Page 58 of Ink and Ashes

Holland

M y head is throbbing when I open my eyes. I’m dizzy and disoriented. My feet and hands are bound with duct tape, and there’s tape on my mouth too. It’s dark wherever I am, and the space I’m lying in is so tight I can’t budge.

My heart rate accelerates as I try to recall what happened, but my mind is foggy. The space around me feels like it’s shrinking, and claustrophobia begins to creep in. Panicked, I start banging against the sides and kicking my feet, and that’s when I realize I’m moving.

I’m in the trunk of a car.

Fuck .

I exhale deeply through my nose, then close my eyes to calm myself down. I need to save my energy, and trying to escape right now isn’t going to help that .

I’m not sure how much time passes before the car rolls to a stop. I hear footsteps crunch against gravel, and when the truck clicks open, everything that led me here rushes to the forefront of my mind.

The conference room. The email. The sketch. Calling Colson. Figuring out Joseph Welland really is still alive.

And that Pierce Whitlock is him.

I’m met with the same icy blue eyes I saw before I passed out. The eyes that belong to none other than Ember Grove’s fire chief.

“Well, well, look who’s awake,” he says, a wicked grin on his face. I shake my head, scrambling to get as far from him as possible, but it’s useless. He grabs me, holding me still as he adds, “If you fight, I’ll kill you right now.”

I swallow, fear engulfing me. And it only gets worse when he tugs me out of the trunk roughly and tosses me over his shoulder.

He begins walking, and I take my opportunity to figure out where we are. There’s a reddish-grey hue around us, letting me know the sun is starting to set. And when I catch sight of the burnt barn in the distance, I realize he’s brought me back to the place where everything began.

The Welland Ranch.

He makes his way up the broken front steps, then crosses the barrier into the house. Panic creeps in further as warmth wraps around me. I realize then that the house is already on fire. And that I’m about to be trapped inside it.

He heads through to the back, and it takes everything in me not to fight. But I don’t doubt that he really would kill me now, and if he does that, then I have no chance of making it out of here alive.

I keep my gaze trained on the floor as he turns the corner and begins walking down a set of stairs.

When he reaches the bottom, he drops me with a thud, and I groan as I land against the hard floor.

Tears stream down my face as I scan the room, and when I see a small window at the top of one wall, I know we’re in a basement.

I watch as Whitlock— Welland —grabs a gas can and empties the contents all over the room.

He covers nearly every surface, the fumes from the gasoline stinging my eyes.

When he finishes, he makes his way back over to me.

He bends down and brushes a strand of my hair behind my ear in an almost parental-like manner, then tears the duct tape from my lips.

I cough from the smell of the gas, then rasp, “You’re not going to get away with this. They’re going to catch you.”

“I’ve been on the run for thirty years. I’m not scared of being caught.” He chuckles. “And I’ll be honest, it’s kind of a relief to not have to hide anymore. Bet you know something ‘bout that, don’t you, Hollis?”

I swallow roughly, but otherwise don’t react to his use of my given name. My throat burns from the mixture of smoke and gasoline as I say, “You and I are nothing alike.”

“Aren’t we? Two people running from our pasts, hiding from everyone, using an alias.”

“I’m not a murderer,” I say through gritted teeth.

His grin returns, then he pats me on the cheek and stands. He walks over to the corner of the room and lights a candle, placing it on the floor. He does the same in the other four corners of the room, and it hits me then that my chances of getting out of here are getting slimmer by the second.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask in an attempt to keep him here longer. I have my assumptions about how he got to this point, but I want to hear it from him.

He tsks. “That’s a loaded question.” He stares down at me while I look up at him, waiting for more. After a beat, he adds, “This town is the reason my family is dead. I wanted to give them a taste of what it feels like to lose everything.”

I shake my head. “They tried to help you. What happened that night was a tragedy, but it wasn’t their fault.”

“It was!” he shouts, then he repeats himself calmly. “It was. They didn’t save my family, then they abandoned me, leaving me to fend for myself. They’re the reason that my family is dead. That I became who I am.”

Nausea builds in my stomach at his words, my ears starting to ring.

“And this is gonna be their fault too.”

Before I have a chance to say anything more, he leans down, getting in my face. I flinch, not wanting this man anywhere near me, but his hand darts out, gripping me by the chin and tilting my head up to face him.

“You know, Rothwell, I spent a long time blaming myself for that night. I’m the one who forgot to blow out the candles before I left for my friend’s, so when it comes down to it, it’s my fault the fire started.”

My eyes widen at his admission. I hadn’t realized he was the one responsible for that.

“But the further away from here I got, the more that blame shifted to the people whose job it was to protect them,” he continues. “I was only fifteen, and it was an accident. But what this town did…that wasn’t. They weren’t fast enough, and they gave up too easily. They were careless.”

Welland rises to his feet. “I’m glad about it now.

It’s because of that blame that I learned everything I could about fire after I got shipped out of Ember Grove.

I needed something to help me deal with the grief of having my whole world ripped from me with a single spark, and becoming a firefighter was it. ”

My head spins from the fumes, fear and guilt conflicting with each other as I listen to Welland speak. Considering where I currently am, I can’t find it in me to feel bad for the man standing above me.

