Chapter 2
Levi
My twin brother, Jude, was already pulling his turnout pants on when I jogged into the firehouse. We weren’t identical. I was shorter by an inch, but he was younger by ten minutes, and long ago we’d agreed that made us equals.
The station had already shifted. That was the only way to describe it—the air changed when a call came in, something electric and focused replacing whatever easy atmosphere had been there a moment before.
The clatter of helmets, the slap of boots on linoleum, the hiss of the coffee pot left abandoned mid-brew.
Shaw was already at the truck, running his pre-check with the methodical efficiency of a man who’d been doing it for fifteen years and still treated it like the first time.
Evers was two steps behind him, pulling her hair back as she walked, saying nothing, already somewhere else in her head the way she always got when a call came in.
I felt the shift move through me the way it always did, that clean spike of adrenaline that sharpened everything down to the immediate and necessary.
Except today, it was taking longer than usual to kick in.
I pulled on my boots and tried to get my head right.
Pine and Fourth. I ran the street layout in my mind, the access points, the neighboring structures, and the way that block sat at a slight downhill grade that could complicate drainage if we needed to flood the space.
The familiar mental checklist that usually came automatically, the one that drowned everything else out.
It wasn’t drowning anything out today.
Today, it was competing with the memory of Becca at Violet’s, damp and flushed and trying so hard to hold herself together.
The way she’d taken those napkins from me, as if my hands near her were something she couldn’t afford.
The way she’d looked when she came back from the bathroom, blotchy and braced, like she’d given herself some kind of internal talking-to.
The way she’d stood there and let me get her another coffee without arguing about it, which for Becca was practically surrender.
I wanted to see her again. That was the plain stupid truth of it. I’d left her twenty minutes ago, and I already wanted to go back to Violet’s and find out if she was still there.
I pulled on my jacket and told myself to focus.
Jude was at the truck beside Shaw, checking straps and hoses with methodical purpose. I caught his eye, and he nodded, just the slightest tilt of his head, but it was enough. Out here, everything unspoken carried weight.
“About time,” he muttered, though his grin gave him away. “Small one—kitchen fire on Pine and Fourth.”
“Got it,” I said, grabbing my gear and hauling it on in practiced motions.
Evers glanced at me from the other side of the truck, something assessing in the look, and then away again. She had good instincts about people, and I had the feeling she’d clocked whatever was written on my face and filed it away without comment.
We slid into our seats as the siren blared, the truck jolting forward.
By the time we’d rolled through the doors and onto the slick street, the world had narrowed to the wail of the siren and the rhythm of the rain.
The storm-slicked streets blurred past the windshield, wipers fighting to keep up, the town sliding by in wet grey streaks.
That was the thing about this job that nobody told you, the thing I’d figured out somewhere in my first year.
The moment the call came in, you had to stop being yourself for a while.
You just have to be useful. There was something clarifying about that, something I’d needed more times than I could count.
The version of me that had knelt in a parking lot and made a fool of himself, the version that stood too close to a woman in a café and forgot what his hands were doing—that version had to wait outside.
The job required someone else. Someone better.
I was almost there. Almost.
Kitchen fire. A small one, Jude had said.
They were almost always small ones until they weren’t, and I’d learned a long time ago not to decide what I was walking into before I got there.
That was the discipline of it. You held what you knew loosely, stayed ready to adjust, kept your head in the present moment, and not three steps ahead. I was working on it.
The inside of the cab was warm and a little too bright, Shaw running through the call details in the seat ahead of me, Evers beside him with her eyes on the road like she was driving it herself.
I watched the rain streak the windows and thought about Becca’s coffee going cold on the counter, and wondered if she’d stayed a while after I left, or gone straight back out into the rain.
I hoped she’d stayed. I hoped the café had given her whatever she’d gone in there looking for. I hoped she was warm.
Jude elbowed me lightly. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks, brother.”
“You were at Violet’s, weren’t you?” His grin was playful. “Your voice dropped when you said thanks to somebody. Heard Becca was there.”
I didn’t answer. My jaw worked instead, but the corner of his mouth quirked up like he already knew he was right.
Harper had probably told him everything.
Sweetbriar passed by in a wet blur outside the window, the buildings dripping with rain, the evergreens stretching tall and dark beyond the town limits, their tops disappearing into low mist that rolled down from Mt.
Hood. It smelled of pine and rain-soaked asphalt and wet earth through the cracked window—petrichor—the best smell in the world. Home.
We came around the corner onto Pine, and I saw the smoke before I saw the house.
Thick and grey-black, pushing hard out through the eaves and a blown kitchen window, billowing upward in rolling columns that the rain was doing almost nothing to suppress.
The kind of volume that said this was no longer a toaster fire that someone had panicked about and called in too fast. The neighboring houses crowded close on either side—a craftsman to the left with its porch nearly touching the fence line, an older colonial to the right with shake shingles that would catch fast if this went sideways—and the wind was coming from exactly the wrong direction, pushing the smoke and heat toward the craftsman in slow, deliberate pulses.
I straightened. Whatever had been competing with my attention stepped all the way back.
“That’s not small,” Jude said, low and even.
“No,” I agreed. “It is not.”
Shaw had his door open before we’d fully stopped, already calling it into dispatch, his voice the flat calm of a man recalibrating expectations in real time.
Evers was out right behind him, pulling her mask up, reading the structure the way she always did—fast and systematic, top to bottom, eyes moving to the roofline, the eaves, the gap between this house and the craftsman next door.
“Exposure risk on the left,” she said to no one in particular, because she didn’t need to. We’d all seen it.
We were out of the truck and into the rain, and the smell hit me immediately—that mixture of burning insulation and wet wood and something chemical underneath that meant the fire had gotten into the walls.
Not just the kitchen. The walls. A woman stood on the front lawn in her bathrobe, arms locked around herself, face the color of old paper.
“My husband went back in,” she said. “The dog—he went back for Sparky—”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Two minutes. Maybe three. He went through the front—”
I was already moving.
“Levi.” Jude’s voice behind me had that quality it only got on calls—flat and focused, no room in it. “Together.”
We went in together, the way we always did, the way we’d trained until it was closer to instinct than thought.
Masks on, low, moving through the front doorway into a hallway that was already thick with smoke.
Visibility dropped to arm’s length inside the first five steps.
The heat registered immediately as something more serious than a contained kitchen blaze—not the surface heat of an open flame nearby, but the deeper, pressing heat of a fire that had established itself in the structure, that was living inside the walls and the ceiling and had been doing so for longer than anyone outside had realized.
The kitchen doorway to our right was impassable.
I could see the orange through the smoke without even looking directly at it, a shifting, pulsing glow that backlit the black in horrible amber.
Something in there collapsed—a shelf, a cabinet—and the sound of it rolled through the floor under my boots.
“Back bedroom,” I said. Because that was where people and animals usually went.
We moved down the hallway, each of us with one hand on the wall, counting doorways.
The wallpaper was peeling back in long, curling strips from the heat, and under my glove, the wall was hot, telling me the fire was directly on the other side, working its way through, patient and methodical and entirely indifferent to anything we wanted.
Outside, I could hear Shaw running the hose line, Evers directing, their voices cut up by the rain and the noise of everything, a radio crackling somewhere.
In here, it was different. In here, it was just the roar of it, low and constant, and the creak of the house around us finding new ways to hold itself up.
My throat was already tight from the effort of the breathing apparatus, that familiar pressure against my face, and I moved through it the way I always did—don’t think about the equipment, don’t think about the house, think about what you came in here for.