Chapter 27
ELLA
The first thing I register is the sound—a steady beep that pierces the dark like a cruel metronome.
It hammers against my skull and makes my teeth ache.
My mouth tastes like metal, my tongue is thick and foreign.
When I blink, the world resolves itself in pieces: the curve of a frozen moon, the silhouette of half-built studs against the sky, the smell of dust, diesel, and something bitter and acrid I can’t name.
I try to move but fail miserably. My wrists bite with a rope so tight I can feel the fibers bruise my skin.
My shoulders protest when I shift, pain blooming along my ribs where a band of something heavy presses against my chest. The beeping gets louder.
A digital display flashes in my peripheral vision.
Panic climbs my throat hot and fast, but there’s another sensation underneath it that steadies me—a solid, human heat pressed to my back. The scent hits me immediately. Cole. His shoulders, breath ragged and shallow, against the base of my neck. He’s here. He’s alive.
That fact alone steadies my hands enough to whisper, “Cole?”
A soft, damned-raspy sound comes from behind me, the kind of sound a man makes when he’s swallowing back pain and something else—fear, maybe.
“Yeah,” he answers. “I’m here.”
We are tied back-to-back. My cheek is inches from the rough fabric of his shirt; his body anchored to mine like a broken sentinel.
The taste of copper floods my mouth as I move my head and see the smear of dark on his temple.
A brown stitch of dried blood. He must have taken a hit. My hand shakes even though it’s bound.
We don’t have the luxury of time to be shocked for long. Footsteps crunch on gravel. Flashlight beams slice across the skeleton of the construction site, and the rays settle on us with perfect, humiliating certainty. Faces appear out of the light like actors stepping onto a stage.
Toby and Calista. Both of them are smiling like we’re at the part of the story where they finally win.
“Well, well, well, look who’s awake.”
Toby steps into the moonlight, holding the flashlight under his chin like he’s telling a ghost story. His eyes look wild, manic, pupils blown wide. He’s sweating even though it’s cold, looking like a man who’s finally snapped in the way everyone saw coming.
Calista floats in behind him, blonde hair messy, lipstick smeared, mascara streaked from crying or sweating, or both. She looks unhinged, her hands shaking as she tucks her hair behind her ear, then immediately shakes it loose again.
“Oh, precious,” she coos, stepping closer. “You’re alive.”
Her sweetness is a knife.
Cole growls behind me. “Don’t come near her.”
Toby laughs, waltzing closer. “Relax, big man. You two have bigger problems than us getting handsy.”
He taps the vest on my chest with his flashlight. I flinch.
Calista crouches down, her face inches from mine. “Hi, Ella.” Her voice drips with mock sympathy. “I have to say, I’m impressed. You really threw yourself into his life, didn’t you? Like a little barnacle.”
“Get away from her,” Cole warns, voice low and shaking with rage.
She ignores him, flicking her eyes toward him like he’s nothing. “Funny, isn’t it? I offered him everything. Marriage. A family. Stability. And he chose a cowgirl with a horse girl complex and a tragic past.” She twirls a strand of her hair. “Men are stupid.”
“You cheated on him,” I snap before I can stop myself.
Her smile twists. “He pushed me to it.”
“No,” Cole snarls. “You pushed yourself.”
Toby kicks his boot lightly, tauntingly. “Aww, look at him. Still so high and mighty. Even tied up like a pig before slaughter.”
My stomach turns. Cole tries to shift again, but the vest’s wiring digs into him. “Why are you doing this?”
Toby’s jaw ticks. “Because you don’t get to win, Dawson. You don’t get to walk away with your company, your kid, your shiny new life, and your perfect ranch girlfriend—“
Calista cuts in sharply. “You should have listened to me, Cole. If you’d just signed over the business, if you’d let me and Toby handle the sale, we’d all be rich by now.”
“You were going to sell the company behind my back,” Cole spits. “You were going to leave me with nothing.”
“You deserved nothing!” Calista screams, the sound cracking off the steel beams around us. “You made me keep that baby!”
My blood runs cold.
“She is your daughter!” Cole growls.
“She ruined my life!”
Something in me snaps. “You ruined your own life. Aria isn’t—“
Calista lunges and backhands me so fast I barely see it coming. Her hand slaps like a clap. Hard. My cheek blossoms hot, and the world tilts for half a second. Cole roars behind me, wild and animalistic. I feel his ribs tremble as he jerks with the force of a man who tries to break free of rope.
“Touch her again,” he snarls, “and I swear—“
Toby crouches again and lands a loose, ugly punch to Cole’s jaw while he’s still bound.
Blood sprays; it hits my shoulder and the rough fabric of his shirt.
He doesn’t collapse entirely—he’s stubborn like that—but his breath comes in ragged, painful pulls.
They stand over us like gods you don’t want to anger.
My eyes sting with tears. “Stop it! Just stop!”
Toby steps back, wiping his knuckles like he’s proud.
Calista tosses her hair, breath coming fast. “You always thought you were better than me, Cole. Morally superior. Stronger. Smarter.” Her voice rises. “But you’re nothing. You’re trash. And after tonight? You won’t even be that.”
Toby gestures around. “Everything you built? Gone. The Morgans won’t save you now. The explosion will take out the buildings and the east pasture. Insurance will screw you.” He smirks. “You lose everything.”
Calista straightens and stalks around us like she’s inspecting a prize.
“They’ll rule it as arson, an accident, whatever story fits.
But the look on Hank Morgan’s face when he realizes his beloved daughter is gone?
