I sprint across the street, ignoring the people trying to call out to me. The stabbing pain in my chest explodes into something raw and feral, driving me faster.
The glass lines the ground. The front façade of BeckettDeluxe Design is warped, one door hanging off its hinges, the other twisted inward. Smoke curls out in dark, choking coils.
He did this.
Jack O’Connor walked into Zara’s building and set a bomb—or something close enough—to blow the place apart. So help me fucking God if she’s dead…
I step inside. Heat licks my face, blistering, angry. The fire hasn’t reached the upstairs level where her office is yet, but it will. Soon. Too soon. I can only pray she’s up there and not on the ground floor.
‘Boss!’ Gabriel calls out behind me. ‘Keep back?—’
‘She’s in there,’ I snarl without turning. ‘She’s in THERE.’ A roar tears out of my throat, primal and violent.
I charge further inside. The heat punches me, smoke clawing down my lungs. My vision swims—but I don’t fucking stop. I don’t feel fear. Only one thought consumes me, ignites me, drives me straight through the flames licking the walls.
I’m coming for you, sweetheart.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
Chapter Forty-Eight
ZARA
My lungs burn. The air tastes like chemicals and hell. Smoke coils through my office in thick grey ribbons, writhing across the ceiling, curling down the walls, creeping closer by the second.
The heat presses against my skin in heavy waves, like someone’s opened an oven door and shoved my face into it. And I thought it was hot earlier. An irrational, crazed laugh bursts from my lips. The smoke is sending me delusional on top of everything else.
I twist against the cable ties biting into my wrists, but they don’t budge. Jack cinched them so tight my fingers are already going numb.
He paces in front of the blown-out window, and laughs—actually laughs as he takes in the chaos he caused on the street below like it’s some kind of fucked-up movie.
‘Look at them,’ he croons, tapping the glass with one bony knuckle. ‘Running around like ants. They’ve no idea what’s coming next.’
The wall shudders.
The fire is spreading.
‘Please,’ I choke out, my voice raw from the smoke. ‘Jack, let me go. The baby. She’s done nothing to you.’
He turns, eyes wild and glittering.
‘It’s not about the baby. It’s about pain. Reckoning. Revenge.’ He flicks his lighter open, shut, open again—that click-click-click burrowing straight under my skin. ‘Your brothers took everything from me. And your father before that. Now, I get to take everything from them.’
My stomach clenches so violently I gasp. I fold forward as much as the restraints allow, cradling my bump against the rising heat.
Jack saunters closer, crouches so his face is level with mine. His breath smells metallic, like the blood he’s desperate to spill. ‘Your family are probably down there. Right in the blast radius. Hopefully blown to bits.’ He glances at the flames licking up the corridor outside my office, grinning like the devil himself. ‘Not long now, Zara. What a way to go, right?’
Oh God.
I’m going to die here.
With this fucking maniac.
Tears blur my vision. I try to blink them away, but they just fall faster. I’ve never known fear like this. It’s so… final.
