The crushing weight on my shoulders eased. I still couldn’t breathe properly past the dust and smoke, but the tunnel around my vision receded enough to make out the figures on either side of me, both wearing full gear.
A third firefighter pulled me out from under the table and took my place.
“One... two...three!” The respirator-flattened voice counted down, and the table tilted as the three people beneath it heaved.
I stumbled around to the side and eased Jez away, taking her place and grabbing Gage beneath the armpits as another firefighter levered up the beam that had been trapping his leg. I heaved, pulling my packmate free. Knox and Jez pulled Tony out of danger immediately afterward, now that he no longer had a two-hundred-twenty-five-pound alpha on top of him.
“Stretchers!” called one of the firefighters. “We need two stretchers over here!”
Gage was alive—the pain through the bond proved that much, even if he was barely conscious. The need to crash to my knees next to Tony’s body and check his pulse was nearly overwhelming—but Jez, Knox, and I were immediately elbowed out of the way by the knot of first responders surrounding the pair.
The wreck of the banquet hall was now a confusing blur of moving, high-powered flashlight beams. Rescuers swarmed the area, shouting orders and calling for more stretchers.
Gage and Tony were efficiently strapped onto backboards and transferred to the first two stretchers.
“Go with them,” one of the firefighters said. “We need to help the people who aren’t ambulatory. This building isn’t stable.”
Knox grabbed my arm, keeping me from following the stretchers. “Thank you,” he told the man. “You and your team saved our lives.”
The firefighter gave a brisk nod, but then he immediately disappeared to rejoin the search.
“Jez.” Knox’s voice was a bare rasp, but Jez dragged her eyes away from Gage and Tony’s stretchers in response, meeting his gaze. “Go with them,” he told her. “We’ll be a few minutes behind you.”
Her dusty face wrinkled in a confused frown, but then the stretcher bearers were already carrying their injured burdens in a slow trek through the rubble. She looked torn for a moment, but then she nodded and limped after them.
Worry, fear, exhaustion, throbbed through the mating bond, a counterpoint to the pain of Gage’s injuries. I swallowed hard and choked on grit. Knox still had me by the arm.
“We need to get out,” I told him hoarsely.
His dark eyes glittered in the light of the firefighters’ emergency lamps, hard despite the bloodshot whites. “In a minute.”
He tugged me toward what I was pretty sure had been the stage area, where pitiful whimpers and groans came from the shadow of a pile of rubble. I’d dropped my cell phone in the confusion of saving the others. It was probably crushed under the table at this point—the second phone I’d lost this month. Knox still had his, though. He played the flashlight beam along the base of the pile until it illuminated a familiar face.
Adrian...Paolo... sobbed and flinched as the light hit his eyes. He lifted an arm weakly, as though to fend us off.
I took an abrupt step back. “Knox,what the fuck. Let him rot.”
Hatred roiled in my gut as I stared down at the slimy little weasel who’d orchestrated not only Knox’s attempted murder, but also the shit-show at the silos.
“No,” Knox said in a monotone. “I don’t think so. Help me get him free.”
He propped the phone nearby and grabbed the first chunk of concrete, rolling it aside. I hesitated, but the instinct to obey my pack leader won out over the instinct to get my hands around Paolo’s scrawny neck and squeeze.
Barely.
The collapse that had trapped the omega didn’t include any debris too big for us to move. The first responders were still dealing with the area where most of the guests had been seated. They didn’t appear to have noticed us over here in the shadows.
My hands slipped when I pulled a chunk away from the asshole’s leg. The concrete was wet with blood, and so were my hands when I dropped it on the growing pile next to me. The rest of the debris covering his lower body fell away easily, revealing more blood.
Even though he was no longer trapped, Paolo just lay there—staring up at us with terrified eyes. The leg I’d freed was twisted at an unnatural angle, and his stupid maroon tuxedo trousers were shredded. Worse, though, was the source of the blood soaking the floor around him. It wasn’t just pooling sluggishly. It was pulsing from a gash in his thigh.
He was bleeding out as we watched.
“Don’t... don’t hurt me,” Paolo whimpered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to... to...”
“See, here’s the thing,” Knox said to me, ignoring the omega’s cringing and begging as he shed his jacket and unfastened his suspenders. “Maybe Lorenzo Vozzina was the one who planted a bomb in this building, and maybe he wasn’t.”
He wrapped the suspenders around Paolo’s leg above the wound and yanked them tight, drawing a weak cry of pain from the injured omega. The bleeding slowed to a trickle.
