“And you—” I tried again. “You?—”
“I got you out,” he said simply.
Something inside my chest lurched. I looked at him more closely and saw the tremor he was fighting in his hands, the way he was bracing himself like the ground might still give way beneath us.
“You scared the hell out of us,” Gabi said from across the room.
I hadn’t noticed her there. She gathered some kind of materials from a tray and advanced on her brother with a scowl that said she wouldn’t be put off.
“Us?” I echoed faintly.
She shot me a look as she reached for the burn on his arm. “Yes, us. And before you start arguing, you’re staying on oxygen. You had smoke inhalation, and you lost consciousness. You don’t get points for toughness.” Her gaze shot to Rios. “Neither do you.”
“I’m fine,” I said automatically.
She didn’t even look up from the task. “You’re stable. That is not the same thing.”
Rios shifted, his thumb brushing once over my knuckles. “Just listen to her.”
There was no edge to it. No command. Only concern, bare and unguarded. It hit me harder than the reprimand would have.
For a few minutes, we stayed silent as Gabi efficiently cleaned the burns, dabbed them with some kind of ointment, and covered them with gauze.
The nurse came and checked my vitals, the cuff squeezing my arm until my fingers tingled. She murmured something to Gabi, something I couldn’t quite track, then adjusted the oxygen flow and smiled at me in a way that probably meant to be reassuring.
“You’re doing well. Keep breathing slow like that.” She glanced at Rios, then back to Gabi. “Fire department called ahead. Police are on their way.”
The word police cut through the fog in my head.
“The police?” I asked.
Rios’s eyes flicked to mine. There it was again—that subtle shift, the way his posture changed as if he’d taken on more weight.
He looked at Gabi. “Can we have a minute?”
Gabi’s mouth flattened. “One,” she said. “After that, they’re coming in whether you’re ready or not.”
She herded the nurse out with a look and pulled the door closed behind them. Background sounds dampened to a soft hum.
Rios didn’t sit. He stayed standing, close enough that I felt the heat that wasn’t heat radiating off him, the restless energy of someone whose body hadn’t yet accepted that the danger had passed.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He took a breath. Let it out slowly, like he was bracing himself. “Madden, the fire wasn’t an accident.”
The words slid into the space between us and stayed there.
I stared at him, my brain snagging on the wrong part of the sentence. Wasn’t an accident still left room for malfunction. Faulty wiring. A bad fuel line. Anything that didn’t involve intent.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The cabin door was locked. From the outside.”
My stomach dropped. “Locked how?” The question came out thin, like I already knew the answer and didn’t want to hear it anyway.
He shifted, and that careful pause told me he was choosing his words. “There was a bike chain looped through the handle. Padlocked to the rail.”
For a second, my mind refused to cooperate. Locked. From the outside. My thoughts skidded, trying to reroute.
