Chapter Twenty – Holt #2
Not random. Not quite natural either. The breeze shifts. Something sweet and chemical rides the air under the usual smoke and gas. Accelerant.
I straighten slowly.
“Wright,” Ray says behind me.
I turn. He tips his head slightly, reading my expression with the kind of ease that comes from years of shared shifts and worse calls than this one.
“You smell it too.”
I nod once.
His jaw tightens. “Thought so.”
The deputy comes over then, an older guy I know by sight if not by name, and gives us the broad version of what they have so far.
Car stopped. Engine smoking. Driver got out.
Called for help. Fire spread faster than expected.
He doesn’t say "suspected accelerant," but he doesn’t not say it either.
The whole report sits in that same uneasy middle ground as the inn fire—too plausible on the surface, too wrong underneath.
It follows me all the way back to the station.
The adrenaline burns off slower this time, leaving me sharper instead of looser.
By the time I strip off the turnout coat and set it with the rest of the gear to dry, it’s close to two in the morning, and the place has settled into that strange half-life stations get in the middle of the night.
Lights dimmed in the bunk room. Coffee left warming even though no one with good sense should be drinking it now.
The bay quiet except for the soft tick of cooling metal and the occasional murmur from Mac’s office, where he’s still finishing the first pass of reports.
Beckett drops into the chair across from me at the kitchen table with all the grace of a man who has been awake too long and still somehow has enough energy left to be irritating.
“You have that look again.”
I don’t look up from the incident form in front of me. “What look?”
“The one where your brain is trying to solve something and your face forgot how to look normal.”
“Pretty sure my face was never normal.”
“That’s fair,” he says. “Still not the point.”
He reaches for the stale pretzels in the bowl between us and makes a face after the first bite but eats them anyway. Ray comes in a second later, grabs another mug of coffee, and leans against the counter like sleep is for people with less to think about.
“There’s a pattern,” I say finally.
Beckett sits up a little straighter. “You going to share with the class or just continue being mysterious?”
I set the pen down and rub the heel of my hand against my sternum, trying to ease tension that doesn’t seem interested in leaving. “The inn. Tonight’s car fire. Same wrong feel. Spread was too fast. Burn looked off.”
“Accelerant?” Ray asks.
“Maybe.”
Beckett’s expression shifts, some of the easy humor draining out of it. “And you think it’s connected.”
“I think I don’t like coincidences.”
“Neither does Mac,” Ray says, nodding toward the office.
I glance that way. “He say anything?”
“Not yet.”
He doesn’t need to. Mac never says anything until he’s sure enough to put weight behind it. But the fact that he’s still up, still writing, still reading through a routine call like it might not be routine—that’s enough.
Beckett tosses another pretzel back and grimaces through the chew. “Okay, so let’s say you’re right. Let’s say somebody’s setting fires and not being subtle enough about it. Why?”
The question hangs there.
The truth is, there are too many possibilities now.
The inn has history. Old grudges. Property issues I probably don’t know the half of.
Nolan hovering around it like he’s part foreman, part watchdog.
Lark’s mother calling from whatever polished corner of hell she runs her life from, trying to control things from states away.
And now Kenzie is back in town with that look in her eyes like she showed up hoping to remind me of who I used to be and didn’t like what she found instead.
The station settles deeper into the hour around us, quiet and humming and full of the kind of fatigue that lives in your bones.
Mac finally turns his office light off and heads for the bunk room without a word, though he gives me one long look on the way by that says he knows more than he’s saying and maybe more than I’m saying, too.
I stay at the table after the others drift off. Not because I need to finish the report, it’s already done, but because sleep feels impossible when my head is this full.
I sit there in the low kitchen light and think about all the reasons this shouldn’t be happening.
Lark and I live in worlds built to pull us in opposite directions.
She is trying to prove she can stay. I have spent most of my adult life learning how to leave at the sound of a tone without thinking twice.
Her life has always seemed shaped by people trying to tell her who she should be, where she should go, what she should want.
Mine got shaped by the opposite—by learning too late that being the fun one doesn’t mean people trust you when things get real, and by working hard enough to become the man they’d call when it mattered.
On paper, none of this works. In theory, I should know better than to want any part of it.
And still, I see her at my kitchen sink, trying not to let her mother’s words get under her skin and failing only because she cares too much about proving them wrong.
I see her at the inn, hands dirty and jaw set, dragging something broken toward whole with more determination than sense.
I see her in the barn with Tabby, all her edges softened for one unguarded moment.
I see her looking at me like I’m something steady, and I want to be worthy of it in ways I don’t know how to explain.
That’s the worst part. That she makes me want to be better at it.
By the time I finally head for the bunk room, dawn is still a couple of hours off, and sleep feels less like rest than surrender.
I strip down to a T-shirt and lie on my back staring up at the underside of the mattress above me, listening to Beckett snore from across the room and the old vent rattle every time the air kicks on.
I close my eyes anyway. The last thing I think before I drift is that I need to warn Lark. That warning her means admitting exactly how real the danger has become. And exactly how much I have to lose if I’m right.
I don’t sleep long.
A little after five, the tones drop again somewhere deep in the station, dragging the whole building awake in stages. By the time I sit up, my neck stiff and my brain still somewhere between exhaustion and adrenaline, the memory of last night comes back fast.
Lark laughing softly beside me at the overlook. The way her hand brushed mine on the drive back to the farm. The look she gave me before I headed back here to finish the shift.
I scrub a hand over my face and swing my legs over the side of the bunk.
Beckett groans from somewhere across the room. “You’re smiling again. It’s upsetting.”
“I’m not smiling.”
“Sure, Romeo.”
I flip him off without looking.