I turned back to the burning building, the fear lodged in my throat. The entire roof was engulfed in flames, and sooner or later, that building was bound to collapse. As I watched, frozen in fear, another section of the building collapsed inward with a thunderous crash.
And she was in there. I couldn’t imagine how terrified she was, knowing her fear of fire, and she went in there before the flames started.
Without thinking, I dashed through the front door.
“Arko, stop right there!” Andrey grabbed my arm. “You can’t go back in there. The whole place is coming down.”
I pulled away, my feet not stopping as I turned and screamed. “She’s in there. I know she is!”
“You don’t know that,” Dante screamed back, just as Caspian yelled out explosive curses at Beatrice.
I ignored them all, my feet hitting the ground like wind as I ran toward her. She must have thought something happened to us, and I knew she was too damn selfless to stand by and do nothing.
The heat hit me like a wall as I reached the exit I had used moments earlier. Flames devoured the doorframe, but there was still a gap I could get through. I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth and pushed forward.
Inside was hell. The smoke was so thick I could barely see a foot in front of me. The roar of the fire drowned out everything else.
“Beatrice!” I shouted. “Beatrice!”
I moved through the burning corridor, staying close to the wall in case I lost my way in all that smoke. The skin on my hands blistered from the heat as I felt my way forward.
“Beatrice!” I called again, voice cracking from the smoke.
That’s when I heard a faint bout of coughing from a room up ahead, to my right. I moved as quickly as I could and saw some fallen, broken beams blocking the entrance. Through a gap in the rubble, I saw movement.
“Beatrice?” I screamed again.
“Arko?” She sounded weak and panicked.
“Fuck!” I roared back. “I’m here. Stay right there!”
I tried to remove pieces of the debris, but they were too damn heavy. But there was no other way. Eventually, I decided I couldn’t clear the whole thing and moved just enough pieces to create a hole large enough for her to slither out through.
When I got a good look at her, she was pressed against the far wall, her face red from the heat, and her eyes wide-set with horror.
“I’m going to get you out,” I said, extending a hand. “Just try to slide out through this hole.”
“I’m sorry,” she said between coughs as she came closer, and I moved away to give her space to climb. “I thought something happened to you when the comms went down.”
“Save it for when we’re out of here,” I grunted, waving my hands to urge her to move faster. “Come on!”
She squeezed through the opening, and I was immediately by her side, catching her in my arms. I knew we were in a hurry, that every second was a matter of life and death,but I couldn’t help myself from stilling for a moment, from holding her in my arms.
“You have no idea how much you scared me.” I kissed her senseless, but just then, we heard another crash, pulling us back to the present.
“Can you scold me once we’re out of here?” she laugh-cried, and I laughed too, grabbing her arm to make a run for it. I kept her against the wall and myself toward the hallway, closer to the fire as I led her toward the exit.
“This way,” I said, keeping her close.
Flames badly engulfed the exit, and I saw Beatrice panic.
“Come on!” I said. “We have to jump through it!”
“There has to be another way,” she cried, looking around in desperation. The fire was so hot now that I could feel the heat singe the hair on my neck.
“There isn’t,” I said, and without thinking, lifted her off the ground. Before she could protest, or scream, or even shout, I jumped over the fire. The place could have come down on our heads any time now, and I knew that.
We tumbled out onto gravel, gasping and coughing in the night air. I grabbed Beatrice and half-dragged her away from the building. We’d barely made it thirty yards when the section we’d just escaped from collapsed entirely to the ground.
