Chapter 50
Wyatt
“Bryn!” I yell at her unmoving body.
It takes my brain a moment to analyze everything in front of me as I race inside the room I stood in with her weeks ago. It’s rippling with smoke, angry and punishing overhead, dark gray, churning to a charcoal. Visibility is shit up high, but clearer lower where she is on the massage table.
Or rather, attached to it.
It’s lying on its side, Bryn suspended between it and some kind of rope. A chain runs from the steel table leg that crosses beneath the table to her wrist at her side, her head flopped towards the floor.
She doesn’t look good, beads of sweat dripping from flushed skin, bits of soot and ash marking her body.
There’s no reaction when I yell her name again, reaching the foot of the bed to look at her restraints.
The firefighter in me knows I need to go after all this rope and the chain around her wrist, but the man inside of me wants to overrule my training to grasp her face and ensure she wakes up.
I push it back. There’s no time. Taking it could mean life or death.
Looking at the rope, I curse when I realize it isn’t rope at all. Its wire cable.
Jumping to the underside of the table, I look to see how it’s attached, tracing it to where it starts. My stomach drops when it leads me to the side of the table with her on it, a heavier chain like the one at her wrist locking everything together with a heavy-duty lock. Right near her ankle.
“Fuck,” I roar, my voice filling the entire room, drowning out the rumble of fire overhead.
If it had been on the underside, I could have popped it with my irons, but it’s so fucking close to her like this. I risk seriously hurting her if I try. If it comes down to it, though, her life over injury wins every time.
“Victim found restrained. Require immediate bolt cutters,” I shout into my radio, and even I can hear the panic in my voice. The fear. “Division two, far delta side. Bolt cutters required. I repeat, bolt cutters required.”
There’s been constant chatter coming over the radio, my name being said more than once, but I’m locked in on Bryn. Now that I’ve said something, Nate answers in a clipped tone.
“Roger. CAN report.”
“Heavy smoke coming in from the ceiling,” I tell him, glancing up.
The conditions are shit, the smoke growing worse than when I walked in thirty seconds ago.
We need to get her the hell out of here before this whole damn room flashes over.
“Growing black, starting to really churn. Need immediate help.”
There’s a muffled sound on the other side of the bed that has my heart leaping. Staying as low as I can, I scramble back around the table, dropping to my knees beside Bryn as her head barely manages to lift.
Tears leak from eyes that are only slits, and she groans behind a piece of tape. A piece of fucking tape I didn’t realize was over her mouth.
“Fuck. Baby, I’m here. I got you,” I tell her, cupping her head in my gloved hand. I try to grab an edge to pull the tape off, but with my gloves it’s no use. “I’m getting you out of here, okay? Stay with me.”
The faintest acknowledgment has my chest constricting. She’s sweating bullets, her face lined with little black particles of ash, moisture beading down the tape from her nose. I can’t imagine how raw her throat must be, or how her airway must feel like it’s on fire from all the smoke.
I need to get her out. Now.
Getting up to my knees, I assess the bed.
On its side, with the legs extended and her attached to it, I won’t get it through the door.
If I right its position, she’ll be consumed by the smoke and out-of-control heat that comes with being higher off the ground.
Even if I got the table upright, getting it through the door by myself with the angles would take time I don’t have.
A helpless feeling churns in my gut, and I grab my radio. “I need the bolt cutters now.”
There’s a whimper beside me, the sound like a knife straight to my heart. Bryn’s eyes are wider, but I can tell she’s struggling to keep them that way, moisture leaking over the bridge of her nose into the other eye.
My heart is being ripped out of my chest at the sight of her, knowing the only thing I might be able to do to get her out of here will hurt her in the process.
Her skin is so flushed, clothes sticking to her the way mine are inside my gear, but that’s just another beating my heart is taking.
I’m in far better shape in my gear than she is with nothing.
I could take my jacket off to give to her. Give her my mask to breathe. But I’d be useless in helping her then, and it breaks every piece of me knowing that I’m doing the shittiest job at protecting her.
That I wasn’t able to protect her from this.
She whimpers again, the middle of the piece of tape pushing outward like she’s trying to move it. She wants it off, and though I know I shouldn’t, I peel my glove off so I can remove the tape.
