Chapter 6 Fire

Sera's POV

That project was my life's work, and I didn't want to see it fall apart at the very end.

I nodded, then turned and got into a cab.

At seven-thirty the next morning, Cassian pulled up downstairs at Alice's, right on time.I pulled open the car door the way I always did, and met a pair of provoking blue eyes.

Hailey sat comfortably in the passenger seat, the leather already covered with a fluffy pink seat cushion. A carton of milk steamed gently on the console. The passenger seat that had once been mine alone was now buried under the things she'd planted to stake her claim.

Cassian explained it evenly. "Hailey's foot makes things difficult. Take the back seat."

Hailey gave me a sweet smile. "Morning, Sera. Cassian brought me along so I could learn the ropes of your job."

From the driver's seat, Cassian's voice came out clipped, almost sulking. "You resigned, Sera. I had to find someone to fill the seat, didn't I?"

"Sure," I said. "Do whatever you like."

The secretary's chair wasn't the only seat that would need filling soon: the wife's spot was about to open up too.

I pushed aside the mess of Hailey's things scattered across the back seat and cleared just enough space to sit down. The car started, and the closed cabin filled with that cloying milk smell mixed with gasoline.

I kept my eyes on the window. Up front, Cassian and Hailey were talking, and I had never once seen him like this: taking up even the smallest, most idle thing she said, answering her easily, almost warmly.

Hailey's voice, pitched deliberately soft and breathy, was cloying enough to turn anyone's stomach, and maybe it was all in my head, but mine actually began to churn, hard. The nausea climbed and climbed until I couldn't hold it down.

"Stop the car!" I clamped a hand over my mouth and cried out in misery.

Cassian slammed on the brakes. I stumbled out, and bolted to the planter at the roadside, retching as if my insides were tearing loose.

"Sera, are you carsick? Are you all right?" Cassian pushed open the driver's door and started toward me.

"Ah! Help me!" A shrill scream tore out of the car.

Cassian's feet stopped dead, and he whipped around. Hailey was clutching her chest, fighting for breath, her face white as paper, cold sweat sliding down her forehead. "Cassian, help "

Cassian's pupils shrank. Without a moment's hesitation he turned and rushed back to the car, and the second he saw the state she was in, he started the engine. "Sera, Hailey's having an asthma attack! I have to get her to the hospital now! Take a cab to the venue yourself!"

The window rose, and the Maybach shot into traffic like an arrow off the string, leaving me nothing but a long trail of choking exhaust. I braced myself weakly against a lamppost and wiped the sour taste from the corner of my mouth.

I gave a bitter laugh. So this was Cassian's choice.

The road was remote, and I waited twenty minutes. No taxi, no car turning back, not a single text.I arrived at the meeting fifteen minutes late.

The meeting had been running for half an hour by the time Cassian and Hailey showed. He pushed the door open, settled Hailey onto the sofa in the corner first, and only then took his place at the head of the table, saying to the room, "My chief secretary wasn't feeling well. It held us up."

His eyes found me first, scanning me quickly, as if to confirm I was all right.

I went on with my report without so much as lifting my head. I ran point on the technical review, walking the partner pack through every line of the suppressant data. Their lead kept nodding, scribbling fast to keep up.

From the head of the table, Cassian was watching me. There was something in his eyes he probably didn't know was there: a flicker of quiet, unguarded admiration.

The meeting was halfway through when a sharp, acrid smell of burning poured in through the central air vent.

At first no one paid it any mind, until the fire alarm tore through the whole building!

"Fire!" someone shouted. Thick black smoke was already flooding the corridor outside.

"The elevator's down! Take the stairs!" the partner pack cried in panic, and the conference room dissolved into chaos.

Hailey took one breath of the smoke and folded into a violent fit of coughing. Her legs gave out and she dropped to the floor, clutching at Cassian's trouser leg, and screamed in a frenzy. "Fire! Cassian, I'm so scared! I don't have the strength, save me!"

The smoke stung my eyes, and that burnt smell yanked me straight back into the nightmare of the year I was eight. The firelight in the cabin, the burning beam crashing down, the skin searing off my back.

I shook all over, cold sweat soaking through my clothes in an instant. My throat closed like something had clamped around it, and I couldn't make a sound. Through the crush of bodies, I looked at Cassian in desperation.

Cassian swept Hailey up off the floor and wrapped his suit jacket tight around her head. He didn't turn back to look at me even once. With Hailey in his arms, fast and sure as a black panther, he plunged into the current of people in the escape stairwell.

(God's POV)

Cassian carried Hailey out of the building through the fire exit and set her down on a bench at the curb. She was still shaking, clinging to his arm, refusing to let go.

"Cassian, don't go, I'm so frightened "

"Sera's still inside." He pried her fingers loose and turned to go.

"No! It's too dangerous in there!" Hailey shrieked and caught the hem of his jacket. "What if something happens to you? Cassian, you can't leave me "

"Let go! I have to go back for her!" A vein stood out at Cassian's temple as he wrenched his arm free of her.

Cassian drove back into the fire against the tide of fleeing people, and the poison smoke set him coughing hard. A burning section of ceiling came down, and the flames licked across his arm and raised a wide sheet of blisters. He didn't care. He kicked the conference room door open.

Empty.

His chest heaved, and relief broke loose in him.

She must have gotten out with the partner pack's people, he told himself.

He fought his way out, and Derek had already arrived with a medical team. Cassian rubbed at his brow, exhausted. "Derek, reach Sera. The second you hear anything, tell me. Get Hailey to the hospital first."

(Sera's POV)

By then the smoke had stolen the world from my eyes.

The panicking crowd had pushed me into a back stairwell, but by the tenth floor a wall of roaring flame had swallowed the way down.

The fire crackled with a terrible sound. When I was eight, I'd run into a blaze like this to save the boy who promised to marry me, and I'd come out of it covered in scars. And today he had carried another woman to safety and left me behind in this hell.

A heavy fire door, its hinges burned through, crashed down and sealed off the only path I had left.

The heat around me was high enough to cook the skin from my bones. I sank to the scorching floor, and every breath came harder than the last.

If I die, you finally get to marry her with a clear conscience. In the last second before I lost consciousness, I closed my eyes.