Actually flinches.
“I’m trying,” he grits out, his voice low and rough and way too human to belong to the thing carrying me through a burning building. “I’m trying, I’m trying, I’m trying?—”
The ceiling gives way behind us.
The roar of the fire swallows his words.
The world shakes.
I feel myself being lifted higher against his chest as he shields my body with his own without thinking about it.
Something deep inside me answers that gesture like it has been waiting its entire life for it.
The pressure in my chest blooms.
Blinding.
Overwhelming.
Not pain.
Recognition.
My body goes slack.
The last thing I register before the darkness finally takes me is the sensation of being held tighter, impossibly gentle, and the echo of something inside my chest answering a presence I have never felt before.
And the world goes out.
CHAPTER 4
TUR
Icrash through the kitchen doorway with her in my arms as the ceiling finally gives up behind us, a thunderous, collapsing roar that sends a hurricane of fire, dust, and shattered concrete chasing my heels like something alive and hungry. Heat lashes across my back hard enough to steal the breath from my lungs, and I twist my body sideways on instinct, turning my shoulder and spine into a living shield so the worst of it hits me instead of her.
Debris slams into me in heavy, brutal impacts—chunks of plaster, shards of tile, something metal that rings against my ribs like a gong—but I do not slow down.
I do not drop her.
My boots skid on glass and grease and water as I clear the threshold and stagger into the alley, the night air knifing into my lungs so violently it feels like I’ve been stabbed from the inside. Sirens are screaming now, close and chaotic and layered, red and blue light bleeding into the smoke pouring out of the ruined building behind me.
I keep moving.
I don’t look back.
Her weight is nothing.
Her weight is everything.
She is limp against my chest, her head lolling sideways, dark hair plastered to her forehead with sweat and blood, her arm hanging loose over my forearm like a broken-winged bird. Her breath comes in thin, wet little pulls that hitch and stutter, and every single one of them feels like a countdown I cannot see.
“Stay with me,” I rasp under my breath, even though I know she can’t hear me. “Don’t you fucking dare check out on me now.”
I cut left, deeper into the service alleys, away from the screaming street and the flashing emergency vehicles and the rising plume of fire that will draw every surveillance drone in the district like flies to meat.
The heat rolling off her body is wrong.
Not fever-warm.