It’s like putting my hand in an open oven doorway. Hot. Way too fucking hot for her to be this exposed, even this low to the ground.
I tug at the tape, and she cries out as it lifts away from her skin. When it’s off, she inhales deeply, probably on instinct, without realizing the consequences.
She goes into a coughing fit, body straining against the wire that holds her, her face turning redder as she struggles. Cupping her face in my ungloved hand, I bite back the growl that I want to let out at how hot her skin feels and try to just support her head to help her.
Because there’s nothing else I can fucking do and it’s eating me alive, the helplessness devouring me like the fire consuming everything above us.
“Small, slow breaths, B,” I tell her when the coughing calms. “I think I can get you out, but it’s going—”
“Wy,” she gasps, the sound raspy and raw.
“B, don’t talk. Conserve the breath you’ve got.”
She doesn’t listen, though, trying to shake her head through another cough. “Not Eddie. 10-42. Yelling.”
The full weight of her head drops into my hand, her chest convulsing as she coughs again.
She has to be talking about the arsonist, but I don’t give a shit about that right now.
I care about her. About the way her breathing isn’t right, and the choking she’s doing with every word that tries to come out.
The way her skin feels against mine, and how the sweat is pouring off her in waves like the ocean we once enjoyed together.
“B,” I whisper, emotion welling up in my throat. “I hear you, but I need you to stop talking, okay? Small, slow breaths, baby. I need you to do that and hold on. We’re going to get through this and then you can tell me everything.”
“Wy,” she sucks in a small breath, “I lo—”
“No!” I nearly shout, putting my thumb over her lips. “B, no. Not here. Not right now. Not when I can’t kiss you and hold you. Not as some last fucking confessional because you think you’re about to die.”
The crushing weight of the thoughts I can see swirling in her mind hit me like a devastating blow to the chest. The pain, the heartache, the hopelessness that I can so easily read on her face. She thinks she’s about to die, but she isn’t. I won’t allow it.
“You think there’s no hope, but you are my hope, Bryn. You have things to do with your life, memories to make. With me, with Gran, with our entire future ahead of us. You don’t get to be hopeless now,” I growl, fear leaking through each word, as tears slide down my face inside my mask.
After a brush of my thumb across her cheek, I push up and crawl over to where my irons are.
The smoke and heat have climbed to near unbearable heights anywhere besides the floor, so I stay as low as possible.
The ceiling is an angry ocean of smoke, swollen with gases and heat, primed to ignite at any moment.
I wasted too much time. I should have kept going. Should have used my irons before this. Should have had her out by now.
Looking for the best place to try and break the chain locking the wire, I put my glove back on, place the Halligan next to her ankle, and pull the chain taut to try and get some tension into it. This isn’t going to work. I know it isn’t just by looking at it.
Fuck.
An alarm goes off in my mask, and I try not to let my heart stop when I realize that it’s my oxygen. I’m almost out.
Swallowing a scream of frustration, I move around to the other side of the table, looking at the bolts on the legs.
It hasn’t changed since I first looked at it.
The wires are crossed and twisted within the legs of the table.
Prying them away from each other isn’t going to free Bryn.
Unless I can slide her and the table legs off the table together.
I glance at the ceiling. I don’t know if I have that kind of time.
But I have to try.
Getting the Halligan positioned, I start applying pressure at the bolt where it connects to the table, leveraging it with a boot as I lean back, trying to pry them apart. The wood of the table splinters, crackling like the fire above as it threatens our safety.
“No. Fucking no,” I growl, pulling again, knowing we’re running out of time.
“Dalton!”
Brody.
A second later, he’s dropping in next to me, bolt cutters in hand. He doesn’t waste any time assessing, he just starts cutting with a frantic pace that I want to kiss him for. He can see it too. He knows the beast that’s coming for us in the dark of the ceiling.
Not just a little flame and fire. The worst-case scenario, and instinct tells me it’s imminent.
Moving around Brody, back to the side of the table with Bryn, I start pulling at the wires that he’s cut, moving her gingerly as she gasps. The wires have been digging into her for god knows how long, and with the heat in this room and the smoke in her lungs, I can’t imagine how it must feel.
“I know, baby. Hold on,” I encourage, taking the weight of her legs as Brody clips through turn after turn of wire.