Page 3 of Sizzle
Lucy did another visual sweep before returning her gaze to his. “The warehouse is abandoned,” she started, but they didn’t have time for this.
“You know as well as I do that doesn’t mean it’s empty. There are squatters all over the place down here, especially in the winter.” Turning his chin toward the radio on his shoulder, Sam said, “Faurier to Hawkins. I’ve got”—stop. Slow down. Restart—“Ihada visual on movement inside the warehouse. D side, ground floor, window three. It looked like a person. Permission to do search and rescue. Over.”
“Hawkins to Faurier,” came the immediate reply. “Can you confirm entrapment?”
Sam’s gut fought against the “negative” his mouth had already formed. Goddamn it. “I don’t see the person now. But I swear I saw someone walk by the window.”
“Walkby?” Hawkins asked, his doubt clear even over the radio. “The place is on fire, Faurier. Are you sure it wasn’t just smoke or sunlight?”
Sam spring-loaded an argument—as irrational as it was, people thought they could hide from fire all the damn time, and windows like that, on a warehouse, wouldn’t just open so a person could jump out—but Captain Bridges beat him to the radio.
“Bridges to Faurier. Do you have a current visual on anyone trapped inside the warehouse?”
“Negative,” Sam bit out.
“Hear anyone calling for help?”
Fuck. “Negative.”
“de Costa, report,” Bridges said, and Lucy stared a hole in the windows on the ground level before frowning and giving Sam an apologetic shake of her head.
“Negative on a visual, Captain. I don’t see or hear anyone, either. But Faurier—”
“Copy that,” Bridges replied, cutting her off. “If neither one of you has a visual and you can’t even confirm for sure that you saw someone, we can’t risk search and rescue. Not with a fire like this.”
Adrenaline forked through Sam’s chest, instinct screaming at the order to stand down. “But Isawmovement in that window. I’m telling you, someone’s inside.”
“Stand down, Faurier,” Bridges said, and every ounce of Sam’s training told him to heed the chain of command. Fall in line. Follow orders.
But his gut roared that it was the wrong call, that someone could die if he didn’t act on what he knew, deep in his bones, that he’d seen.
“Sorry, Captain. But I’m going in.”
He didn’t think twice before he started to run.
2
Lucy de Costa never broke the rules. Not when she’d been in the fifth grade and Tommy Loomis had wanted to cheat off her math tests. Not when she’d been sixteen and hospital visiting hours had kept her from her mother’s bedside at the exact moment the woman had taken her last breath. Not even when she’d been at the fire academy four years ago, and the unwritten rules had dictated that she keep her head down and her mouth shut at all costs. The rules existed for a reason. To keep everyone safe. To keep order. To be relied upon in any given situation, no matter how standard or serious.
So the fact that Lucy had just instinctively followed Sam fucking Faurier into a burning building to rescue a civilian who may or may not exist, against their captain’s crystal clear orders not to move so much as a millimeter?
Yeah. She was going to have to slidethatidiot decision under the microscope for a full examination later. Once they found whoever was trapped inside this warehouse and got out of this mess.
Assuming they got out of this mess.
“de Costa?” Faurier blinked at her through the face mask he’d yanked into place just seconds before, his boots clattering to a halt just inside the threshold of the door he’d kicked in. The combo wall of heat and smoke that rushed to greet them hit Lucy right in the solar plexus as she ducked all the way into the warehouse, and holy shit, this fire was moving at warp speed. Faurier must’ve felt it, too, because he didn’t waste any time asking, “What are you doing here?”
“Helping you find whoever you saw in the window,” she said, squashing the nausea churning beneath her turnouts. She’d disobeyed a direct order from her captain (oh, God. Hercaptain, was she insane?), who was absolutely going to blow a gasket when he realized that both she and Faurier were in this warehouse together. But Faurier had been dead-on, balls certain that he’d seen someone in here, to the point that he’d run inside to help despite knowing that, at the very least, he’d get into some very deep kimchi for it. Following him in to stick to their golden rule of always entering a structure in pairs had overridden Captain Bridges’s order in her brain, albeit barely. If a civilian was trapped inside, that literally meant life or death. Saving people’s lives—and having her fellow firefighters’ backs while they did the same—was in her job description.
Even if it meant risking the wrath of her captain (seriously, she needed to stopthinkingabout it).
“Right,” Lucy said, snapping back to the moment. She might’ve broken one rule by following Faurier into this warehouse, but she wasn’t about to loseallreason. Protocol dictated she relay her position and her plan to the officer running the call, so she hauled a deep breath past the softball of dread in her throat and turned toward her radio. “de Costa to command. I’m on Faurier’s six for search and rescue. Ground floor, D side.”
“Negative,” Gamble’s voice collided with Captain Bridges’s, and just like that, her softball tripled in size. “de Costa, Faurier. Get out of that warehouse.Immediately,” Bridges ordered, and Faurier nodded his agreement.
“You need to go back, de Costa.”
Gamble’s voice crackled over the radio, thoroughly pissed and echoing the sentiment. But rules were rules, even if she’d broken one in order to keep to another.