Chapter 6
Garrett
The coffee maker hissed and sputtered, filling my kitchen with the smell of dark roast while I stood at the window watching the sun climb over Queens.
I was going to see her again next week.
I poured my coffee. Took it black—the way I'd learned to during thirty-six-hour shifts when cream meant extra trips to the bathroom and time was a luxury we didn't have.
The mug was warm in my hands. Solid. Real.
Sloane Harper was back in my life.
My phone sat on the counter where I'd left it last night. Screen dark, but I could still see the message.
Together.
She'd written it first. We'll figure this out. Together. And I'd stared at that word for a full minute before typing it back. Just the echo. Just the confirmation.
I could have sent something else. Something safer. Sounds good. A thumbs up. Anything that didn't feel like reaching across eight years of silence and taking her hand.
But she'd offered it first. That word. And some part of me—the part I'd spent a decade trying to kill—couldn't let it hang there unanswered.
Together.
Like we still knew how to be that. Like the years between us were a pause instead of an ending.
I'd told myself this was professional. The serial arson case. The corruption I'd been documenting for years. The chance to finally expose the network that killed Emma Marsh and a dozen others like her.
Engine 295 needed this story told. The city needed someone to shine a light into the dark corners where city officials made deals over bodies.
Sloane was the best investigative journalist in New York. Maybe the country. This partnership made sense. It was logical. Strategic.
And I was a goddamn liar.
Because underneath all the justifications, underneath the professional necessity and the tactical advantage, there was a simpler truth: I wanted to see her.
After eight years of trying to forget her face, her laugh, the way she used to steal my hoodies and wear them around the apartment like they were evening gowns—after eight years of failed relationships and empty apartments and work that never quite filled the hollow space she left behind—I wanted to sit across from Sloane Harper and pretend, just for a little while, that she hadn't destroyed me when she walked away.
Dangerous. This was dangerous.
I knew it the way I knew fire. The way I could read smoke patterns and structural integrity, and the moment a building went from survivable to a death trap. Some risks you calculated. Others you felt in your bones.
Sloane was the second kind.
I drained my coffee. Set the mug in the sink. Headed for the door.
Keep it professional, Stone.
I almost believed it.
Engine 295 was dying by inches.
I noticed it the moment I pulled into the lot—the bay door stuck halfway up, the mechanism grinding like it had gravel in its gears. Rodriguez was already on his phone, patience fraying around the edges as he talked to someone at Facilities.
"Deferred indefinitely," he said when he hung up. "Pending budget audit."
Shane caught my eye across the apparatus floor.
We'd been having this conversation without words for weeks now. The slow strangulation of a firehouse someone wanted dead.
"They sent people," Brian said, nodding toward the common room. "Suits."
I followed his gaze. Two men in gray, clipboards in hand, measuring the square footage of our living quarters like real estate appraisers at an estate sale.
They didn't introduce themselves. Didn't acknowledge us. Just wrote numbers in neat columns and took photos of spaces they'd labeled "underutilized."
"City Budget Office," Rodriguez said quietly. "Third visit this month."
My jaw tightened. I watched them photograph the kitchen, the bunks, the equipment bay—cataloging our home like inventory to be liquidated.
"Equipment request came back." Rodriguez handed me the form. Red stamp across the top: DENIED. "New thermal imagers, replacement hoses. We're supposed to borrow from Engine 302."
"302's across town."
"I'm aware."
I pulled out my phone. Started taking pictures. The suits with their clipboards. The denied equipment request. The bay door frozen halfway open.
Everything timestamped. Everything documented.
When Sloane and I built this case, I wanted evidence that they were deliberately sabotaging us.
A woman arrived at lunchtime, carrying Tupperware containers that smelled like garlic and basil.
"I'm Becks." She smiled, the expression crinkling the corners of her eyes. Middle-aged. Brown hair shot through with gray. The kind of face that belonged on a church bulletin board or a neighborhood watch committee. "I live a few blocks over. Thought you boys could use a home-cooked meal."
The crew descended like locusts on a wheat field. Brian was first, already prying open a container of lasagna. Rodriguez thanked her with the automatic politeness of someone who'd accepted a thousand community gestures over twenty years on the job.
I hung back.
