30. Havoc
Havoc
Knox drops like somebody cut his strings.
For half a second, nobody moves.
Not because we don’t understand what happened.
Not because I thought he was invincible.
I’m not stupid. I watched him go back into a burning room after two men he could have left behind if he were built like most people.
I saw the smoke in him by the time we got out.
I felt his grip slipping on my arm while he was still forcing Vale’s weight forward with the other hand.
Still. Seeing Knox on the ground does something ugly to me.
“Knox.”
Vale is half-folded beside me, coughing like his lungs are trying to turn themselves inside out.
Firefighters are suddenly everywhere, hands on shoulders, masks, radios, boots, bright yellow moving through steam and soot.
Somebody shoves me down onto the curb and I nearly swing on reflex before I realize they’re trying to get an oxygen mask over my face.
I yank it away long enough to point at Knox. “Wrong man, genius.”
They ignore me. Rude.
Two of them are already on Knox, one checking his airway, the other working fast and practiced, and I hate how still he looks. His face is gray under the soot. Ash in his hair. Mouth open just enough to make him look unfamiliar.
Vale says his name too, but it comes out shredded by smoke. “Knox?—”
“He’ll love this,” I mutter, because if I don’t talk I might actually start thinking, and thinking is rarely my best feature in moments like this.
They get the mask on me, and cold oxygen floods in.
I didn’t realize how badly my chest hurt until now. Every breath feels scraped raw. My eyes won’t stop watering. My throat is wrecked. Vale is in even worse shape, one medic trying to keep him upright while another checks his pupils with a penlight he absolutely deserves to hate.
Lena is white as paper. She keeps trying to step forward and getting blocked back, not by force, just by competent people who know panic when they see it and have no time to negotiate with it.
Knox still isn’t moving.
And the thing is, I’ve always assumed if Knox and I ever ended up with one of us dragging the other out of danger, it would be the other way around.
I always figured I’d eventually get him killed by being myself.
Too reckless, too amused, too willing to lean into the bad option if it looked interesting enough.
Knox has spent years looking at me like I’m half a mission liability and half a headache with legs. I took a certain pride in that.
Now here he is, face blackened with soot, laid flat on the pavement because he went back for me. For us.
I lower the mask long enough to say, mostly to Vale because he’s the only one close enough to hear it, “You know, I always thought Knox would eventually kill me.”
Vale looks at me through one swollen eye, still breathing through his own mask. “Still might.”
I grin despite myself. “Instead he saved me. Deeply insulting.”
That almost gets something out of him. Not quite a laugh. Close enough to count.
Then Knox coughs.
The medic at his side barks something I don’t catch through the mask and radio noise, but I don’t need the words. Knox drags in one ugly breath, then another, and his eyes crack open with the exact expression I would expect from a man waking up surrounded by strangers and incompetence.
I laugh into the mask. It sounds half-insane, which feels appropriate.
“Told you,” I say to nobody in particular. “Too stubborn.”
A firefighter presses me back down when I try to stand. “Stay seated.”
I lift the mask long enough to tell him, “You people are very controlling.”
He takes the mask and puts it back on my face like I’m an unruly child. Again, rude.
Vale is staring at Knox over the edge of his own oxygen mask, one eye nearly swollen shut, the other fixed and dark and alive in a way it wasn’t ten minutes ago.
There’s soot all over him, blood dried at his temple, bandage on his wrist gone half-black from the fire, and still his whole attention is on Knox.
Knox sits up too fast and immediately regrets it. I can tell from the way his shoulders lock.
The medic pushes him back down. “Easy.”
Knox pulls the oxygen mask off long enough to rasp, “Vale.”
Vale lets out something that might have been a laugh if his lungs weren’t wrecked. “Still here.”
Knox’s eyes cut to me next.
I spread my hands as much as the firefighters and blanket and general catastrophe will allow. “Surprise.”
He closes his eyes for half a second, then opens them again. That’s his version of emotion on a good day. I can work with that.
When the mask is back on his face, I say, “You know, I always figured you’d eventually kill me.”
Knox’s eyes shift toward me.
I tap my own chest. “Did not have ‘runs into a burning room and drags me out’ on the list.”
Vale coughs behind his mask and I can’t tell if he’s laughing or dying a little more, which is not ideal.
