“Not unless you make it over,” Bronc snapped. “We go now. We don’t stop. We get her back, or we die trying.”
The words lit something inside me. Not hope, not yet, but the muscle memory of a thousand drills, the urge to move, to act, to fix what was broken even if it meant burning down the world.
I got up.
We rode hell for leather, engines screaming, the horizon a line of black smoke against the purple sky.
By the time we reached the compound, the fire had eaten the clubhouse. It was a pile of cinder blocks and burned timber. We met two fire trucks, a sheriff’s cruiser, and three ambulances. The air was a goddamn furnace, thick with the smell of scorched wood, melted plastic, something sweet and awful under it all.
I jumped off the bike before it stopped rolling and ran to the smoking ruin, heart trying to punch its way out of my chest.
The clubhouse was gone.
Just gone.
Walls folded in on themselves, bricks spattered across the yard, beams twisted and snapped like matchsticks. All the windows were teeth biting at the sky. There was no roof—just open air, black and glittering with falling ash.
People everywhere. The pack had come back from the civic center. There were a few of our own EMTs, and a few lost faces I didn’t even recognize. Someone yelled, a kid maybe, but all I could hear was Parker’s voice in my ear, that last laugh, soft as a goodbye.
I staggered to the wreckage. The firefighters kept shoving me away, shouting about danger, but I kept coming. Finally, T-Bone, one of our patched-in members, appeared at my side,face streaked with soot, hands already torn up from moving debris.
He grabbed my arm and pointed. “Stairwell survived. Kinda. If she was in there…”
He didn’t finish.
I nodded, ran for the jagged hole where the stairs had been. The heat was brutal, singeing the hair off my arms, but I didn’t care. I climbed over a collapsed beam, boots slipping, hands raw. Every breath was pain. Every movement threatened to collapse what was left of the structure.
“Parker!” I yelled. “Parker, answer me! Please! Wren!”
Nothing. Just the hiss of burning insulation, the pop of distant embers.
I clawed my way down the first flight, then the second. The lower stairs were intact, sheltered by the concrete wall. That’s where the debris was thickest—an avalanche of plaster, glass, furniture, and steel. I started to dig.
My fingers bled, nails ripped off at the quick. I tore at every board, every chunk of drywall, calling her name until my throat was raw.
Someone else joined me—Papa, I think, or maybe Gunner. Together, we pulled away the junk, brick by brick, the dust so thick I couldn’t see.
Then I heard it.
A faint, rasping breath.
“Stop,” I shouted. “Everyone stop.”
Silence.
I pressed my ear to the rubble. There it was—a whisper, barely there.
“Here!” I roared, and the guys swarmed in, hands and shovels and crowbars, anything they could use. We worked like maniacs, moving a wall’s worth of garbage in minutes. Sweat blinded me, the world a tunnel of pain and noise.
Then a hand.
Small, pale, streaked black with ash.
I grabbed it, squeezed. “Parker! I’m here. I’m here.”
The hand twitched, weak as a baby bird. But it was alive.
The next few minutes were chaos. The paramedics got there fast, cut her out with a saw, dragged her tiny broken body up and into the ambulance. She was unconscious, face pale, lips split and blue. Her clothes were burned away in patches, skin raw and bleeding.
