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They’d thrown it into Everly’s bedroom window, where they clearly expected her to be sleeping—and now burning to a crisp—but he couldn’t allow himself tothink about what might have happened if she’d been tucked up in her bed where she belonged. They’d had good aim, too. The flames were already dancing along the length of the bed she should have been sleeping in, and licking at the walls.
Blue didn’t have time to explain himself. He scooped up her T-shirt and tossed it at her as he lunged for her bedroom doorway.
“Cover your face,” he ordered her. “And call nine-one-one. Tell them the address and hang up.”
He didn’t wait to see if she would obey him. He wrapped his hand in his own T-shirt as a precaution, then reached out to grab the doorknob and slam the door shut. He turned back to face her as the apartment’s smoke detector began to shrill.
“We have to get out of here,” he told her, loud enough to be heard over the insistent shrill from above. “Now.”
Everly looked pale and a bit sick, but determined. She was clutching the apartment’s landline phone in one hand while she pulled on the T-shirt he’d thrown her with the other, but she only nodded at his latest order. Blue realized he expected her to argue. But she didn’t. Instead, he heard her belt out her address into the receiver, then toss it on the table, just as he’d asked.
He headed back to the couch, shrugging into his own T-shirt. He shucked on his athletic pants, stamped his feet into his boots, and grabbed his bag with his other hand. By the time he turned around again, Everly was across the living room floor near the kitchen, throwing open the utility closet that he knew by now contained an apartment-sized washer and dryer, stacked on top of each other.
“Now, Everly,” he bit out, eyeing the bedroom door in case it exploded.
She didn’t react, but she didn’t stop what she was doing, either. She yanked a pair of jeans out of the dryer, then stepped into them. She hooked them up over her hips, then raked her hands through the rest of the laundry in the dryer, finding a handful of what looked like panties. Nothing else. By the time Blue made it to the foyer, Everly was ready, meeting him there and sticking her feet into another pair of Converse she’d left by the door.
These were bright red, he noticed. And he couldn’t have said why that little detail, combined with how focused and calm she appeared in this latest crisis, made something in him clutch. Hard.
The girl next door had grown up into the perfect woman, but this wasn’t the time to throw himself into that minefield.
Will there ever be a right time?something in him asked.Will you ever face what’s been happening here?
But Blue didn’t really want to look into why his instant response to that question was negative.
“Stay behind me,” he told her curtly, because he wasn’t sure he even knew what might come out of his mouth around her. It was something he planned to be deeply pissed about—once they were safe.
“I will,” she said, in that same quiet, resigned way. As if she’d woken up to a firebomb a thousand times.
He hated the fact that it had happened to her even once. Blue was the one who’d been trained for this crap. Everly was supposed to...
Stay seven years old forever?that same obnoxious voice asked.
Blue gritted his teeth and shrugged his holster back on and into place. He hauled the table he’d left in front of the door back to its usual place in the foyer. Then he pulled his gun out, clicked off the safety, and eased the front door open.
He took a quick glance out into the hallway, fully expecting to find a gun in his face. Maybe more than one.
But the hallway was empty. He stepped out, then motioned for Everly to follow him, and he knew he should have reprimanded her when she tucked her fingers in the waistband of his sweats. He shouldn’t have encouraged that kind of thing, but the truth was, he liked knowing where she was.
Then they were on the move, a solid three minutes, maybe four, from impact. Blue moved swiftly down the hall toward the stairwell, and pulled the building’s fire alarm as he passed.
He sorted through the information he had as he jogged down the stairs, Everly right there behind him as he went. It seemed like an extreme escalation. Stalker to hit man to firebomb in the course of a single evening after all these weeks of nothing. Who did that? Who went from game playing on social media to explosive devices tossed through windows?
Blue turned that question over and over in his head as he heard the rest of the building start to come awake around them. There were shouts and slamming doors on the floors as they ran past them. The usual reactions to fire alarms in city buildings.
But he had the two of them out of the stairwell, then headed toward the side door of the building that let out into the alley beside it, before he heard the fire trucks in the distance.
“We’re going to head for the SUV,” he threw over his shoulder when they reached the door to the outside. He eased his way out, checking the alley for lurking scumbags, but it was clear.
“I thought you got rid of it days ago.”
Everly sounded a shade too monotone for his peace of mind, which suggested she was in shock, but there was nothing Blue could do about it now.
“I moved it from the front of the building days ago. Rule number two is always, always have a getaway car.” She slipped out behind him and closed the door carefully, instead of letting it slam shut, because she wasn’t just a pretty face. Not this one. “Or, you know, a handy seaplane. A boat. Whatever works.”
Instead of heading toward the front of the building and the busy street, he took her elbow and led her in the other direction. There was a fence in the middle of the alley, separating one property from the next, but Blue didn’t pause. He threw his bag up and over the chain-link barrier, then turned to Everly.
“Can you climb it?”