Page 57 of Light

Just enough time for us to bask in the delight of his excited grin.

Before he disappears down the elevator shaft with his two new friends.

Chapter Three

Reece

I’ve heard my wife scream in a lot of different situations. In the grip of fear, the heights of passion, the throes of labor, the sobs of pure love.

No sound out of the woman’s mouth has prepared me for the wail she lets out now. It resonates through the alcove and then out and up through all three stories of the courtyard, its agony shaking the chandeliers and forcing even the SWAT guys to stumble back by discernible steps.

It makes me want to tear apart the building. The block. The whole fucking city.

But I force myself to hone that shit in so I can rip open the only space that matters right now. The whole floor of the elevator beneath which Lux and the twins have dropped.

Ten seconds’ worth of a focused lightning torch—a power I haven’t switched on in full since fending off the group robbery attempt at the RRO fundraiser in New York—and the lift’s floor is completely free of its moorings. Emma’s right next to me, her power on full so she can melt the slab back onto the shaft walls, preventing it from taking someone’s head off during a plummet of its own.

A horrific thought for a different day. A different set of circumstances.

Like ones not involving me running through every option for saving my son between one eye blink and the next.

Which get whittled down by one—a good-thing bad-thing mix—from the second Davidson charges in, flanked on all sides like he’s the reincarnation of fucking Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. “Move back, Richards,” he growls before bellowing back over his shoulder, “We need rope! Lots of it! Fiore and Pratt, front and center. You’re our fastest rappellers. Find those kids!”

“Rappellers?” But as it spills out of me, every pore of my skin is zapped by the lightning of my instinct. The solution makes sense—to the real world. But half my days aren’t lived in the real world anymore. “No,” I mutter. “No,” I emphasize, pizza-cutting the rope coils that have been brought forward and plunked on the floor between Davidson and me. “That’s only going to make it worse.”

The fire chief grunts. At once I’m back to being the rich-boy wannabe hero who was lucky enough to receive electric-blood infusions for six months. “Mr. Richards.” He seethes the syllables with such vitriol, I’m shocked the dude’s not fried off half his mustache. “I asked you to move back. I won’t ask again.”

I grind down three layers of tooth enamel in the same number of seconds. “Damn straight you won’t.”

“Huh?”

Annnnd another three layers—as I hook an arm around Emma’s waist and then flip her backward and up until she lands squarely across my back. Only after she’s locked her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist do I let my grin relax by a fraction. “Bolt rappelling team, reporting for duty, Chief.”

I punctuate it by ticking my temple with two extended fingers, as Davidson attempts to form words. I’m fine with being the fall guy for every asshole billionaire showoff he’s ever had to deal with, but not when my son’s fate is on the line. Now, all egos are off.

And all limits as well.

And, as Emma and I learn as soon as we plunge into the shaft, all the lights too.

She screams again, but only at half her volume from ground level and only into my ear. Her reaction is more visceral than emotional, a sound even Davidson would be yelping if I subjected him to a drop into impenetrable blackness. The ink-black air surrounds us on all sides. We have only the light from her glow and my pulses, which act as brakes for our drop along the steel-lined chute.

But not for very long.

As I’ve suspected since we first arrived and met the twins, this chasm is about more than the Biltmore’s elevator shaft. That much is evident as soon as the clangs and pongs resulting from my pulses are replaced by earthen thuds and the smell of damp dirt.

We’re below Los Angeles.

Well below it.

The atmosphere gets heavy. Heavier still. I’m conscious of the weight of everything over our heads—buildings, roads, society, life—as we plunge into a world of thick, abject silence.

And suddenly, out of nowhere, glaring and explosive light.

“Aggghhh!”

My growl tangles with Emma’s stunned cries. My instincts, now trained to the point of auto-reactions, manage to land us safely—but barely. As soon as my feet hit the white tile floor, I skid along the slick surface until bottoming out like a drunk ice skater. I go down face first but continue to be a human drift missile, stopping only when my head collides with a pristine white wall.

The pain is bearable only because I lift my face and see hers. With her gorgeous blues open. With tears brimming in them. With her body seemingly unharmed as she tumbles off my back and then plunks down onto the floor until we’re both on our sides, facing each other. It’d be the best torment I ever endured for this woman—if only we were canoodling between sheets instead of sprawled across an antiseptic-smelling floor. And the light wasn’t so goddamned bright.