A door materialized through the smoke. Lucy slammed into it, shoved it open, and cold night air hit my face like salvation.
We made it maybe twenty feet before the café collapsed behind us.
The sound was immense. Breaking wood, shattering glass, forty years of history coming down in a single catastrophic moment. The shockwave knocked us off our feet, sent us sprawling across the pavement. I covered her body with mine as debris rained down.
Then silence.
Flames crackling. Distant shouting. Someone calling my name.
I rolled off Lucy. She was staring up at me, soot-streaked, shaking, alive. Her hand found my face, my jaw, checking to make sure I was real.
I couldn't speak. Could barely breathe. Just looked at her—this woman who had run into a burning building for me, who had known the way out when I didn't, who had saved my life with nothing but stubbornness and five months of closing shifts.
Liam appeared out of the smoke. Riley and Owen right behind him. Hands grabbed us, pulled us further from the wreckage. Medics materialized. Someone pressed an oxygen mask to my face. Someone else was checking Lucy, asking questionsshe wasn't answering because she wouldn't stop looking at me.
Somewhere beyond the fire line, a commotion. Shouting. A scuffle.
I turned my head, oxygen mask fogging with each breath, and saw Sheriff Daniels hauling Evan toward a cruiser. Evan was fighting, drunk and raging, screaming something about Lucy belonging to him, about how this wasn't over, about how he'd finish what he started.
Daniels didn't flinch. Just shoved him against the car, hard, and yanked his wrists into cuffs.
"Evan Harris, you're under arrest for arson, attempted murder, and violation of a protective order." Daniels's voice carried across the chaos, steady and cold. "We caught your buddy running from the back alley. He's already talking." He leaned in close. "It's over."
Evan screamed something else, but a deputy was already pushing his head down, folding him into the back of the cruiser. The door slammed shut, cutting off his voice mid-sentence.
Daniels looked over at us. At Lucy, soot-streaked and shaking. At me, flat on my back with an oxygen mask strapped to my face. He gave us a single nod.
It was over. Finally over
In the middle of the roar and the heat, I reached out. When my hand found Lucy's, time seemed to fracture. Her fingers laced through mine in an iron grip, a silent promise that neither of us would let go, even as the world burned around us.
She didn't let go.
Neither did I.
CHAPTER 20
Lucy
White ceiling.Fluorescent lights humming somewhere above me, too bright, making my eyes water. Or maybe that was something else.
I blinked, trying to piece together where I was. The beeping came first, steady and insistent, a rhythm I recognized from too many hospital rooms. Then the smell: antiseptic, industrial soap, that particular staleness of recycled air. My throat burned when I swallowed, raw and scraped, and my lungs ached with every breath like someone had taken sandpaper to the inside of my chest.
“Smoke inhalation”. The words floated up from somewhere, clinical and distant. “Minor burns. Overnight observation.”
I turned my head, and the movement sent pain shooting down my neck, muscles I didn't know I had screaming in protest. But I didn't care. Because there, in the bed beside mine, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him if I tried, was Cal.
He was alive.
I knew it because he was watching me. I didn't know how long he'd been watching, but his eyes were open, fixed on my face with an intensity that made my breath catch. Like he'd been waiting. Like he'd been afraid to look away.
"Hey," he said. His voice came out rough, wrecked from the smoke.
"Hey," I whispered back.
That was when I started crying. Not the quiet, controlled tears I'd learned to hide through all those years, not the muffled sobs I'd buried in pillows so no one would hear. These were the kind of tears that came from somewhere deep and primal, the kind that shook your whole body and didn't care who was watching. Relief and terror and exhaustion and something else, something that felt like hope, all tangled together until I couldn't tell where one ended and another began.
Cal didn't say anything. He just reached across the space between our beds, his IV line stretching, and found my hand.
