Smokey (STEEL REAPERS MC #4) by Zahra Girard EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Zahra Girard
- Language: English
- Genre: contemporary romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Dixon
Smoke billows through the room and searing heat creates shimmering
waves, illusions, images that emerge from the flames that crackle and roar
around me, crimson tongues that call to me. One in particular — a face,
always the same face, with the same wound: a bullet hole above the left
eye, a window into the brain of someone too good to have died the way
they did — appears and beckons me.
It wants me to step into the flames.
I take a step deeper into the house, ignore the warnings of the other
firefighters over the radio, ignore the screams of caution that ring within my
skull, and answer the call that pulls me toward obliteration.
I don’t think; I don’t hesitate; I’m ready. Of all the men I’ve killed,
there’s only one I see. Only one I regret. If I could trade places with that
vision in the flames, I would.
Another step.
Then A hand takes my shoulder. I turn. A helmet with a respirator and
visor that glistens with the glow of the flames stares back at me, cocked
askew in surprise. The hand on my shoulder tightens; it says one thing:
What the fuck are you doing?
I shake my head and raise my hand, thumbs up, and they take their hand
off me.
This isn’t the answer. The flames won’t wash my conscience clean.
Nothing will.
The man in the helmet gestures towards a different room, away from the
flames, toward a back hallway down which I can see several shut doors.
Bedrooms, probably. The civilian who called this in said multiple people
were using this shitheap of a home as a flophouse. I cast one more longing
look toward the flames before going deeper. We have a mission: there’s a
kid in here and that kid doesn’t deserve to suffer for my selfishness.
I have to focus.
Deeper we go.
While the air turns a glowing red-black with smoke laced with the
wicked poison the addicts in this house were cooking up.
Deeper.
While the inferno simmers and sizzles and pulses like a living thing
around me, calling to the darkest parts of my soul: step in, let me burn the
pain away.
It’s tempting, even now.
I stumble over something soft and nearly fall. A body. Not moving, not
breathing; I kneel for a moment, two fingers pressed against the scrawny,
wasted neck — no pulse.
The other man with me — Jenkins is his name, though that hardly
matters now — points to a door. It’s slightly ajar, leaking a whining cry that
slices through the churning cacophony of the fire. A baby.
I surge through the door, into a world of stifling heat and suffocating
darkness. The smoke is solid here, a black sea flooding from the ceiling. My
flashlight beam cuts through, revealing glimpses of a life paused midbreath: scorched photographs on the wall, melted toys on the floor.
Then a crib and its terrified resident.
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