Page 154 of Pawn's in the Bishop's Game (Checkmate 1)

I slide out of Alex’s hold a second time and sprint for the stairs. “Kane?” With the gun in my hand, I bound up the metal steps with none of the fear I felt the last two times I was here. I ascend into thick smoke and bring my shirt up to cover my mouth and nose. “Bishop!” My eyes water, and the hairs on my arms sizzle and sting my flesh. “Kane?”

“Jessica?” Alex’s enraged voice follows me up the stairs. “Lenaghan! Get down here, now!”

“Kane?”

I catch sight of his eyes for half a beat, but he’s lost to me again when gunshots ring out through the club and one bullet pings off the metal bannister no more than a foot away from my hand.

I squeal and whip my hand back close to my body. Holding the gun the way he taught me, I breathe in. Out. In. Out.

Two hands. Control. Care.

It’s not a fuckin’ toy, Blondie. If I can’t trust you not to hurt yourself, you can’t use it.

I move slower up the stairs. In. Out. Breathe.

As soon as I hit the landing, I jump with a squeal when something on the main floor explodes. It’s probably nothing more than aerosol cans popping, but to my hypersensitive ears, it feels like the club is falling down around me. Metal sizzles, and the platform I stand on warps. A storm of gunshots ring out within feet of where I stand almost blinded by smoke.

Lowering to a crouch, I lean against the hot bannister and plug my ears against Kane’s shouted instructions.

Run away, Jess.

Put your gun down, Hayes.

Get to safety, Jess.

Go get her!

Alex’s shouts and stomping boots coming up the stairs add to the cacophony of deafening booms around me. My heart pounds. My eyes water. I’m dizzy and fast losing consciousness, but when Kane bolts through the smoke and sweeps me up into his arms, I cry out with relief and clutch at his chest the way I have so many times before. Running, his body jolts forward, but it’s not until his beautiful eyes turn impossibly wide do I consider what could have caused that jerking in his muscular body.

He sprints down the stairs and away from the smoke. His breath whistles through lungs that refuse to expand the way they’re supposed to. I hold onto him the way I did only a week ago – my legs around his hips, my arms around his neck – but this time, I hold a gun in my hands, and his blood seeps through his shirt into mine.

He bounds down the collapsing stairs into the raging hot inferno and literally tosses me into Alex’s arms. “No!” I spin in Alex’s arms. Chest heaving and heart pounding, I meet Kane’s eyes, and like the night he overdosed, they glitter with pain.

Almost black.

Death.

Another explosion, but louder this time, brings heat tearing through my arm.

The world slows, and the chaos around me mutes as a single line of blood dribbles through Kane’s ski mask and into his eyes.

One day, I might be able to look back on this moment and know that the sting in my arm is a bullet. I might even be able to recognize that it was the same bullet that passed through his ski mask. Someday, I might be able to look back on this and know the exact mistakes that were made, each individual second that ticked by that led to this.

But right now, all I see are Kane’s eyes. The mask covers his lips, so I’ll never see that smirk again. It covers the deep wrinkle, that one single line that marks his forehead when I annoy him.

But the eyes are his, and while he drops to his knees, he watches me. His shoulders, always so broad and strong, now droop. Hands that have worshipped me now dangle lifelessly by his side. Broad thighs, thighs big enough for both of us, no longer hold him up. Kane drops to his knees, and when he falls forward, the noise and chaos around us un-mutes and I come eye-to-eye with Abel Hayes, a still smoking gun, and a horrible grin marring his ugly face.

The support beam I was tied to fractures under the weight of a heavy ceiling. Kane lies face first in a tiny river of flames that moves forward and licks at my still soaked jeans.

While Kane and I stared, the world went silent. The creaking of the large club was muted, and the roaring of the fire was silenced, but now that our connection is broken, it’s all back.

Steel twists, and fire races up my jeans.

I scream; at my jeans, at Alex’s rough hands, at Kane.

Especially at Kane.

“Jess!” Alex’s strong arm wraps around my stomach and swings me around. The stitches that were all but healed, stitches that Kane so very gently put into my body, tear open on Alex’s belt full of tools and keys. He lifts me off my wildly flailing feet; to take me out of the collapsing club, to take me to safety, to extinguish the flames that race up my legs and blister my skin. But I fight against him, to get back to Kane, to save him.

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