Because of you? Priceless.” She smiles like she is tasting victory.
“You’ll take the fall, Cole. Or we’ll make sure the world thinks you were always a danger. ”
Toby presses the button on the small detonator panel strapped to his wrist. Not to blow us up, no. Just to start the countdown faster.
The timer jumps.
00:19:00
00:18:59
00:18:58
Calista claps like it’s a party trick. “Oops.”
They leave laughing, hand in hand like the world’s sickest Bonnie and Clyde.
The moment they’re gone, I swallow a sob. “Cole, what do we do?”
He’s quiet for a long, impossible beat, swallowing hard like he is gathering something fierce inside of him. I can feel his shoulder press against mine as he flexes and works on something I can’t see.
“They tied us sloppy,” he says, a rough edge to his voice. “Idiots. Rope’s not cinched right. They tried to make it tight so we couldn’t move, but they left too much slack on the knot.”
I focus on the cords binding my wrists because it’s the only thing that feels like control.
I can feel Cole’s fingers moving behind me, working at the knot where his own hands chafe against the ropes.
He’s been hit. He’s in pain. He smells like blood and diesel and something feral that makes the hair on my arms rise.
“How long?” I ask, and the numbers over the LED glow like a countdown to my soul. 00:18:03.
“I’ll get you loose,” he whispers. “Hold still.”
He’s so steady, even when he’s bleeding, kicked and beaten—there’s a set to his jaw that says he means it. I let him work, let the panic climb, and then settle because it has to; there’s no other option.
His fingers are clumsy but deliberate. The rope scrapes my skin raw.
At one point, he mutters something about the knot; his breath is hot against my ear.
I wonder how the man who builds bridges with his hands learned to unpick knots under pressure, and I think how many times he must have practiced getting himself out of tough spots for work, for the field. He always did things with his hands.
00:10:12.
He finally frees his right hand and works to get behind me.
For a second, we’re both just breathing, existing in the middle of the dark like two halves of the same thing.
Then his hand, slick with blood, grazes mine, and for a sliver of a second, I forget the beeping, the lights, the cruel words.
He hooks his fingers into the rope at my wrists and works the knot.
“It’s… almost—“ he hisses.
I grab at his wrist to give him something solid to hold. He answers by working faster. Sweat slicks his brow. Blood trickles into the hollow at the base of his throat.
00:05:41.
My chest squeezes. I’d thought there were so many ways to die when you stand in the middle of a life you planned. This isn’t one I imagined. Not like this—so intimate and small, so ridiculous to die at a construction site for reasons that smell like hate and small-town grudges.
He gets my hands free at last. The ropes bite red circles into my skin.
My palms are raw and shaking, but I move with a new animal speed, ripping at the vest strap that presses the bomb to my torso.
There’s an access buckle, one they figured to be hardy but careless.
Cole’s free hand is working on his own harness, metal scraping in the dark, and he grunts when a part finally gives.
00:02:58.
It’s a scramble that makes me dizzy. We’re rending cloth, clawing at snap releases, fingers numb with cold and blood and adrenaline. Every rustle sounds like an accusation. Every time something pops free, it’s a small, miraculous thunder.
“Cole—“ I gasp as we manage one vest, then another. Our hands are slick; salt and blood mix on our fingers, and I feel like I’ll throw up with relief and fear.
00:01:16.
He yanks the last of his harness loose, and we scramble to our feet, legs wobbly and useless from the ropes and the blows.
We don’t waste a second. He grabs my hand, and we run like we belong to each other, because in that moment, that’s all that matters.
The houses loom like sleeping beasts. Behind us, the timer screams into single digits as if it can sense our movement.
“The lake,” he says, panic brightening his eyes into something like belief. “We need to get into the water.”
My lungs burn, chest a tight fist of terror. “Don’t leave me,” I plead, and I mean it with the kind of rawness that tastes of everything we survived and everything we risked losing.
“I’m not leaving you,” he replies, and I catch the crack in his voice.
We run faster—all crooked steps and stuttering—heading toward the ragged line of the lake where the moon scatters itself thin and silvery.
The ground underfoot jerks me, knocks my feet out as an explosion blooms behind us like a dying star flaring one last time. Heat thwacks my back even as the deafening roar lifts us off balance. I stumble, and Cole’s arm is there, iron-strong, to shove us both onward.
Debris rains down. The air fills with the stench of burning wood and something chemical and wrong. For a terrifying second, I worry the whole world will crack open and eat us. We leap into the lake together. The water hits like salvation.
Cold wraps me like a new skin. The shock of it takes my breath away, and for a heartbeat, everything is loud and only the wild, frenzied beating of my heart matters.
Then an aftershock rolls across the surface; a jagged column of fire and wood shoots up where the house frames stood, and sparks rain down like furious fireworks.
We break the surface, coughing and swallowing.
Cole clamps an arm around me, hauling me to the shallow shore.
The water is full of bits of charred timber and acrid bubbles.
The heat from the blast still stings my ears.
My lungs heave as I suck in air, my ribcage biting.
Cole’s face is smeared with blood and smoke. His breath is a ragged sob.
“Ella… are you… okay?” he pants.
I nod against his shoulder, sobbing with relief. “You saved us.”
He presses his forehead to mine, breath ragged and warm in the cold night air.
“No,” he whispers. “We saved each other.”
Behind us, the construction site burns, but we’re alive.
For a long time, we just breathe as the night burns and the sirens wail in the not-yet dawn, a keening that tells the world that the night stole something and might never be the same again.