But I do feel bad for the fifteen-year-old version of him.

“I vowed to myself that I would be better than the people here, that I’d never let anything like what happened to my family happen again.”

“But you didn’t do that,” I argue. “Instead, you made it happen.”

He smirks. “That’s where you’re wrong. At first, I didn’t. It wasn’t until the fifth anniversary of that night that I decided to come back here. When I did, I lost control and set one. And after that first time, the urge only grew stronger.

“I spent years perfecting my craft, then once I did, I faked my death so I could continue on without people figuring out who I am. I knew if I set fires here all the time I would get caught, so I came back every five years—enough to satiate me but not enough to alarm anyone. In between, I stuck close to wherever I was at the time. It was easy enough to do. As soon as someone started to get suspicious, I’d just move onto the next town. ”

I swallow, wincing over the burning in my throat. “What happened ten years ago that made you return?”

He pauses, assessing me. After a beat, he says, “My plan was always to come back. By then it had been twenty years, and I felt confident no one would recognize me, and that I could control myself well enough to continue flying under the radar.”

“Until you killed Ellie,” I fill in for him.

His jaw flexes. “I’ll admit, Ellie’s death was an accident. Until then, I’d always stuck with contained locations or wildfires because it was easier to predict. That one was a risk, and the fire got out of my control. I didn’t mean for anyone to die.”

He blows out a breath, walking back and forth in front of me.

“The church was a different story. I knew you were closing in on me, so I needed to do something to throw you off my trail. I was hoping it’d be Caldwell, but Sharpe would’ve been good too, since I knew you had suspicions about him.

It wasn’t supposed to be Finnegan. He just had to be a hero. ”

My stomach roils at his admission—at knowing Colson was his initial target. But I try not to show my fear as I keep him talking.

“What changed this year?”

He turns to face me, a wicked grin growing on his lips. “You did.”

The way he says that causes my skin to itch.

“In April, I set a few bigger wildfires, like I have for the past ten years. No one batted an eye at the increase because all thing’s considered, it wasn’t that extreme.

Normally, a few at the beginning of the season is enough for me, but then you started sniffing around.

And when I realized you weren’t giving up no matter how much the town pushed you away, I decided to make it into a game. ”

He leans over me, and I force myself not to recoil.

“Looks like I won,” he adds, right as a crash sounds from above us—like something falling. The flames upstairs are growing, and the smoke is getting thicker.

Welland’s body language shifts, the noise letting him know that he’s running out of time.

“No,” I rasp, my jaw clenched tight. “You lose.”

His eyes narrow in my direction as I send a silent prayer up that he ends up trapped in here with me.

Without wasting another moment, he grabs my arms and drags me down the hall.

My fight or flight kicks in and I scream, pulling against the tape around my hands and feet, but they don’t budge.

The only way I’m going to make it out of here is by being rescued.

I just have to hope that Colson figures it out and finds me before it’s too late.

Welland pulls me into an unfinished bathroom and pulls out a roll of duct tape. My eyes widen and in a moment of panic and a desperate attempt to delay him, I say, “I’m sorry about what happened to your family.”

He hesitates for a moment and his throat bobs, but he brushes it off quickly, returning to his task. He grabs my hands, binding them to an open pipe on the wall. I hiss as the heated metal presses against my skin, confirming even more that this house is up in flames.

“Joseph, please,” I beg, but it falls on deaf ears. He’s been at this for nearly three decades—he’s too far gone to be stopped.

He wraps the duct tape as tightly as possible, then tears off another strip. “I gave you plenty of warnings, Rothwell. You shouldn’t have stuck your nose where it didn’t belong. I have nothing left to lose. But they all do.” He presses the tape over my mouth. “ You .”

With that, he stands and kicks me out of the way of the door to pull it shut, locking me inside. I pull at the pipe, praying the tape will come loose. When it doesn’t, I scan the room, hoping to find something to cut myself free somehow. But there’s nothing. I’m trapped.

I hear a rush of flames from outside the door, and it hits me then that this is actually happening. I’ve been in a lot of scary situations throughout my career, but this one takes the cake .

I curse myself for my unrelenting inability to keep my mouth shut. For ever allowing myself to get into this situation. For every mistake I’ve made and every person I’ve hurt since coming to this town.

For not telling Colson how I really feel about him sooner. Now it might be too late.

My tears fall harder. Colson is the one good thing that’s come out of this for me.

The one thing that stops me from entirely regretting coming here.

I hate myself for not thinking of him earlier when Whitlock found me in the conference room.

For not waiting until he got back to share what I found.

Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be here right now.

He’s been through so much, and it makes me sick to my stomach that this is happening to him again. If I don’t make it out of this, I can’t even imagine what that will do to him.

I need to keep fighting. I blink fast, trying to clear the tears and my head, but the room is starting to feel like a sauna. Smoke creeps in under the door, and the room quickly becomes hazy.

I cough through the tape as the edges of my vision go blurry, my head spinning. I put all the fight I have into keeping my eyes open, but my energy fades fast. And despite my will to stay strong, I can’t.

I drop my head to the floor, and the world around me goes black.