Chapter Twelve Wes
The fire smells wrong before we even get inside.
I know it the moment I step off the engine. There’s a certain feel to the air around a structure fire, the way smoke layers itself, how it moves relative to wind and heat and what’s burning.
This one has the same off-note I caught at the apartment building two weeks ago. Too clean in some places. Too concentrated in others. A directionality that doesn’t match the building’s layout.
I don’t say anything. It isn’t my job to say anything. Noelle is the one who reads fire scenes. I read everything else.
Cap is already directing from the street.
The building is a four-story prewar residential brick building, the kind that burns slow on the outside and fast on the inside because the walls are full of wood framing that nobody has touched since 1938. Smoke is pushing hard from the second-floor windows.
The crew moves in standard formation.
I go in with Callum on ventilation, and we work the second floor, moving through smoke that thickens as we go, and by the time we get to the stairwell I’m already clocking the origin points, the way the char patterns on the walls track back toward a single location that doesn’t correspond to any electrical panel or heat source I can account for.
Noelle would want to see this.
I push the thought aside and keep working.
We ventilate the second floor in twenty minutes.
By then, the fire is contained at ground level, the crew is working with extinguishers through the smoke, and Cap calls for a secondary sweep before he’ll let anyone else into the building. Standard procedure. The building isn’t clear yet.
I come back down to the street and pull off my helmet and take a breath of cold air that tastes like snow and char.
Cap is on the radio. Tara is running equipment checks. Rico is talking to a neighbor who came out to watch despite the blizzard, the way neighbors always do, because people are drawn to fires the same way they’re drawn to anything that could destroy them.
I scan the perimeter.
Noelle is supposed to be behind the barrier.
She isn’t.
I do one full visual sweep of the street to be sure. She’s not at the barrier. Not at the engine. Not anywhere on the visible perimeter.
I go back inside.
I find her on the ground floor.
She’s in the room at the back of the building, the one closest to where the fire started, crouched low with her camera out and one hand braced against the scorched floor. The ventilation isn’t complete back here.
The smoke is thin enough to see through but thick enough to matter, and she doesn’t have a mask, and she’s been in here long enough that her eyes are watering. Surprisingly, she doesn’t appear to have noticed.
She looks up when she hears me.
“I found the origin point,” she says, her voice hoarse. “The accelerant pattern matches the apartment building exactly. It’s the same person.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I need two more minutes.”
“No.”
“Wes.”
“No,” I say again, the same way, and I reach down and take her arm, and she doesn’t fight me, which tells me she already knows she pushed it too far. She lets me help her up to a standing position. She takes one step, and her knees go uncertain, and I put my arm around her, and we walk out.
She doesn’t say anything on the way through the building.
Outside, the cold air hits her, and she coughs, bent forward with her hands on her knees, long and hard and productive. I keep my hand on her back and let her get through it. Cap sees us from across the street. I shake my head once. He holds his position.
There’s a conversation coming. Not now.
“I’m fine,” she says, still bent over.
“I know,” I say.
“I just need a second.”
“Take your time.”
She straightens up eventually. Her eyes are red and streaming, and she looks furious about that. I steer her toward the SUV.
“I can walk,” she says.
“I know that too.”
She walks to the truck and gets in. I go around to the driver’s side.
She argues the entire way back to the station.
Not loudly. Noelle doesn’t argue loudly. She argues in the precise, measured tones of someone building a case, which is probably a professional habit she can no longer turn off. She’s fine.
The exposure was minimal. She had visual confirmation of the origin point, and the accelerant pattern and the value of that evidence outweigh the minor discomfort of some incidental smoke inhalation.
I drive.
“You’re not going to say anything?” she asks.
“No.”
“You’re not going to lecture me about protocol.”
“No.”
“Grant is going to lecture me about protocol.”
“Probably.”
She looks out the window at the snow coming down over the city. A full block passes.
“It’s the same person,” she says, quieter now. “The pattern is identical. Whoever set that fire has set one before. Possibly more than one.”
“I believe you,” I say.
She glances over. Like she wasn’t expecting that.
“I do,” I tell her. “I’m not arguing with your evidence. I’m arguing with your method.”
