22. Chapter 22 Carry You Out
Cole
I go in.
That's the whole thought. That's all there is.
Training takes over the second I hit the stairwell mask down, one hand on the wall, moving fast through smoke that's gone from gray to black in the time it took me to get up here. My radio crackles. I don't answer it. I'm counting doors.
Her apartment. Second floor, front-facing, window she was just leaning out of.
The hallway is bad. Not unsurvivable, but close. The floor above the shop has caught. The heat coming through the ceiling is the kind that tells you the building has minutes, not a lot of them. I move fast and low, and I don't think about what I'll find on the other side of her door.
I think: Mine.
I think: Not leaving here without her.
Her door gives on the second kick.
The room is smoke-filled and orange-edged, and Suzanne is at the window, crouched below the sill, shirt pressed to her face, one arm hooked over the frame to get at the outside air.
She turns at the sound, and her eyes find me through the smoke, and the relief on her face undoes something in my chest that I'll deal with later.
"Cole"
"Don't talk." I cross the room, get an arm around her waist, pull her up, and into me. She's shaking. I can feel it through the gear, through both of us. "Can you walk?"
"Yes."
"Then walk fast."
I keep her tucked against my side, her face turned into my shoulder, and we move. Back into the hallway, back toward the stairs, my hand on her head keeping her low. She doesn't argue, doesn't slow down, matches my pace step for step. Even now, even like this, she doesn't make herself small.
The stairwell is better. We're moving.
I hear the shop go below us, not an explosion, just the deep, structural crack of something giving way, glass blowing out of the front windows, the whomp of oxygen hitting flame.
The heat spikes up through the floor hard enough that I haul Suzanne up and off her feet and just move, her arms around my neck, her face pressed to my jaw, and we come out the side door into the cold night air, and I don't stop until we're across the street, past the tape, clear.
I set her down on the curb.
My hands go straight to her face. My mask off, tipping her toward the light. Eyes tracking. Breathing. A cut above her eyebrow from something, not deep. Soot on her throat and cheek. Her hands are shaking when they come up to grip my wrists.
"I'm okay," she says.
"Let me check."
"Cole. I'm okay."
I look at her for a long second. All of her tears cutting clean lines through the soot, the way she's holding herself together through sheer will, the stubborn set of her chin even now.
Then something in me just gives.
I go to my knees on the asphalt in front of her.
I don't plan it. My body just decides. I press my forehead to her belly, both hands curved around her sides, and I stay there with the heat of the fire at my back, and the whole town watching from behind the tape, and I don't care about any of it.
Her hands come down to my hair. She doesn't say anything.
"I've got you," I say, into the fabric of her shirt, against the small swell of her. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Both of you."
She makes a sound above me, not quite a word, not quite a sob.
I feel her fingers curl.
We stay like that for a moment that doesn't belong to anyone else. The fire hisses behind us. Someone on the crew calls my name. The whole street is lit orange and red, and I'm on my knees on the pavement, and I have never in my life been more certain of anything.
Then she tugs gently at my shoulder, and I stand, and she steps into me, and I put my arms around her, and she lets me hold her weight. Her forehead against my throat. My chin is on the top of her head.
"The back stairs were locked," she says quietly.
"I know. Nash found it."
"He planned it. He wanted me trapped."
My jaw tightens. "He didn't count on the part where you didn't panic."
She laughs once, short and a little wrecked. "I panicked a lot."
"You called it in. You stayed low. You stayed at the window." I pull back enough to look at her. "You did everything right."
Something shifts in her face. Just a little. Something less braced.
My radio goes. I answer it this time, crew checking in, containment holding, building's a loss, but the spread is stopped. I keep one hand on Suzanne's shoulder and talk through the update, and she leans against my arm like she's been doing it for years.
When I click off, Beau is there.
He's been there for a few minutes, I think, standing just at the edge of my peripheral vision, giving us space, which is the most restrained I've ever seen him. He nods at Suzanne once, something solid and quiet in it, and she nods back.
Then he looks at me.
"Walk with me a second."
I squeeze Suzanne's shoulder. "Stay with Willa." I spotted her already pushing through toward us, hands pressed to her mouth.
Beau takes me twenty feet down the sidewalk, away from the noise. His PI is on the phone behind him, pacing tight circles on the pavement.
Beau doesn't waste words. "We have him."
I go still. "Say that again."
"Phone records. Footage from two different angles of the fixer at the building tonight. A wire transfer from the campaign account to a shell LLC that traces back to him." Beau's voice is controlled, but his eyes aren't. "Marcus came through. We have enough to hand to the DA and watch it land."
"Then what are we waiting for?"
The PI ends his call and steps in, voice tight. "He's not waiting either." He turns his phone toward me, a news alert, timestamped less than fifteen minutes ago. A press release. The candidate's name in the headline.
"He's going public first," Beau says. "Preemptive statement. He's calling Suzanne unstable. Claiming she's fabricated a harassment campaign to extort him ahead of the election." He pauses. "If that narrative gets out before we hand over the evidence, it muddies everything."
The fire crackles behind me.
I look back at Suzanne, standing in Willa's arms now, both of them holding on. Soot on her face. Smoke in her hair. Everything she built here, burning.
I turn back to Beau.
"How fast can he move?"