Knox takes the mask off again because apparently he has learned nothing in the last two minutes. “Shut up.”
I grin, then wince because smiling hurts more than it should. “See? That’s the tone I trust.”
The medics keep trying to do their jobs around us and we keep making it difficult, which feels like a good sign. Dead men are famously easier to manage.
Lena is there too, a little back from the curb now because a firefighter made her move and she clearly only obeyed because she was choosing her battles.
Her face is streaked with soot and tears.
Blanket still around her shoulders. Eyes too bright.
She’s looking at all three of us like she can’t decide whether to scream or hit us.
The firefighters start asking questions the second they decide none of us are about to fall over dead in front of them.
Where did the fire start. How many people were inside. Did anyone smell accelerant. Was the room heater on. Did we see anyone outside before it went up.
I answer most of them because I’m the least likely to sound concussed, which is a depressing thought.
“Door side first,” I say, lifting the mask long enough to talk. “Window too. It came up too fast to be wiring issue.”
“We don’t think it’s a wiring issue either.” The firefighter crouches in front of me, a woman with ash in the lines around her eyes. “You see anyone?”
“No.”
“Any enemies?”
I smile at that because the alternative is saying yes and then having to define the word. “Enough to be annoying.”
She doesn’t smile back. Professional. Heartless. I respect it.
Knox is answering his own set of questions a few feet away, voice still rough from smoke but steady now that oxygen has put some color back in him.
Vale is giving shorter answers because every sentence clearly hurts.
Lena is wrapped in one of the scratchy emergency blankets now, watching all of it with that too-bright, exhausted stare of someone who has run out of room for surprise but keeps getting handed more anyway.
One of the firefighters says, “Any reason someone would target your room specifically?”
All four of us go quiet for half a beat.
A siren cuts off near the curb and two paramedics head over with another kit.
The whole lot is brighter now, noisier, more crowded.
Firefighters still working the remains of the room.
Neighbors gathering where they’ve been told not to.
People pretending not to stare at the four smoke-blackened disasters on the curb.
Then the motel owner arrives.
You can always tell an owner from the expression. He looks stricken in a deeply financial way. Fifty-something, badly buttoned shirt, sandals, phone clutched in one hand, face pale with shock and apology. He keeps saying “I’m so sorry” before anyone’s even accused him of anything.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again, stopping in front of us. “I don’t understand, I checked everything last month, the wiring, the units, the heaters, everything.”
I want to laugh, but I’m too tired to make it sound fun.
Knox gives him a flat look. “You had empty extinguishers.”
The owner actually flinches. “What?”
“In the room,” Knox says. “Empty.”
That rattles him more than the fire itself seems to. Good.
“That’s impossible,” he says. “No, no, they were serviced, I signed—” He stops talking when he sees none of us believe him.
Lena says, hoarse from smoke, “Were there cameras in the hallways?”
“Cameras? Yes, outside, on the lot, reception, stairwell, some hallways.”
Knox turns. “Save the footage.”
The owner nods too quickly. “Yes, yes, of course.”
I watch him while he says it and decide almost immediately that he’s telling the truth about one thing only: he did not expect this. He looks terrified, overwhelmed, and deeply aware that his motel may have just become evidence in something much uglier than an insurance claim.
That helps exactly not at all.
A paramedic kneels in front of Knox and starts shining lights in his eyes, asking orientation questions he answers with visible contempt.
Vale gets his ribs checked again and nearly bites the man’s head off when he presses too hard.
Lena’s getting waved off as smoke exposure and mild shock, which sounds insulting given the night she’s had.
I’m halfway through explaining to another firefighter that no, we did not leave candles burning, because apparently we look like idiots who’d light candles in a motel, when I see movement at the edge of the lot.
A kid.
Not a little kid. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Thin. Dark hoodie. Ball cap low. He moves with that uneasy, deliberate purpose of someone trying very hard to seem like he belongs and failing.
I know the look immediately.
Initiate. Not sworn in. Not trusted far. Sent to carry messages because if things go wrong, nobody important is lost.
He walks straight toward us, and every muscle in me tightens.
Knox sees him too. Vale does a second later. Lena just notices the way all three of us go still and follows our attention.