Chapter 5
Annie woke to the smell of smoke. It invaded her lungs before she was fully conscious, harsh and chemical, scraping down her throat and sending her into a violent coughing fit that dragged her out of sleep and into terror.
Her eyes flew open, but darkness met her gaze—thick, oppressive darkness—broken only by a thin, pulsing line of orange light seeping beneath her bedroom door.
For half a second, her mind refused to accept what her body already knew.
Then the heat brushed her skin.
Fire.
Her heart slammed so hard against her ribs it hurt as reality crashed into place.
The building was burning. Her building. The shop downstairs.
Her apartment. Everything she had spent four years rebuilding after loss, after fear, after running—every sacrifice, every long night, every fragile hope—was turning to ash beneath her.
Please, God. No.
She threw back the covers and hit the floor, bare feet slapping against hardwood as she ran for the door.
Childhood safety lessons surfaced just before instinct betrayed her, and she yanked her hand back from the knob, already imagining blistered skin.
She grabbed the shirt from the chair, wrapped it around her fingers, and twisted.
The knob turned, but the door didn’t budge.
She braced her shoulder and shoved. The wood didn’t give. Panic surged and she slammed into it again, harder this time, driving all her weight forward.
Nothing.
The door hadn’t stuck once in the two weeks she’d lived here. She’d heard somewhere that a wooden door could swell and warp during a fire because of the extreme heat. Was that why it wouldn’t budge? Or had someone trapped her in here deliberately.
The police could investigate that later. Right now, she needed to get out of here.
Jack.
The thought struck like lightning, igniting a deeper panic that nearly buckled her knees. He was downstairs. In the storage room. If they had blocked her exit, if they had planned this, then they had planned for him too.
Had they already—
No. She wouldn’t go there. Jack was trained. Alert. Capable. He would find a way out. But she needed to worry about herself first.
She spun back into the bedroom and reached for her phone, only to find a dead screen staring back at her from the nightstand. Guilt and frustration stabbed through her. She’d forgotten to plug it in. Forgotten, even after Jack told her to.
The smoke thickened, rolling in slow gray waves across the ceiling before lowering toward her face. Each breath burned. Each second tightened the walls of the room.
She didn’t have long. Her gaze went to the dresser.
The locket.
Even as survival screamed at her to get to the window, she dove for the drawer, hands shaking as she wrenched it open.
The small velvet pouch lay where she’d left it, warm from the encroaching heat, heavy with the only proof they had managed to uncover.
The locket. The tiny key. The folded scrap of paper that had raised more questions than it answered.
If she died tonight, if Jack died, whatever truth Eleanor Blackwood had hidden would vanish with them.
Her fingers closed around the pouch just as a violent crack split the air as part of the living room ceiling gave way.
Embers showered down beyond her doorway, sparks skittering across the floor.
The fire was chewing through the building with terrifying speed.
The window. It was her last hope of escape.
She shoved the pouch into her pajama pocket, grabbed her scarf, and tied it over her mouth and nose. The smoke burned anyway, thick and suffocating, each breath like swallowing ash.
She staggered to the window and shoved it open, gulping as cooler night air rushed against her face. Below, the alley yawned into darkness, three stories down, the distance enough to make her vision blur and her stomach revolt.
Her fear of heights surged violently, old and ingrained, dragging memories with it—the oak tree behind her parents’ house, the sickening drop, the snap of bone, the months of nightmares that followed.
But fire pressed at her back.
“I need Your strength,” she whispered hoarsely. “I can’t do this alone.”
Scripture rose unbidden, Uncle Eric’s voice steady in her mind, echoing from a hospital room long ago. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.
She tore the sheets from her bed.
The flames crept closer, heat swelling the air as she knotted fabric with shaking hands, testing each connection again and again because her life would depend on what she was making. The rope would not reach the ground. She knew that. But it might get her close enough.
Another sharp crack echoed through the apartment. The bedroom door bowed inward, the wood groaning, smoke forcing itself through the seams.
She looped the sheets around the heavy oak dresser she’d bought at her first estate sale, cinched the knot, and fed the length through the window. The ground waited far below.
