heart pounds hard in my ears, buzzing making my head spin, my skin hot and uncomfortable, and anxiety is replaced by real fear as I think I’m going into cardiac arrest. That’s when my head snaps to the side, my ears ringing with a high pitched tinny sound, a tear slipping down my cheek at the heat bubbling in the assaulted skin.
Blaze’s hand cups over my cheek, his thumb catching the tear, smoothing beneath my eye, I stop breathing all together then, the scar on my face beneath the rough pad of his thumb.
“I need my pills,” I say then, quietly, nerves fraying inside of my skull, but I need them, and he doesn’t know.
“Pills for what?” his dark eyes are still focussed on the scar upon my cheekbone, something he put there, a reminder of him etched into my flesh like a part of our twisted story.
“I have hypertension,” I lick my lips, bringing his attention to my mouth, back up to my eyes.
“Well then, Pretty Girl,” he smiles and there’s nothing nice about it, “looks like your heart’s about to drum a little faster than it ever has before.”
He nips my bottom lip, fisting my hair and then he’s dragging me through one of the doors by my curls, light from the street flickering in through a broken blind. Blaze tosses me to the ground, snatching the ribbon straight from my curls. My knees smashing into the bare concrete flooring, pain ricocheting up my thigh bones, spiking in my hips, the base of my spine. Sliced palms from the glass shard reopening as they splat against the floor.
I don’t even have time to shake off the dizziness before the door we just came through is slamming shut at my back and I’m alone.