Chapter 42
FORTY-TWO
Heath
THE BANQUET HALL LOOKED like a vision from another planet. The huge event space had taken up the entire center of the old hotel, open all the way to the ceiling of the four-story building, thirty-odd feet above our heads.
Based on the explosion we’d seen and felt earlier, someone had planted a bomb on the roof. That roof was now lying in pieces on the floor, while the rest of the building rumbled ominously around us. Great clouds of choking gray dust billowed in the light of my phone’s flashlight.
Next to me, Jez bent over. Her hand gripped my arm for balance as she pulled off her fancy shoes and tossed them away. She hiked the tight skirt of her gown up to her hips, and before I could get words out, she was away, scrabbling around and over fallen chunks of concrete.
She moved with utter fearlessness... with a complete lack of care for the injuries she was sure to get as she grabbed sharp-edged handholds and stepped over broken glass and wood.
I gaped after her for a precious second, unable to comprehend how she was even functioning with Gage’s pain pouring through the bond. I was only getting it secondhand, and it was very nearly crippling.
Keeping the flashlight beam as steady as I could in one shaking hand, I lunged after her. Groans and sobs from partygoers trapped in the rubble formed a nauseating symphony around me. The occasional human limb coated with sickly gray dust stuck out from random gaps.
Through it all, Jez scrambled ahead of me in an absolutely straight line, climbing over any obstacles that stood in her way as though an invisible elastic band was dragging her forward.
I coughed and choked on dust as I did my best to keep her in sight. My stomach plunged as her small form dropped behind a pile of debris, disappearing from view. But when I reached the spot, it was to find her running across a relatively clear area of the floor.
Stupidly, I paused and looked straight up. Beyond the haze of dust, patches of stars twinkled in the night sky where the roof had once been. The sirens that had been blaring in the distance sounded nearly on top of us.
“Knox!” Jez shouted, jolting me out of the surreal haze of the destroyed building and Gage’s pain.
I ran after her, stumbling over toppled chairs and smaller chunks of debris. My phone’s light wavered wildly before playing over a gray-coated figure crouched beneath the slant of an upended table.
“Get out!” Knox choked, his voice wavering with effort. “It’s not... safe—”
Horror suffused me as my brain made sense of what my eyes were seeing. The half-destroyed table was jammed like a lever beneath one end of a much larger section of fallen concrete; Knox using his own body to keep it from collapsing and crushing the unmoving body trapped beneath it.
No. Not body. Bodies.
I dove in next to Knox, shoving my shoulders against the creaking wood of the broken table to take some of the strain.
“Gage!” Jez shouted, “Tony! Wake up!”
“Can’t,” Knox grunted. “I can’t hold it...”
I jammed my shoulders harder against the underside of the table, my back and thigh muscles screaming as I took more of the weight.
“Jez,” I grated. “Can you pull them out?”
It seemed impossible on the face of it. She was a tiny wisp of a thing, and Gage was a mountain of an alpha—but we were short on options.
She grunted and cried out. More pain flared through the mating bond.
“His leg is trapped!” she said, sounding near tears. “And most of his weight is on Tony! I can’t move them!”
I clenched my jaw and threw my full strength against the table. “Knox, go help her!” I managed past gritted teeth. “I’ll hold this!”
Knox coughed out an acknowledgement and slipped past me. My spine popped and creaked in protest as I took the remaining strain. Christ—how long had Knox been bracing this thing before we got here?
Something behind me shifted, and there were more groans of effort.
“We have to get them out!” Jez’s voice held more than a hint of hysteria. “Come on... come on!”
The pile shifted again, and the pain through the bond grew white-hot. My vision wavered; a haze of red closing in from the edges. Jez’s cries grew into screams.
I couldn’t lose consciousness. I couldn’t lose consciousness.
I could feel the table I was bracing pressing my body down. My muscles shook. The heels of my shoes squeaked against the dusty tile of the floor. A rasping cry of denial clawed its way up from my throat—
Two bulky bodies shoved themselves in on either side of me.
“Hold on, sir.” The voice sounded alien... flattened by a respirator mask. “Chicago Fire Department. We’ll get your friends out.”
The crushing weight on my shoulders eased. I still couldn’t breathe properly past the dust and smoke, but the tunnel around my vision receded enough to make out the figures on either side of me, both wearing full gear.
A third firefighter pulled me out from under the table and took my place.
“One... two... three!” The respirator-flattened voice counted down, and the table tilted as the three people beneath it heaved.
I stumbled around to the side and eased Jez away, taking her place and grabbing Gage beneath the armpits as another firefighter levered up the beam that had been trapping his leg.
I heaved, pulling my packmate free. Knox and Jez pulled Tony out of danger immediately afterward, now that he no longer had a two-hundred-twenty-five-pound alpha on top of him.
“Stretchers!” called one of the firefighters. “We need two stretchers over here!”
