6. Chapter 1
Dashiell
Late September
The dispatch call rings out while I’m in my bunk room at the fire station, trying my best to get a good picture of my ass for my profile on a new hookup app.
Fuck me, I think, almost dropping my phone and hastily jumping off my bed, where I’ve been kneeling like I’m doing yoga, my tactical pants halfway down my thighs.
I burst out of my bunk room, still pulling my pants up, and nearly collide with Vinnie, a fellow firefighter. Vinnie, thirty-eight, dark-haired and bearded, steadies me without breaking stride.
“Whoa there, kid. The tones wake you up?” He glances suggestively at how I’m buckling my belt. “Or interrupt something else?”
“Something else, unfortunately.”
“Jerking off again, huh.”
My cheeks flame—I’ll never get over the embarrassment of the time Captain Nick Gutierrez walked in on me masturbating in the shower during a long shift. The others at the station won’t let me forget it. “No. I was trying to take a picture of my ass.”
He laughs as we take the stairs down to the first floor of the station, to the apparatus bay, where the rest of our crew is scrambling to position.
Fire Station 27, where I’ve worked for the last two years, has a ladder truck, an engine truck, and a medic unit.
My shift’s crew includes Nick, Vinnie Siragusa, Charlie Morton, and myself in the ladder truck; Beck Villanueva, Joey Castle, and Owen Kwon in the engine truck; and Azul Velasco and Haden Balogh in the medic unit.
“Trying, huh? No luck?” Vinnie says as we grab our turnout gear and start throwing it on over our station clothes.
“Taking ass pictures is hard. You tops have it easy with dick pics.”
At that, he laughs uproariously. I’m still surprised I wasn’t the only queer man at Station 27. I always thought firefighting would be a straight boys’ club, but Nick is gay and Vinnie is bisexual, and they’re both very open about talking about their experiences.
“If you ever need a hand getting a good angle, just let me know,” Vinnie says with a wink.
Coming from someone else, that offer might make me feel weird, but from Vinnie, it’s honestly sweet.
He’s like… I don’t know, not my dad or an uncle, because I would never accept their help taking an ass picture.
But it’s nice having him as a sort of queer mentor.
It also helps that there’s not an ounce of attraction between us—though with his big muscles, thick chest hair, and beard, he’s definitely my type.
Not to mention being more than fifteen years older than me. That, in my book, is always a plus.
“Let’s move!” Nick calls. “This one’s out of our normal range. We gotta hurry.” He repeats what the dispatch alarm has been saying: residential fire, unknown occupants.
“Why’d they call us?” I ask, jamming my helmet on top of my brown curls. The first time Vinnie and Charlie saw me in my turnout gear, they joked I looked like a kid dressing up in his dad’s uniform.
(Never mind that my dad is a construction worker, not a firefighter.)
I can’t help it that I’m twenty-two and only 5’6”. Can’t help that I get mistaken for a teenager all the time, that I regularly get turned away from bars and clubs because the bouncers are convinced I’m lying about my age.
“Sounds like it’s pretty bad,” Nick explains, swinging himself into the truck. “They called in multiple companies.”
Nick is thirty-three, tall and bronze-skinned, with a shaved head and cheekbones like carved marble. He runs a tight ship (or station), but I respect the hell out of him.
“Well,” Vinnie says when Charlie guides the firetruck out onto Sanchez and hits the gas. “Let’s see.”
He holds his hand out to me expectantly.
“See what?”
“These ass pics you’re trying to take.”
“Jesus, Vinnie,” Nick says from the front.
“Want me to drop him off here, Cap?” Charlie says wryly. Charlie, thirty-five, brown-skinned with dark locs dyed blond at the ends, is Vinnie’s best friend and the resident straight man on our truck. But he’s just about the strongest ally I know—despite having zero tolerance for Vinnie’s bullshit.
Vinnie flips Charlie off casually. I pass him my phone. “What do we think of this angle?”
He zooms in on my screen. “Damn, kid. I’d say you were successful with these pics. Want to see, Cap?”
“I’ve seen the goods already,” Nick says, winking at me in the mirror.
“Ah, yes, the masturb—”
“Okay. We’re done.”
Up front, Charlie shakes his head and pushes us faster through traffic.
Like all urban firefighting companies, we respond to a variety of emergencies, but when we respond to an actual fire like this, my job on the truck is search and forcible entry. We’re the ones going in.
We wail into an obscenely wealthy neighborhood, our lights flashing against the mansions set far back from the road, and I immediately see the house we’ve been called to.
A dark orange glow hazes around the Mediterranean-style manor, and thick, oily smoke oozes from the windows on the lower levels.