She turns back to the window. “Noted.”
We drive the rest of the way in silence that isn’t uncomfortable.
***
The equipment room is the nearest space with a door when we get back. She glances at the bench, at the rows of gear, and something flickers across her face before she shuts it down. Color climbs her neck. She doesn’t say anything about it. Neither do I.
I sit her down on the bench and find the first aid kit, and she submits to this with the barely concealed impatience of someone who has decided cooperation is faster than resistance.
Her eyes are still red. Her breathing is even, which is the important thing, but she’s going to feel this in her chest tomorrow morning.
I work through it methodically. Check her eyes, her airway, her oxygen levels with the kit’s pulse oximeter. She watches me do all of it without speaking.
“You’ve done this before,” she says eventually.
“Field medicine. Two deployments.”
She absorbs that. “Army?”
“Marines.”
A pause. “How long?”
“Eight years.”
She looks at me steadily. There’s a question behind her eyes that she isn’t asking yet, which is how she operates. She banks things and waits for the right moment.
I put the kit away.
“Why don’t you push?” she asks. “You never push. You didn’t push me on the roof. You didn’t push me in the car just now. You just wait.”
I think about how to answer that honestly.
“Overseas,” I say, “the guys who got pushed to talk before they were ready were the ones who eventually stopped talking altogether. You push someone before they’re ready and you don’t get the truth. You get whatever they think you want to hear, and then the door closes, and it doesn’t open again.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“So you wait,” she says.
“So I wait.”
She looks at her hands in her lap. The equipment room is small and warm, and the overhead light is steady and outside the blizzard keeps going, muffled through the walls, present but distant.
“That’s a hard thing to learn,” she says finally.
“It is.”
“Did someone push you before you were ready?”
I consider that. “A few people tried.”
Her eyes come up to mine. Something in them has shifted, some layer of the careful professional distance she maintains thinning out at the edges. She recognizes something in what I’ve said.
She recognizes a wound that took a long time to stop being fresh.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
The silence in this room is different from the silence on the roof.
The roof was open and cold, and the city was spread out below us, and the space between us was wide enough to be safe.
This room is small and warm, and we are close enough that I can see the smoke still caught in her hair and the color her eyes go when her guard comes down.
It’s not a color so much as a quality, something that opens.
She shifts slightly on the bench.
I stay where I am.
“I haven’t celebrated Christmas since I was eight,” she says, which is what she said on the roof and she knows I already know it and she’s saying it again anyway, differently this time. Not as a deflection. As the beginning of something she isn’t sure she’s ready to say yet.
I wait.
She looks at me for a long moment, and whatever she’s deciding seems to resolve itself, because she closes the small distance between us.
I don’t move away.
She makes the decision, and I let her.
She kisses me first.
It is quiet and intentional. I let her lead for a few moments. Then I take control. One hand slides to the back of her neck while the other grips her waist.
I deepen the kiss.
I pull back just enough to look at her. Her eyes are still red from the smoke. Her cheeks are flushed. Her red hair is messy from the day. She looks beautiful like this. Raw. Real. The usual sharp edges are softened, and it does something dangerous to my chest.
I stand slowly and bring her up with me. My hands move over her with purpose. I peel off her jacket, then her shirt. I kiss every new inch of skin I uncover. Her collarbones. The swell of her breasts. The soft skin under her ribs.
She is strong and soft at the same time. Curves and muscle and pale skin that flushes easily under my mouth. I want to map every part of her.
When I get her pants and underwear off I keep her standing, my chest against her back, one arm banded across her ribs to hold her up.
She is already wet when my hand slides between her thighs.
I don’t hurry. I stroke her slowly and deliberately, learning exactly what makes her breath catch.
She moans softly and sags back into me. The sound goes straight to my cock.
I take my time. My fingers circle her clit in the same steady rhythm I bring to everything, while I listen to every hitch in her breathing. She is slick and warm and perfect. I press my mouth to the side of her throat and feel her pulse going wild there.
I slide two fingers inside her and curl them deep, my thumb still working her clit. She is tight. Pulsing around my hand. I work her patiently, holding her upright against me, building her up until her hips start rocking into my palm.
