Page 136 of Pretty Savage: Defy

Smoke spills into the kitchen. I inhale before I can cover my mouth and double over, coughing until the room tilts around me.

“That’s it.” Carrson wraps an arm around my waist. “We’re leaving.”

With Abbie and Thomson beside us, we squeeze through the closet and descend into the tunnel.

It’s packed with bodies. I can’t see the front of the crowd, only shoulders and robes moving through the darkness while smoke pours in behind us. I hope someone has opened the exit at Rosewood Hall. Otherwise, the tunnel meant to save us will quickly become our grave.

“Where are Sam and Cicley?” I shout to Abbie.

“Outside,” she yells back. There’s a blast of smoke at my back. We all cough. “They’re trying to get control of the fire. Sam started it in the cornfield to force everyone outside, but the wind shifted. It spread to the house.”

If I hadn’t been running for my life, I would’ve stopped her right there and made her explain everything. “What do you mean Sam started it?”

Wood groans overhead.

Everyone ducks as a smoldering beam crashes into the passage behind us. Sparks scatter across the floor, and a woman farther ahead screams.

“She was trying to help you,” Abbie says between ragged breaths. Tears carve pale tracks through the soot on her cheeks.

“To stop the sealing?”

Abbie nods.

I almost tell her the truth. They were too late. The sealing is done. As far as The Order is concerned, Carrson and I are legally bonded and sealed, but before I can say the words the smoke thickens. I press my sleeve over my nose, but the thin fabric does little to filter it. Abbie’s coughing grows harsher, her lungs already damaged by whatever she inhaled before reaching us.

“Carrson!” Carr’s voice tears through the tunnel behind us, ragged with smoke and urgency.

Carrson stops.

He turns toward his father’s voice, then toward me. His body shifts one way and then the other, duty tearing him in opposite directions.

“Go,” I tell him.

“Laurel—”

“I’ll meet you at Rosewood Hall.” I press my bloody palm against his chest. “Go help your father.”

He searches my face, needing to know I mean it.

“We’ll be okay,” I say. “Now go and hurry. Stay safe for me.”

He hesitates, but his dad calls for him again, and Abbie can’t stop coughing.

“Te amaré solo a ti en cada vida.” Carrson kisses my forehead, then he turns and disappears into the smoke with Thomson beside him.

I wrap Abbie’s arm around my neck, and we push forward only as fast as the packed bodies ahead allow. Screams and shouted directions ricochet off the stone walls, overlapping until every voice seems to come from everywhere at once. Smoke burns my eyes, making them tear up.

Abbie stumbles. Her weight goes slack against me, her head lolling forward.

There’s heat against my back. I twist around and see flames consuming the far end of the tunnel, the direction that Carrson ran. Figures move through the orange glow, the dancing fire stretching their shadows across the walls and ceiling until they look warped and macabre.

Dizziness rolls through me, accompanied by a violent throbbing behind my eyes.

“Carrson!”

I search for him in the smoke as dirt sifts from the ceiling and scatters over my hair and shoulders. I want to turn around and find him, but Abbie’s knees buckle. Her feet drag over the stone. She doesn’t respond when I call her name. The smoke is everywhere now, so thick I can’t see what’s in front of me.

I haul her to me and keep moving because she can’t.