A handful of people, mostly dressed in staff uniforms, have already gathered on the wide, manicured lawn.
“Looks like we’re first on the scene,” Nick murmurs.
Charlie hits the brakes and I rock forward in my seat. “Fuck me,” he whispers, almost admiringly.
The house is pale golden stone with a heavy tiled roof. Stone might not burn, but everything else in that house sure as hell will.
There’s a problem with old houses. They might be pretty, and sure, the walls might hold.
The bones of the house might be standing tomorrow, all blackened, the stucco scabbed with soot.
But that roof? All that beautiful tile is dead weight sitting primly on wood joists, just waiting to come crashing down on the property below.
“Okay,” Nick says. “Three stories, heavy fire first floor, occupants unknown.” He turns to the engine firefighters, who are responsible for running the water. “Joey, Owen, get a line off that hydrant and hit the east side. Beck, back them up.”
“Got it, Captain.”
“Haden, Azul, work the yard. There’s people out there who might need you now.”
“Got it, Captain.”
“Vinnie, Dash, you’re with me. We’re going in. Charlie, stay with the rig. Run the stick and try to vent the upper levels.”
“Got it, Captain,” I say, reaching for my tools.
I barely have my ax in hand when a woman comes running over, her dark eyes wide. Older, maybe sixty or sixty-five, she wears an elegant silk dress. Soot streaks one cheekbone.
“Please!” she cries, her voice catching. “My husband, my son, they’re still in there! Please, God—”
I snap into crisis mode. “Ma’am, how many? Where?”
She calms herself with a steadying breath. “Two. Massimo, my husband, and Lorenzo, my son. Massimo was in his study when the fire alarms went off. Lorenzo—he showed up as we started evacuating and went in there to get his father.”
One man, older, stuck in the fire. Another man, younger, going in to get him.
Heroic, sure. But also foolish.
“Where’s this study?”
She points to the north side of the building.
“First floor?”
“Yes,” she says.
“We’ve got it,” I promise, though I have no way of knowing if we can actually get them out in time.
Then I’m moving, following Nick and Vinnie, because they’re already at the front door, ready to go inside.
“What’d she say?” Nick asks.
“Two occupants. Older male, Massimo. Younger male, Lorenzo. Massimo’s locked in a study on the first floor. Lorenzo went in to get him.”
“Goddamn,” Vinnie whispers, his voice filtering through my comms. “Massimo and Lorenzo. You know those names?”
“Should I?” I ask.
“Massimo Diamante,” Vinnie says quietly, staring at the front door, hanging open like a portal to hell. “Boss of the Diamante crime family.”
Neither Nick nor I have time to process that piece of information. We have to move. Behind us, other companies are rolling up—I also see the flash of police lights and what might be TV news vans.
Shit, this is going to be a show.
“Let’s move,” Nick says, and leads the way into the burning mansion.
Burning houses are nothing like what you see on TV.
There are no dramatic walls of rolling orange flame.
It’s just a shit ton of smoke, low and thick, banking down from a ceiling I can’t see, and heat pressing in from every inch.
My turnout gear should protect me, but even it has its limits.
My light barely cuts two feet in front of us.
Somewhere high above, the tile roof is fighting against the heat and flames, edging closer to failure and disaster.
“SFFD!” Nick shouts through the roar around us. “Anybody in here?”
Nothing.
We move through a smoky foyer, past a living room flickering with low flames, toward the north side of the house the woman pointed out.
The thick plaster walls hold the heat inside, trapping it worse than a newer, weaker house would. The good bones of the house are bad news for us—all that stone keeps the deadly heat in like we’re standing in a kiln.
And then I hear it, cutting through the roar of the fire and the creaking of the building: a thump. Someone is beating hard on a door down the hall. Hard and rhythmic, the sound of someone throwing their whole weight against an unmoving door.
And then a voice, hoarse and wrecked but still not weak: “Father! Open the door, open the—”
“There!” I point my light down the hall. Vinnie and Nick are already moving.
I see him then, at the end of a long hallway, silhouetted against a doorway and wreathed in smoke.
Flames flicker across the ceiling. He’s a big man, throwing his shoulder against a door that refuses to move.
The doorframe is swollen shut, I’m sure, the wood grain expanding under the heat.
There’s no way it’ll give beneath his beating, no matter how strong he is.
“SFFD!” Nick shouts. “Sir, can you hear us?!”
For some reason, I push past Nick. The man doesn’t turn until I have a hand on his arm. “Sir! I need you to step back!”
The man rounds on me, and in the dark, flickering light of the burning hallway, he looks wild and frightful, a man trying to claw his way out of hell.