She moans again. Louder this time. Pushing back against my fingers. The sound of her pleasure makes my cock throb. She looks incredible like this. Red hair falling forward against my shoulder. Back arched into me, taking what I give her.
I can feel how close she is.
I press harder against her clit, fingers still driving deep.
And she comes hard. Her whole body shakes against mine, her knees nearly giving out.
A broken moan tears from her throat as she clenches around my fingers.
I hold her up through every wave, my arm tight across her ribs, until she starts to come down. Trembling.
I turn her and bend her over the bench. Her hands brace against the wood. I grip her hips. Rubbing my cock against her soaked pussy. Letting her feel how hard she makes me.
I grip her hips and push inside her in one slow, deep stroke.
She is soaked and tight, and the feeling of her pussy stretching around me pulls a low groan from my throat.
I stay buried for a moment, just feeling her.
Then I start to move. Deep, rolling thrusts that make the bench creak under her hands.
I keep one hand on her hip and the other slides up her back to grip the back of her neck.
I hold her down exactly like this. Bent over the bench in the middle of the equipment room. The gear on the walls rattles slightly with every thrust.
I fuck her steady and hard. The sound of skin slapping skin fills the small space.
I bring my hand down on her ass in a firm smack. She gasps and pushes back against me, her pussy clenching hard around my cock.
“You like that,” I murmur.
“Yes,” she moans. “Fuck, yes.”
I spank her again, harder this time, and she cries out in pleasure.
I rub my hand over the reddening mark, then grip her hip and drive into her deeper.
I keep her bent over the bench for a long time, fucking her with those heavy, controlled strokes while the overhead light casts shadows across her back.
I pull out and turn her around. I lift her onto the bench so she is sitting on the edge.
I step between her legs and slide back inside her in one smooth thrust. She wraps her arms around my neck, and I hold her close, fucking her deep while we are face to face. I kiss her hard. My hands grip her ass, spreading her open as I thrust up into her.
“You feel so fucking good,” I say against her mouth. “So wet for me.”
She moans and kisses me back, her nails digging into my shoulders. I keep one arm wrapped around her waist to hold her steady while I drive into her. The bench creaks under us. I can feel her getting close again.
I pull out and turn her once more. This time I bend her over the bench facing the other way.
I grip her hips and sink back into her from behind.
I fuck her much harder now. Deeper. My hand comes down on her ass again in sharp smacks that make her moan louder.
I reach around and rub her clit while I thrust.
I lean over her, chest pressed to her back, and growl low in her ear.
She moans loudly at my words and clenches around me. I keep rubbing her clit and spanking her ass while I pound into her. The gear on the walls shakes. The bench scrapes against the floor.
She comes hard. Her whole body shakes, and she cries out my name. Her pussy pulses around my cock so tight it drags me over the edge with her. I bury myself deep and come inside her, groaning against her neck as I fill her.
I stay buried deep for a long time afterward. I wrap both arms around her and hold her tight against me. Both of us are breathing hard in the quiet equipment room. The overhead light hums above us. The blizzard is a low roar outside the walls.
I press a slow kiss to her shoulder and keep holding her.
***
Afterward, she sits with her back against the wall, her knees drawn up, her eyes on the middle distance. I sit beside her, close enough that our shoulders touch, and I don’t ask how she is, and she doesn’t tell me she’s fine.
We’ve already moved past that particular exchange.
After a while she says, “Grant is going to be unpleasant about the scene.”
“Yes,” I agree.
“I got what I needed though.”
“I know.”
She tilts her head back against the wall. Her eyes close briefly. In the low light of the equipment room, smoke still faint in the air between us, she looks less like someone braced for impact than I’ve seen her look since she arrived.
The door is open. I didn’t close it when we came in, and I’m aware of that in the background. The bay beyond it is quiet. The crew is still running post-incident checks, filing reports, and doing what they do after a call.
Footsteps in the bay, even and unhurried.
They slow as they pass the open door.
A pause. Brief. The length of time it takes to register what you’re seeing.
Then they continue on.
Neither of us moves.
Neither of us speaks.