There was something about her. The way her gaze moved around the station—not curious the way visitors usually were. Not impressed by the rigs or intimidated by the gear.
She was cataloging. Taking inventory. Noting where things were, who stood where, and how the spaces connected.
"Hard work you do," she said, moving toward me. Her voice was warm. Maternal. "Dangerous."
"Part of the job."
"Some calls must stay with you, though." Her eyes found mine. Held them. "The ones you can't forget."
The words hit somewhere deep. Somewhere I'd bricked over years ago.
"All of them stay with you," I said carefully. "That's what it means to do this work."
She smiled again. Patted my arm like I was a nephew she was proud of. "You're one of the good ones, Lieutenant. I can tell."
Then she was gone, leaving behind a table full of food and a crew singing her praises.
"Nice lady," Brian said around a mouthful of lasagna. "We should put her on the regular rotation."
I watched the door she'd walked through.
The feeling wouldn't settle—that sense of being examined. Evaluated. Like I'd been weighed on some invisible scale and she'd recorded the result.
Paranoia. Had to be.
The stress of the closure threats, the corruption case, Sloane walking back into my life. I was seeing shadows where there was only light.
I made myself eat. The lasagna was good.
I couldn't shake the taste of something wrong.
The doorbell rang at six-fifteen the next evening when I was off shift.
I'd cleaned the apartment twice. Not that it needed it—I wasn't the kind of person who let things accumulate.
But I'd straightened the books on the shelf. Adjusted the lamp by the couch. Checked the fridge three times like I was expecting a health inspection instead of my ex-fiancée.
The word landed wrong. Ex-fiancée. Too clinical for what we'd been. Too small for what we'd lost.
I opened the door.
Sloane stood in the hallway with her messenger bag slung across her body and her armor firmly in place. Professional blazer. Hair pulled back. Green eyes that used to look at me like I was the answer to every question she'd ever asked.
Now they were guarded. Careful.
The same way mine probably were.
"Come in."
She stepped past me, close enough that I caught her scent—something subtle, not perfume exactly, more like clean laundry and the faint ghost of newsprint. My chest tightened.
Eight years.
Eight years since I'd smelled that combination. Since I'd known exactly what shampoo she used and how she took her coffee and the sound she made when she laughed for real, not the polished version she gave interview subjects.
"Nice place." She was surveying the apartment the way she surveyed everything—taking in details, filing them away. The minimalist furniture. The framed photo of my father in his dress blues. The bookshelf heavy on tactical manuals and light on fiction.
"It works."
We stood there for a moment, the silence stretching.
Two people who used to know each other's bodies better than their own, now strangers wearing familiar faces.
"Should we—" she started.
"The files are in the living room," I said at the same time.
Awkward laughter. Hers was nervous. Mine felt rusty, like a door hinge that hadn't been used in too long.
We moved to the couch. I'd spread out my documentation on the coffee table before she arrived—incident reports, inspection records, ownership chains traced through shell companies. The pattern I'd been building for years.
Sloane settled into the cushion beside me. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that I caught the scent of her shampoo.
Same one. After all this time, the same damn shampoo.
My mind flashed to Sunday mornings. Her hair was still damp from the shower. The way I used to bury my face in her neck just to breathe her in. The way she'd laugh and squirm and then go still when my mouth found the spot behind her ear.
Focus.
I cleared my throat. "I've already looked into the buildings that were targeted."
Sloane's head came up. Whatever she'd been about to say—whatever professional opening she'd prepared—dissolved. "When?"
"After the second fire. Something about the pattern felt familiar." I pulled my folder from the stack. "Every single property has a history of fire safety violations. Exposed wiring. Blocked exits. Faulty sprinkler systems. The works."
She took the folder. Flipped through it. That crease appeared between her eyebrows—the one that meant she was connecting dots.
"These violations were reported," she said slowly. "But nothing was enforced."
"Not a single one."
Sloane tapped her pen against the folder, eyes still scanning. "Same owners?"
"Different names on paper. But follow the shell companies back far enough and you hit the same handful of players.
" I spread out the ownership records I'd traced.
"A holding company called Apex Properties that exists only on paper.
They own half the firetraps in Queens and a good chunk of Manhattan. "