21. Chapter 21 Ashes
Suzanne
Iwake up coughing.
Not the slow, confused kind of waking, the immediate body-knows-before-the-brain-does kind. My eyes open, and the room is wrong. The air is thick and gray, and the smoke alarm is screaming, and the orange glow under my bedroom door is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen.
I roll out of bed fast. Too fast. My hip catches the nightstand, and I grab it, steady myself, make myself breathe through my shirt even though every instinct says run.
Think.
Door first. I press the back of my hand to the wood. Hot. Not searing, but hot enough.
I don't open it.
The hallway is where the smoke is coming from. I can see it curling under the gap, slow and deliberate, filling the floor first, the way it always does. The shop. The fire is in the shop below me.
My apartment. My grandmother's building. The only thing that's been mine in years.
I shove it down. No time.
Back stairs. That's the plan, the back stairwell Cole made me map out a week ago during one of his "safety inspections" that I gave him grief about and would very much like to take back right now.
I grab my phone off the charger, shove my feet into the nearest shoes, and move into the hallway low.
The smoke hits me like a wall.
I pull my shirt over my nose and push toward the back stairwell door, eyes burning, lungs already complaining. Ten feet. Eight. The heat radiating up through the floorboards is wrong, too much, too fast. Whatever started this, it didn't start small.
I reach the stairwell door and yank. It doesn't move. I yank again, both hands, putting my whole weight into it.
Locked.
Not stuck. Locked. The kind that needs a key from this side, the kind that's only supposed to lock from the outside. The kind that should not be locked right now.
Ice moves through me despite the heat.
This wasn't an accident.
I already knew that. I think I've known it since the gas line. But knowing it and standing in a smoke-filled hallway with a locked door between me and air are two very different things.
I turn back. Eyes streaming. The smoke is thicker now, lower, and my lungs are starting to burn in earnest. I press one hand to my belly without thinking, just a reflex, just hold on, hold on, hold on, and move back toward the bedroom window.
The front of the building.
Main Street.
I shove the window up, and the outside air hits my face, and I gulp it, three deep breaths, leaning out over the sill into the night.
Below me, the glow is unmistakable now, orange pouring out of the shop windows, glass already gone in the front display case, smoke rolling up the brick face of the building.
I look down. Two stories. The awning is gone on this side.
Not survivable. Not with…
Another cramp moves through my belly. Not sharp. Just tight and scared, like every muscle I have is bracing.
"I know," I whisper. "I know. Hold on."
I lean back inside to call 911, and my phone screen says two missed calls, Cole, and the sight of his name does something to me that I don't have time for right now. I dial anyway.
Dispatch picks up on the first ring. I give them the address, the floor, and the window. My voice is surprisingly steady, which is its own kind of shock. The dispatcher tells me to stay at the window, stay low, units are already en route.
Already.
I look down at the street again, and I can see the glow of lights at the corner. I hear the sirens cutting through the night. The town is waking up. Lights coming on in windows across the street, a figure running down the sidewalk below, someone pointing up.
The smoke in the room behind me thickens.
I crouch below the window, face turned toward the outside air, one arm hooked over the sill. My eyes won't stop streaming. The heat at my back is building in a way that feels personal, steady, and advancing, the way the fixer walked toward me in the Watering Hole. Measured. Patient.
He planned this.
The thought makes me furious in a way that cuts right through the fear.
He locked the back stairs. He wanted me to have no way out. He wanted me to lose Butter & Bean, lose my grandmother's building, lose the only ground I'd managed to put under my feet, and he wanted me to know, standing in the smoke, that he'd taken it.
The rage is better than fear. I hold onto it.
Then I hear it.
"Suzanne."
Below. Rough and raw, cutting over the crackle of radio traffic and the hiss of the hoses being run. I know that voice. I would know it half-conscious, half-dead, from twice this distance.
"Suzanne, sound off!"
"Window!" I shout back, and I lean out, and through the smoke and the lights, I see him in turnout gear, face shield up, scanning the building face until his eyes find mine. Even from here, I can see what's in them.
"Don't move," he shouts up. "I'm coming to you."
"There's smoke in the hall, the back stairs are locked."
"I know. Stay at the window." A beat, and then lower, rough enough that it carries anyway: "Don't you move."
I almost laugh. This man.
I press my forehead against the window frame and breathe and wait and don't move.
Behind me, the bedroom door has started to glow at the edges. The heat at my back is not subtle anymore. The cramps have faded to a tight, constant ache, and I keep my hand on my belly, and I breathe, and I count, and I do not look at the door.
Then the ceiling groans.
A deep, structural sound, not a creak, a groan, like something fundamental giving way. A crack opens in the plaster above the bedroom door, jagged and fast, and the section over the hallway shudders.
The smoke pours through it like water through a break in a dam.
I flatten myself against the window, half outside, coughing hard, and through the roar of it, I hear Cole's voice closer now in the building, on the stairs, shouting my name like it's the only word he knows.
The ceiling shifts again.
"Cole!" My voice tears out of me. "Cole, the ceiling…"
The bedroom door blows open.