Page 79 of Poisoned Promise
Empty.
He’s not here.
From there, I sprint to the other bathroom, hoping he’s taken refuge in there with the water but it’s as empty as the bedroom.
My heart races faster and faster, my damp feet slip on the wooden floor, and my stomach twists into knots as I race to where the smoke is the thickest. The lounge.
“Alex!” I scream as I dart in the door.
“Mom!” His cry rises up from a lounge completely ablaze.
Every piece of furniture is covered in flames.
Flames claw up the curtains, melt the fixtures on the ceiling and send light fittings and plaster raining down in miniature balls of fire, and heat up the alcohol in the bottles until they start popping and exploding like fireworks.
“Alex!”
He cowers in a corner near the desk with his arms up over his head to protect himself. I brace against the heat, quelling the fear in my heart now that I’ve found him, and ignore the pain of heat licking at my bare legs while I sprint toward him.
“Mom!”
“Alex! I’m here, honey. I’m here, come on. Get up. We’ve got to get out of here!” Taking him by the arm, I haul him upward just in time because the curtain railing creaks and whines, then crashes to the floor and brings a chunk of the wall with it. It all lands where Alex was hiding mere seconds before.
“Mom, I?—!”
“Come on!” Hand in hand, I drag him through the burning lounge as fast as I can and we stumble into the hall with a flurry of coughs and chokes. Already the flames are spreading across the ceiling in the hall, flooding the entire place with thick, black smoke. It’s like breathing in burning shards of glass.
“Follow me!” I yell in between coughs and something crashes down to the ground in the lounge. “We have to get out of here!”
He sticks with me as we sprint back to the bathroom where the shower still pours, creating a collision of hot steam with thick smoke. The flames race with us, clawing their way across the ceiling like they’re determined to cut off our escape route.
In the bathroom, I grab two washcloths and soak them, then thrust one over Alex’s face. “Breathe through this, okay?” I pant at him. “It’ll help!”
“Mom, I’m sorry,” Alex gasps while I tear through my discarded clothes for my phone. “I’m so sorry!”
“You don’t need to apologize, honey. Just hold on, we’ll get out of here.” This entire place is sealed, Felix made sure of that. Codes and fingerprints that he’s hid from me but given the circumstances, he better tell me what they are. Fumbling with my phone, it takes too long to unlock but I manage to scroll to his name and his dial.
My phone immediately beeps.
Call failed.
“Are you serious?!”
“Mom, it’s all my fault!”
My eyes dart up and Alex stands there with large tears filling his eyes. My heart stops dead. “Alex?”
“It was only supposed to be a small fire! After everything you and Felix told me about the life you used to live, I didn’t want you to be stuck here anymore. And the seals on the doors, I thought if I triggered the fire alarm then the doors would auto-unlock andwe could leave! But it sucked the fire up into the vent and then everything went to shit and I’m sorry, Mom! I’m so sorry!”
Everything pours out of him like vomit and he chokes every so often in his desperation to get the words out.
For a moment, the entire world freezes.
He did this?
He started this fire?
Anger wells up within me but it’s immediately quelled by the pain that he did this for me.
