Chapter 32 Quinn #3
It shifts. Barely. The beam grinds across the tile floor with a shriek that echoes down the hallway.
Quinn shoves harder, every muscle in his arms trembling as heat sears through the towel and into his palms, the pain white-hot and sharp enough to make his vision stutter.
His alpha healing kicks in, cells racing to repair damage even as the fire chews through him faster than his body can keep up.
Not nearly fast enough.
The smell of scorched skin hits his nose and nearly makes him gag.
“Move, you piece of shit!” He throws his shoulder into the beam, ignoring the way his palms scream in protest as he pushes it another few inches. The gap widens enough. Quinn stumbles through and turns back immediately.
Lana. He grabs her under the arms and hauls her across the floor, coughing hard.
“Stay with me,” he mutters hoarsely.
The staff exit and freedom are just down the hall. He staggers toward it, half carrying, half dragging Lana, his hands throbbing so violently he can barely feel the weight of her anymore.
He throws his ass into the exit bar, but it doesn’t budge. Quinn tries again and again. He finally throws a shoulder into it, but it’s either melted shut or worse, blocked from the outside.
For one terrible second, panic claws its way up his spine. Visibility in the hallway is nil, and he can hear glass popping somewhere deeper in the building. They’re trapped.
Quinn turns toward the main room where the door hangs open, but beyond it is fiery chaos. Flames crawl across overturned tables and chairs. The air reeks of smoke and something worse beneath it. Chemical accelerant.
His stomach twists. Someone wanted this place to burn fast and hot.
Through the smoke and heat and falling sparks, Quinn can see the front of the club.
White light from outside shines like salvation through the glass doors with Jimmy’s blood still smeared across them like a grotesque handprint.
All he has to do is get himself and Lana across the war zone between here and there.
Quinn tightens his hold on Lana and coughs hard enough to double over. “Okay,” he wheezes, bending and hoisting Lana up and over his shoulder. “Up you go.”
The smoke is thicker here, seeping into his lungs like burning liquid fire. He stumbles over a chair Niall’s crew had broken for kindling, a beam falls to his left, and he staggers out of the way, nearly losing Lana.
He won’t leave her behind.
Kaian had asked if he’d had friends. And he’d lied. Said he didn’t get attached. But that wasn’t true. He liked Lana. She’d made working in this—now literal—hellhole worth it every day.
Quinn staggers forward with Lana’s weight slung over his shoulder, every step a battle between his legs and the fire chewing the building apart behind them. Thirty more feet is all he needs. His lungs burn like someone poured acid into them.
“Almost there,” he croaks, though the words barely exist.
Glass explodes somewhere behind the bar, liquor bottles bursting one after another with sharp cracks that sound like distant gunfire. Flames surge higher, licking up the walls and across overturned tables.
Quinn takes another step. Then another, and the world tilts.
His burned hands finally fail him. Lana slips from his shoulder and rolls gently onto the floor beside him as his knees buckle.
He tries to stand again, but his legs don’t listen.
There’s no air left. His chest spasms uselessly, dragging in shallow breaths that only make the burning worse.
His vision tunnels, the edges of the room collapsing inward like a closing curtain.
“No…no, no…” He reaches for Lana, and their hands almost touch. His fingers fumble for her wrist, desperate for the fragile rhythm that had been there before. For a moment, he thinks he feels it. Then he realizes it’s only his own pulse roaring in his ears.
The faint flutter that meant she was still there is gone.
Her skin feels strangely cool against his burned fingers.
Weird. Lana is never cool. She’s always warm, loud, alive—arms wrapping around him in a Christmas hug that smells like peppermint schnapps and cheap perfume.
She’d slapped his ass afterward and laughed, deep and wicked, launching into a rant about vocal fry and misogyny while Quinn tried not to choke on his drink. She had never been cool. Not once.
The grief that punches through him feels exactly like the pain in his hands and lungs. For a moment, he can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. His chest spasms again.
Quinn’s thoughts drift. Connall flashes through his mind first, chasing Isaac around the living room while the omega shrieked with laughter between rut surges.
Elias was standing in the kitchen yesterday morning, quietly pouring an extra spoonful of sugar into Quinn’s coffee like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Kaian’s face flushed, his head thrown back as he’d cried out Quinn’s name in pleasure, or today when he’d looked at Quinn with something that looked like love beneath regret.
And Soren smiling at him. Real smiles that transform him on the outside but that reflect how the pack has changed him on the inside. How easy it had been for him to accept Connall’s bite and how it had settled him so completely.
Quinn hadn’t understood it then. Hadn’t seen it clearly through all the fear and stubborn pride and the stupid certainty that freedom meant being alone.
But now he knows. Soren’s smiles had been for him.
Glass shatters somewhere nearby, and all Quinn can think about is Soren. The quiet steadiness of him. The way his hands feel. The way his voice softens when he says Quinn’s name—not Blaze—but Quinn.
It’s almost like he can hear him over the roaring flames, and Quinn wants him.
Goddess, how he wants him—even though he doesn’t deserve him. If he had another chance—just one—maybe he wouldn’t run this time. Maybe he’d stay long enough to see what those smiles really meant.
His lungs seize again. The world grows dim around the edges. Quinn’s hand slips from Lana’s wrist and falls uselessly to the floor beside hers.