Chapter 8 - FIRE AND ASH
Z
Time slowed down to a crawl—the familiar combat phenomena where every second expands into an eternity.
Mason pulled the trigger.
The deafening report of his gun shattered the roar of the flames. The bullet tore through the shoulder of my jacket, grazing my skin with a searing heat.
I didn't fire back.
If I killed him here, in the middle of a burning building, his legal team would spend years turning him into a victim, entangling my family in endless litigation and technicalities. I needed him alive. I needed him to answer for every life he had ruined.
I dropped the fire extinguisher and leaped sideways behind the heavy oak counter as a second bullet shattered the mirror behind the pie display.
Glass showered down on me.
"Come out, Colonel!" Mason screamed, advancing toward the counter, firing blindly into the wooden panels. "Come out and take your medicine like your mother did!"
The mention of my mother reignited that cold, precise fire inside me.
I waited for the sound of his revolver clicking empty—six shots.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Click.
Before he could swing the cylinder open to reload, I vaulted over the counter, driving my shoulder directly into his midsection. We both crashed into the burning debris on the floor.
Mason fought like a cornered animal, biting, scratching, and clawing at my face. He grabbed a jagged piece of broken glass from the floor and slashed at my arm.
I blocked the strike with my forearm, ignoring the sharp pain as the glass cut my skin, and delivered a short, devastating hook to his jaw. His head snapped back, and the glass dropped from his hand.
I pinned him to the floor, driving my knee into his chest, securing his wrists behind his back with tactical zip-ties I pulled from my belt.
"Get off me!" he choked out, coughing on the thick smoke surrounding us. "Get off me!"
"Shut up," I said, grabbing him by the collar and dragging his heavy body across the floor toward the front entrance just as the roof above the kitchen collapsed in a shower of sparks and flame.
I burst through the front doors of the diner, hauling Mason out into the cold morning air, dropping him onto the wet asphalt of Main Street.
May you like
In the distance, the wail of sirens cut through the quiet morning.
I collapsed onto the curb next to him, chest heaving, blood dripping from my arm onto the pavement, watching as the diner—the place where I had grown up, where my father had laughed, and where my mother had dedicated her life—was swallowed by the fire.
