Page 1 of Burn It Down

PROLOGUE

I’m in a hospital. That can’t be good.

I close my eyes and try to remember exactly what happened to land me here this time. I’m a firefighter—have been for four years now—and it happens sometimes. I work in Kansas City too, so there are a lot of cars. A lot of car wrecks. A lot of building fires and house fires. We go on a lot of calls—and of course, some of them are dangerous.

Today—it was an apartment fire. I remember now. Older building downtown, not at all up to code. There was a kid there. I heard him crying and went looking.Elijah? No.But he did look like my son a little bit. Same blond hair and around his age.Terrified.

He wanted his mother. He was crying for his mom when I heard him and went to grab him. I got him to safety, transferred him to one of the other firefighters—right before the floor gave out—and then I fell.

I breathe in deeply but keep my eyes closed, smelling the antiseptic scent all hospitals seem to have, and listen to the monitors I’m attached to. I’m alive.

I remember smelling the smoke, but the flames had gone out. Lying there on the hard ground. Everything hurt, but I knew that was a good thing. I could still feel pain. I was alive.

“Thank God, you’re alive.”Did I say those words out loud?I don’t think I did. I open my eyes and see my sister rushing into the hospital room. “Kade. You’re okay, right?”

I nod my head slowly, but it honestly hurts to move. Still, I manage because she’s here in Kansas City. She moved out of town last week when she got an incredible job opportunity in Oregon. Her husband went with her and just found a job there too. They were getting settled. Tori was so worried to leave Elijah and me, she almost turned the job down, but I told her I’d be fine.

And that Elijah, my sweet six-year-old son, would be okay too. She’d helped me take care of him since his mother died four years ago. She was so damn worried, and I promised her. She went back and forth so many times—but I knew she really wanted to go. She deserved to go and live her own dream after being a caretaker for so many years. Now she’s here—she had to fly halfway across the country—and I can see she’s terrified. That she’s blaming herself already.

“Tori, I’m fine,” I try because I can’t let her go down this path. It was a good thing for her to move. She can’t regret it because I got a little hurt on the job.

She sniffs, wiping her wet eyes with her hand and shakes her head, her eyes roaming over me, and I wish I wasn’t in this fucking hospital bed. That she didn’t look so scared and uncertain. Tori always had to be the strong one. Our dad left when we were young—our mother should have but didn’t. Tori was there for me and our brother, Bowen. She was only six years older than me and four years older than Bowen, but she was our rock.

She had to grow up way too fast, and this was her chance at happiness. At living her own life for the first time. “I’m. Fine,” I say clearly and somehow manage to flinch from the shooting pain in my head when I sit up a little more in the bed.

“You’re not fine,” she says, her eyes deadly serious. “You have a concussion. You have so many cuts and bruises. You have broken ribs and a broken leg. You could have died.”

“But I didn’t,” I say. “I’m alive. Where’s Elijah?”

“With Paul.”Her husband, okay. Good.“They’re getting a snack at the vending machine. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Tori—” I start, but she holds up one hand to silence me.

“You can’t do this, Kade. I know you want to be a firefighter...”

“I am a firefighter,” I say firmly, but she doesn’t acknowledge it.

“But you could have died. Elijah’s mother already died. You’re all he has, and maybe it was selfish of me to move so far away...”

“No.” I shift again on the bed, ignoring the agony and wishing for another dose of morphine. “It wasn’t. You’ve done more than enough. We aren’t your responsibility, Tori. I’m a grown man with a son. I can and do take care of him.”

“You need someone here to help you. He was with that toddler you hired to watch him. She didn’t know how to handle this and told him that you fell through a rotted floor and that she didn’t know if you’d be okay.”

I wince.Fuck.“Is he okay?”

“No,” she says, and I sense her inner mama bear wanting to come out. Angelica isn’t a toddler—she’s eighteen and fresh out of high school. She’s CPR certified, was a lifeguard every summer of high school, and the best I could afford to watch my son when I’m at work and he isn’t in school. But I can’t believe she told him that. That she didn’t reassure him that I was fine.“He spent four hours after school, thinking you were dead. Until I could get here.”

“I’m sorry,” I say honestly, feeling it deep in my soul. I never want Elijah to go through anything like that. I want to shield him from the ugliness of the world as often as I can, and I wasn’t there today. “But I’m good at being a firefighter. It’s all I know. It’s in my blood.”

She shakes her head at that, sniffing. “Don’t bring Grandpa into this.”

I give her a half-hearted smile. Our grandfather was a good man. He tried his best raising my mom and her sister without a mother—she ran off when Mom and Aunt Kiersten were in their early teens. He was a proud firefighter, and when he died when I was sixteen, I lost a huge part of myself and wanted to carry on his legacy.

“This isn’t going to work.” She sits down in the chair next to the bed. “You can’t go on like this. At least Bowen is a firefighter in a place where we pretty much just have to worry about a tractor collision.”

I snort at that, knowing it’s not really true. Bowen is in Garnett—our hometown, which is an hour and a half south of the city. It’s a small, rural community of three thousand people and two stoplights. But his shifts are rarely quiet. “I’m not quitting.”

I can tell she’s about to turn on the lecture, and I resign myself to sit here and listen to it. But then the door bursts open, and my son makes his way toward me, his arms out and his face red and blotchy from crying. My heart tugs in my chest, and I feel like I’m going to throw up, seeing him like that. I hold my arms out for him, and he goes right into them.

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