1
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Mira
Smoke burned my throat before I was fully conscious.
My eyes opened to orange light crawling across the stockroom ceiling. I couldn’t understand why I was on the floor. My cheek was pressed against the cold tile and my thoughts kept sliding sideways, half-formed, dissolving before they could connect into anything useful.
I tried to sit up but the room tilted violently. Nausea rolled through me and I pressed my forehead to the tile, squeezing my eyes shut while my stomach tried to crawl out of my body.
This wasn’t normal. I’d been tired, sure. I’d even curled up in the stockroom for a nap after closing and I’d made tea, that bargain bin chamomile that tasted off, more bitter than usual. I figured it was probably just the cheap brand.
But this wasn’t simple tiredness. My body felt wrong, disconnected, my limbs responding on a three-second delay while my brain tried to push through a fog that didn’t belong there.
The tea tasted bitter.
Oh my god.The realization hit me like a slap in the face.
Someone had drugged me.
That’s when the heat registered.Actualheat, not a product of my groggy brain. Flames were eating through the poetry section, crawling toward fiction with an enthusiasm I wished my customers shared.
Shit.
Six months of building this place from nothing, of painting the walls myself at two in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, of turning a gutted storefront into the one space in this world that felt mine.
I’d never even named the damn shop. Too scared to put down roots and too paranoid that making anything permanent would be the thing that finally got me caught.
And now all of it was burning while I lay on the floor with the motor skills of a newborn deer.
I forced myself to my hands and knees. The room swam as I crawled toward the back exit, using a fallen shelf to drag myself upright. My legs shook under my weight, but they held, barely, and I stumbled toward the back door.
A wall of flame blocked the exit.
I could see the greenEXITsign glowing behind the fire, and there was no way through.
Okay, front door then.
I changed direction, dropping low and crawling. My hands found broken glass, bits of charred paper, the melted spine of what used to be a paperback. When I reached the front door and grabbed the handle with both hands, it didn’t budge.
It was locked… from the outside.
The bolt was jammed in a way that was definitely not an accident. Someone had locked this door while I was unconscious on the floor of a building they’d set on fire. My stomach twisted, anxiety and panic warring inside me, taking turns on which emotion knocked the air out of my lungs first.
So far, the smoke was winning.
Through the smoke-hazed window, a figure stood across the street. Hands in his pockets, watching the fire the way someone might watch a movie they were enjoying. He caught me looking and his head tilted. Then he mouthed two words through the glass.
‘Found you.’
I will forever recognize that horrifying face… that figure. A personification of my nightmares.
The very reason why I ran away.
Hudson.
He found me.