Heart pounding, lungs burning, she climbed onto the sill and forced herself to sit.
The height stole her breath. Darkness pressed up from beneath her feet, vast and uncertain, her old terror surging until her hands trembled violently against the cloth.
Don’t look down.
But she had to.
She lowered herself over the edge and began to descend.
The sheets cut into her palms almost immediately. Her arms shook under her weight. The smoke poured from the open window above her, heat washing over her back as she eased herself lower, inch by inch, praying with every movement. Sirens reached her ears when she was halfway down.
The sound nearly broke her.
“Ma’am! Can you hear me?”
She lifted her head, tears blurring her vision as she focused on the alley below where figures moved beneath flashing red light.
“I’m Carmen with the Fairview Fire Department,” the woman called. “You’re doing great. Just keep coming down. Focus on my voice.”
Annie clung to that voice, to its calm certainty, to the steady instructions guiding her hands. Her arms burned. Her palms throbbed. Blood slicked the fabric beneath her grip, but she didn’t stop.
“That’s it. You’re almost there. About ten more feet.”
Ten feet might as well have been miles.
“My name’s Annie,” she gasped when Carmen asked.
“Annie, you’re being incredibly brave. We’ve got a safety net ready. Just a little more.”
Strength, she didn’t know she still possessed carried her downward until the words finally came.
“Okay. Let go. We’ve got you.”
Letting go defied every instinct screaming through her body. But she trusted the voice. Trusted the hands waiting below. Trusted the God who had carried her this far.
She released the sheets.
The net caught her, knocking the breath from her lungs as she fell into waiting arms. Firefighters steadied her, helped her to her feet, wrapped her in a blanket that barely cut the cold shaking through her.
“Jack,” she rasped, clutching Carmen’s sleeve. “Detective Calloway’s still inside. Storage room at the back. Jack Calloway. Please tell me he’s out.”
Carmen was already speaking into her radio.
Annie watched them run, heart hammering as guilt crashed over her. This was her fault. The locket. The secrets. Every escalation traced back to her.
Her hand closed over the weight in her pocket. The locket was safe. She prayed Jack was as well.
***
Jack woke already choking.
The burn in his lungs dragged him out of sleep before his eyes fully opened, and instinct drove him upright against the storage room wall as smoke rolled thickly across the ceiling, blurring the bare bulb overhead and carrying with it the unmistakable stench of accelerant and burning wood.
Heat pressed down from above in suffocating waves, far too intense and far too sudden to be accidental.
Fire.
The realization hit at the same moment he saw the orange glow bleeding beneath the front door, and his body surged into motion before fear could fully register. He crossed the room in long strides, stopping just short of the metal door when he felt the heat radiating through it.
Blocked.
The fire had been placed to sever his access to the stairwell. To Annie.
He spun and drove his shoulder into the back door, throwing his full weight against it. The impact shuddered through his bones, but the door did not give. He struck it again, then again, anger lending power to each blow, but nothing shifted.
Not warped.
Barricaded.
Someone had sealed it from the outside.
They had planned this.
The thought sent a cold surge of fury through the heat in his veins. This wasn’t vandalism or intimidation. This was tactical. Whoever had done this understood space, timing, airflow, and human behavior. They had mapped exits. Anticipated response. Cut off escape.
And Annie was upstairs.
The image rose in his mind with brutal clarity: smoke filling her apartment, flames climbing the walls, her trapped while the fire ate upward through the building.
Panic surged through him, sharp enough to blur the edges of his vision, and he forced himself to breathe through it even as the ceiling creaked ominously above him.
He would not lose her. Not again. Not because he underestimated someone willing to kill.
The small ventilation window near the ceiling was his only remaining option, never meant for escape, barely large enough to pass a box through, but it was the only opening left.
He dragged a chair beneath it, climbed, and used the metal leg to smash the glass outward.
It shattered across the alley, shards cutting into his forearms and shoulders as smoke surged more heavily into the room, but he barely noticed.
The opening was narrow. Too narrow. He measured it anyway.
Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, his hands shaking now despite his effort to control them.
“911, what’s your emergency?”