I knew what he was saying. It’d kept him safe all these years. It’d keep him safe now.
Reluctantly, with tears welling, I acquiesced and nodded.
Holding my gaze, he dropped the pendant back under his shirt. For two heartbeats he gave me the intensity of his powerful stare.
Then he stood and was gone.
The continuing sound of concrete caving in wasn’t good.
The structure was failing, and I feared we didn’t have time to wait for emergency crews to find us. Leaving her unprotected was killing me, but I didn’t have a choice. I needed to get us out of this building.
I checked my cell as I made my way back through our suite to the adjoining one. My initial text to Luna looked like it went through, but none of the subsequent ones or the group text had. No replies had come in either.
As I walked through the second suite’s bedroom, I spied the phone on the nightstand and cursed my stupidly. Quickly grabbing the receiver, I prayed for a dial tone.
Nothing. Damn it.
Walking to the door of the second suite, I paused and tried Luna again on my cell. The call connected, but after a single ring, the line turned to static. Hanging up, I pocketed my phone and palmed my Sig. Then I opened the door to the hall.
Quickly scanning, I looked for any more damage or anything that was different from before, but it all looked the same, like a fucking bomb had gone off.
Using the security bar that was a hotel’s answer to not locking yourself out and keeping cleaning staff from entering, I flipped the thing to keep the door from closing all the way. Stepping into the hall, I scanned again and hoped to God Harm was okay. Not bothering to call out, I headed toward the elevator shaft.
The doors weren’t hot, but they weren’t cool either.
Briefly debating whether or not to try to pry them open because elevator shafts usually had built in ladders for service, I decided against it. I wasn’t going to risk taking her down that way. Even if we did make it to the bottom without falling or getting crushed, who knew if I could get the doors open at the bottom.
That left the blown-out stairwell.
Picking my way down the hall as the debris became more concentrated, I paused by the blown-out the metal door. Holding my arm over my nose and mouth, I glanced past the doorway.
Jesus fuck.
The whole stairwell between this floor and the one below was blown.
Holstering my Sig, I grabbed my phone and snapped a couple pics before uselessly hitting send to Luna. Pocketing my cell, I inched across the threshold to get a better look. If the stairwell was blown all the way to the ground floor, Sanaa and I were going to be up here for who the fuck knew how long. We’d have to wait for the winds to die down enough for a helo to land on the roof.
Praying we weren’t completely fucked, I first glanced up and scanned the stairs heading to the roof access. They were halfway blown out, but if I had to, I could get us up there.
Then I looked down.
Motherfucking shit.
The entire stairwell between the top two floors was gone.
Scanning the damage as best as I could with only the emergency lights on that lit up an exit sign on each floor, I couldn’t see shit past the floor below. It looked like maybe there was still some of the stairwell intact on the lower floors, possibly even on the floor directly below the one under us. But with a minimum of a fifteen foot drop onto a pile of unstable rubble below us, it was no-go.
“Fuck.” Muttering a curse, I was about to go back to the elevator to see if I could pry the doors open when I heard it.
Not the building settling, not concrete dropping, not the shift of rebar scraping. This was small and slight, but it was telltale.
Pebbles skittering across pavement, telltale.
Unholstering my gun, I flipped the scope and scanned.
On the second pass, I saw it.
Jesus fucking Christ. “Harm!”
Buried under a foot of rubble on a small ledge, with a section of metal railing barely hanging on, I could make out the back of Harm’s head and shoulders.
He shifted again, and more small pieces dislodged from his back.
“Harm, goddamn it, if you can hear me, do not move!” Fuck, fuck. “You’re on a ledge. Two inches to