Page 66 of Up In Smoke

There was nothing more to do but hope that she’d never been in the fire to start with. He would simply ignore that her car was here and her phone was off and no one could find her and he would hope.

With a soft nod, he turned away from Captain Kelly, pulled out his phone and called her again as if it would ring inside the barn or behind him, and he would suddenly turn around and she would be there.

But again, it went straight to voicemail. Her car didn't light up as though the phone had been left inside it. There was nothing more Luke could do except follow up on the last message Ivy had sent.

They'd been so wrong, thinking it was Mario. The irony was that Ivy had been right from the start. Mario's addiction made him too unpredictable to carry out a plan like this. But Luke was slowly putting the pieces together, memories from his childhood. The rejected RFD application. Carlos’s ability to charm their mother, even at a young age.

Had his youngest brother always been a sociopath?

Luke didn't know. He just knew what Ivy had told him: A highly intelligent and charming sociopath could get away with anything, including making people believe that they weren't exactly what they were.

He'd had such hopes that Carlos had broken out of the family cycle of poverty, that he hadn't taken Tiago’s path or suffered like Mario did. Instead, it seemed the baby of the family was the worst of them all.

With his first deep breath in, the rage filled him. He calmly turned and thanked Captain Kelly, but then Luke walked away.

He climbed into his car and was halfway to his brother's house in Lincoln when the scanner crackled to life again.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Ivy woke again to the sound and feeling of her own coughing.

What had happened?

As she opened her eyes, she felt the sting, and she quickly squeezed them shut again. She inhaled, but it burned, and she shallowed out her breaths, but it didn’t help. She was on the floor with her hands still tied and her brain full of crackling static noise.

The last thing she remembered was Carlos coming around behind her. Though once again she'd fought valiantly, once again, he’d won. He put the chloroform soaked rag over her mouth and held her tightly in the chair, one arm wrapped around her, pinning her so she couldn’t fight.

She almost laughed now. Despite her new stretch fabric work pants, there had been no movement she could make that would have worked. She was unable to kick him in the head over her own shoulder. He’d held her so that her range of movement was nothing.

Her head rang and her senses were filled with cotton again. Though, as she squinted her eyes open and looked around, she realized some of it wasn't her.

The wall crackled with flames. She could only see peeks of orange and yellow through the cracks they’d burned into the walls and plywood over the windows. But she could see the smoke they brought.

Ivy now had a reasonable idea of how Carlos worked. There would be an accelerant all around the house—an unbroken ring—so that even if she could find a door or a window and escape, it was unlikely that she would be able to get through without burning herself.

But she wasn’t going to die without trying.

Staying low, she moved her still-bound hands in front of her and lifted to her knees. She was more than a little unsteady with her hands tied, but the cord wasn’t too tight. Still there wasn't much she could do.

Quickly she reached up to the table and found the bottle of water sitting there. She could do this. Ivy twisted the top and drank a small amount, hoping to clear some of the smoke and chloroform that had made its way down her throat. It didn't work, she couldn't drink into her lungs, but it did feel a little better.

She was still in her coat and the bottle offered a pitifully small amount of water, but she poured it over her head and neck down her front and then her back. She ran it underneath her coat where the wetness would stay and hopefully prevent any burns. She wasn't confident that she hadn't just set herself up to boil alive. She had a feeling she’d find out soon.

Next, she crawled quickly around the space. The home was tiny—a kitchen, a living area, two small bedrooms, and a bathroom. But at each window she checked, she saw what she'd mostly only heard before. The orange and yellow dance of flame.

How long had she been out?She couldn't say. But it did seem that the accelerant was not the only thing burning now. The very act of busting out of a window or door would put her in contact with the fire for too long. But still she considered it.

She wasn't ready to gulp the amount of air it would take to yell and scream. So she stopped to hunker down under the table as though that would help and did her best to listen beyond the flames.

She heard no sirens.

If she was going to live, she would have to save herself. She couldn't say for sure how strong her desire to live was, versus how strong her desire was to thwart that asshole. Then again, if she survived out of spite, she wasn't going to be mad about it.

Crawling around, looking for anything that might help, she didn’t expect much. There was no way that this place would have a working extinguisher or a fireproof blanket, or anything that she could wrap around herself to push through the flames. Despite her conviction she wouldn’t find anything, Ivy crawled toward the kitchen, the nearest source of water, and lifted up into the denser smoke and tried the faucet handles. It took three tries popping up and grabbing quickly at them to get them to turn. Each time she had to drop back down to get cleaner air. On the third try, she actually managed to get both of the faucet handles to the on position but nothing happened.

Ivy wasn't surprised. She had figured before that the house had the water and power cut off some time ago. With her one idea thwarted, she turned around to crawl back to the living room, thinking if the walls were on fire, she might be safer in the middle. But as she crawled back, her hands touched something.

She’d been keeping her eyes closed as much as possible. Lord knew she didn't need a repeat of having her eyes bandaged. She wasn't sure they would survive a second time. Then again, surviving this—blind or not—was her one and only goal now. So she opened her eyes to see what her fingers had brushed across.

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