The first thing I remember is the heat.
Not the pleasant kind. Not bonfire heat or shower heat. This is a wall—thick, choking, slamming into my skin as the bass drops, as strobe lights turn the nightclub into a broken slideshow of bodies.
Then the sound catches up.
A roar, a cracking, a scream that might be mine. Glass becomes shrapnel. The floor heaves. For one suspended heartbeat, I’m weightless.
Then the world explodes.
I don’t see the fire at first. I feel it. The blast punches through my back, steals my air, hurls me forward. A hot wind claws my hair across my face. Metal shrieks somewhere overhead. The high, bright tinkle of bottles shattering rains down like vicious glitter.
I hit the ground hard enough that something in my shoulder gives with a sick pop.
Blackness floods the corners of my vision, but the rest refuses to go. Everything is too bright, too loud. Someone is sobbing. Someone else is swearing into a phone. The air tastes of burned plastic and spilled vodka and copper.
"Move." A voice cuts through the chaos like a blade.
I try. My body disagrees. My palms slide on wet tile—someone’s drink or someone’s blood, I can’t tell. I make it half a meter before the ceiling drops part of itself where my head used to be.
I should be dead. The thought is oddly calm. Detached. I blink grit out of my eyes, curl an arm over my head, cough on smoke.
A hand closes on the back of my dress.
Not a helping hand. A hauling, claiming one. Fingers clamp on the collar of cheap black fabric and wrench me backward with a force that tears stitches.
"Hey—" The protest rips out before I can think.
"Shut up." The same voice, closer. Deep, controlled. Male. "You want to breathe in here or outside?"
I twist enough to see him between flashes of emergency lights: tall, dark suit dusted in plaster, jaw marked with a clean line of blood where something nicked him. His pupils are blown wide, but his expression is almost bored, like the club isn’t collapsing around us.
He looks at me like he’s seen me a thousand times before.
I’ve never seen him in my life.
"I can walk," I snap, because panic tastes too much like helplessness and I don’t do helpless.
"You can argue later." His grip shifts from my collar to my wrist, hot pressure around fragile bones. His touch is impersonal, but my skin reacts like it remembers him.
Goosebumps race up my arm, bizarre and inappropriate given the temperature.
An emergency exit sign flickers through smoke ahead. It’s tilted, as if the wall itself is bending. People surge toward it in a blind tide, shoulders slamming, heels snapping.
He doesn’t follow the tide. He cuts through it, dragging me with him, angling along the wall where falling debris is less frequent. Heat licks at my heels. Somewhere behind us, something else collapses with a teeth-gritting crash.
"What happened?" I cough.
"Later." He doesn’t look back. His voice has a strange calm, a rhythm like he’s done triage in chaos before. "Keep your head down."
A beam cracks as we pass under it, splinters raining. He yanks me forward, tucking me against his side just as a chunk of concrete slams into the floor where my legs were. A shard clips his shoulder; he barely flinches.
