Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 85

Chapter 85

Chapter 85

DENISE

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St. Mira’s sat on its street the way it always sat-solid, slightly worn, the particular presence of a building that had been holding the same ground for a long time and intended to continue. The front door with its painted frame, the windows with their institutional proportions, the small courtyard to the side where the children went in good weather and which was currently occupied by two pigeons and a deflated football that someone had been meaning to retrieve for several days.

I parked and took the bakery boxes and went up the front steps.

At the door I stopped.

The smell reached me before I’d turned the handle.

It was not the smell of St. Mira’s, which I knew-the particular combination of old wood and institutional cleaning products and the indefinable warmth of a building full of people, children specifically, the specific smell of inhabited space. That smell was familiar and I had always registered it on arrival as a kind of homecoming, the olfactory memory of a place that had been mine before anything else had been.

This was underneath it.

Chemical. Sharp in the way of things that didn’t belong in domestic spaces, the particular bite of something synthetic and concentrated. My wolf senses, even suppressed, registered it the way they registered things that were wrong before the human processing caught up-the instinctive, pre-verbal recognition of something that was out of place in the chemistry of the air.

Something that shouldn’t be here.

I stood on the top step with the bakery boxes and breathed in carefully.

Yes. Under the familiar smell, threaded through it, coming from somewhere in the interior. Chemical.

My hand was on the door handle.

I pushed it open.

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Chapter 85

The lights went out.

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Not gradually-not the flicker of a failing bulb or the brownout of an overtaxed circuit. All at once, immediate, the interior of St. Mira’s dropping from afternoon institutional lighting to the particular darkness of a building with heavy windows and thick walls, a darkness that was absolute in the first seconds before the eyes adjusted.

And then, from somewhere in the back of the building-from the direction of the storage corridor, the back section, the area the electrician had been working in this morning—a sound.

Not a crash. Not an explosion. Something quieter and more specific: the particular quality of something igniting, the low concussive pressure of a flame finding purchase in material that had been prepared for it.

And then the smell changed.

I was already moving.

The boxes went down-I didn’t register setting them down, they were simply no longer in my hands and I was through the door and into the dark interior and moving toward the stairs, because the children were upstairs, and the back section was behind me, and the smoke that was beginning to thread into the air from the back corridor was not yet thick but was present and was going to become thick with the specific speed of a building that had old ventilation and a storage room full of donated furniture and thirty years of accumulated material.

“Mrs. Adeyemi.” My voice came out at a volume that surprised me-not the voice I used in ordinary rooms. The voice I had not used since I was sixteen and the building I was in had been dangerous for a different reason. “MRS. ADEYEMI.”

From above-footsteps. The sound of doors. A child’s voice, high and uncertain, saying something I couldn’t parse through the distance.

“Stay on your floor.” Loud, clear, aimed upward. “Don’t come down. Stay away from the back

stairs.”

I was at the foot of the main staircase.

The smoke was thicker than it had been ten seconds

ago.

The back section was burning.

I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed and it was ringing before I’d finished the action -the emergency line, three digits, the call connecting in the second ring, and I was talking before they finished their opening words.

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15:37 Fri, Sep 18

Chapter 85

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“Fire. St. Mira’s orphanage, east quarter, Harland Street. Children in the building. I need units.

now.”

“How many children-

“I don’t know the exact number. Twelve, possibly fifteen, upper floors. Send everything you have.”

I hung up because staying on the line would cost me both hands and I needed both hands.

“JUNO.” The name arrived before I’d decided to use it-specific, targeted, the name of the child who was saving her drawings for the right audience and who I needed to hear a voice she recognized, “JUNO, I NEED YOU TO TAKE EVERYONE TO THE FRONT WINDOWS. FRONT WINDOWS ONLY. CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

From upstairs, after a terrible two-second pause: “DENISE?”

The sound of her voice-seven years old, frightened but present, responding to her name in the dark-did something to the inside of my chest that I filed and kept moving.

“I’m here,” I said. “Front windows. Take everyone’s hand. Are you doing it?”

A sound that was yes.

“Good girl. Don’t let go.”

The smoke was in the main corridor now-thin but present, the leading edge of something that was building in the back section and finding its way forward through the ventilation that the electrician had flagged as insufficient.

The insufficient ventilation that was currently keeping the fire contained to the back section.

That containment was not permanent.

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