Gage was alive—the pain through the bond proved that much, even if he was barely conscious.
The need to crash to my knees next to Tony’s body and check his pulse was nearly overwhelming—but Jez, Knox, and I were immediately elbowed out of the way by the knot of first responders surrounding the pair.
The wreck of the banquet hall was now a confusing blur of moving, high-powered flashlight beams. Rescuers swarmed the area, shouting orders and calling for more stretchers.
Gage and Tony were efficiently strapped onto backboards and transferred to the first two stretchers.
“Go with them,” one of the firefighters said. “We need to help the people who aren’t ambulatory. This building isn’t stable.”
Knox grabbed my arm, keeping me from following the stretchers. “Thank you,” he told the man. “You and your team saved our lives.”
The firefighter gave a brisk nod, but then he immediately disappeared to rejoin the search.
“Jez.” Knox’s voice was a bare rasp, but Jez dragged her eyes away from Gage and Tony’s stretchers in response, meeting his gaze. “Go with them,” he told her. “We’ll be a few minutes behind you.”
Her dusty face wrinkled in a confused frown, but then the stretcher bearers were already carrying their injured burdens in a slow trek through the rubble. She looked torn for a moment, but then she nodded and limped after them.
Worry, fear, exhaustion, throbbed through the mating bond, a counterpoint to the pain of Gage’s injuries. I swallowed hard and choked on grit. Knox still had me by the arm.
“We need to get out,” I told him hoarsely.
His dark eyes glittered in the light of the firefighters’ emergency lamps, hard despite the bloodshot whites. “In a minute.”
He tugged me toward what I was pretty sure had been the stage area, where pitiful whimpers and groans came from the shadow of a pile of rubble.
I’d dropped my cell phone in the confusion of saving the others.
It was probably crushed under the table at this point—the second phone I’d lost this month.
Knox still had his, though. He played the flashlight beam along the base of the pile until it illuminated a familiar face.
Adrian... Paolo... sobbed and flinched as the light hit his eyes. He lifted an arm weakly, as though to fend us off.
I took an abrupt step back. “Knox, what the fuck. Let him rot.”
Hatred roiled in my gut as I stared down at the slimy little weasel who’d orchestrated not only Knox’s attempted murder, but also the shit-show at the silos.
“No,” Knox said in a monotone. “I don’t think so. Help me get him free.”
He propped the phone nearby and grabbed the first chunk of concrete, rolling it aside. I hesitated, but the instinct to obey my pack leader won out over the instinct to get my hands around Paolo’s scrawny neck and squeeze.
Barely.
The collapse that had trapped the omega didn’t include any debris too big for us to move. The first responders were still dealing with the area where most of the guests had been seated. They didn’t appear to have noticed us over here in the shadows.
My hands slipped when I pulled a chunk away from the asshole’s leg. The concrete was wet with blood, and so were my hands when I dropped it on the growing pile next to me. The rest of the debris covering his lower body fell away easily, revealing more blood.
Even though he was no longer trapped, Paolo just lay there—staring up at us with terrified eyes.
The leg I’d freed was twisted at an unnatural angle, and his stupid maroon tuxedo trousers were shredded.
Worse, though, was the source of the blood soaking the floor around him.
It wasn’t just pooling sluggishly. It was pulsing from a gash in his thigh.
He was bleeding out as we watched.
“Don’t... don’t hurt me,” Paolo whimpered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to... to...”
“See, here’s the thing,” Knox said to me, ignoring the omega’s cringing and begging as he shed his jacket and unfastened his suspenders. “Maybe Lorenzo Vozzina was the one who planted a bomb in this building, and maybe he wasn’t.”
He wrapped the suspenders around Paolo’s leg above the wound and yanked them tight, drawing a weak cry of pain from the injured omega. The bleeding slowed to a trickle.
“Maybe he was trying to kill us, and maybe he wasn't,” Knox continued. “One thing's sure, though— if Lorenzo was behind the attack, it means he sent his brand-new trophy mate here to stand directly under a bomb when it went off, while he stayed safely at home, out of the line of fire.”
“Wh-what?” Paolo squeaked.
Knox smiled at him. There was no humor whatsoever behind the expression.
“You might want to ponder that before you crawl back to him, Paolo. And if you decide to make a different choice, my door is always open.” He calmly pulled a business card out of his pocket and slid it into Paolo’s jacket, hiding it behind his rumpled pocket square.
“Heath, get us some help over here, please. My voice is shot to hell.”
I stared for a long moment at the cold, calculating sonuvabitch who led my pack, trying to peer into his skull and see whatever schemes were hatching there. Then I turned and bellowed, “Medic! Medic! We’ve got a serious injury over here!”
We waited until a pair of firefighters started heading our way. Then Knox picked up his phone, slung an arm across my shoulders, and let me support his weight as we turned and limped toward the path that the first responders had cleared, leading to the exit.