Page 4 of Reckless
He and Cole pivoted toward the stairwell in tandem, their boots competing with the whooshing rush of the flames as they carved an exit path. They retraced their steps to the first floor, and Alex swung the beam of his flashlight through the thick waves of falling ash in a quick check of the cavernous ground-level space before following Cole through the front door. Sunlight blasted his retinas, momentarily French-frying his vision as he clambered back into the full reach of daylight, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the brightness overload.
When he opened them a few seconds later, the first thing Alex saw was his boss, Captain Robert Westin.
And the man was downright furious.
Alex reached up, relieving himself of his helmet and mask combo as his gut plummeted toward the cracked and dusty pavement of Roosevelt Avenue. Although Captain Westin was a pretty hands-on boss—not to mention an extremely dedicated firefighter—he almost never showed up when another captain had already called the ball at a scene. Which meant someone had radioed him in.
Shit.Alex was going to need to work up more damage control than he’d thought in order to get out of this.
“Cap, I?—”
“Do you need medical attention, Donovan?” A muscle pulled tight over Westin’s clean-shaven jaw, telling Alex in no uncertain terms to offer nothing but an answer to the question.
“No, sir.”
“Good.” The captain shifted to look at Crews for just a split-second’s worth of eye contact before pile-driving Alex with a cold, flat stare. “Then store your gear in the engine and get in my vehicle. You’re going back to Eight with me.”
Just like that, damage control became the understatement of the millennium.
Alex unshouldered his SCBA tank, the blast of cool air that accompanied the removal of his hood and coat barely registering as he replaced his gear in his allotted storage space. He walked a straight line to the captain’s red and white department-issued Suburban, parking himself in the passenger seat as he shut the door and braced for impact.
It didn’t come.
The entire fifteen-minute drive back to Station Eight was filled with nothing but the intermittent squawk of the radio on Captain Westin’s shoulder and the low, rhythmic rumble of the Suburban’s engine. Although Alex was tempted to jump in and rip the Band-Aid off the conversation just to get it over with, he trapped his tongue between his teeth instead. Westin might be a great captain—one of the best, even—but he could be a salty old guy when he set his mind to it. Alex had seen Westin pissed enough to swear at, suspend, even sanction his firefighters if the spirit moved him.
But only once in eight years had he seen the guy go for the full-out silent treatment, and yeah. Alex was going to have to play things just right in order to keep this little come to Jesus meeting from leaving a mark.
Westin pulled the Suburban into the oversized garage bay on the far left of the two-story brick building, his precision barely a half step from surgical as he got out and shut the door. Alex ran a hand first over his helmet-matted blond hair, then the sweat-damp T-shirt he’d worn beneath his turnout gear, the impenetrable bite of smoke clinging to the bunker pants and suspenders he still had on over the rest of his uniform. His stomach knotted as he followed a still-silent Westin through the equally quiet hallways of Station Eight, passing the locker room and the house’s common space before cutting across to the back of the building where the captain’s office stood.
Captain Westin pushed the door shut with a snick, finally breaking the silence. “Tell me, Donovan. In your eight-year tenure as a firefighter, have you ever been told that the chain of command is optional?”
Alex cemented his feet to the linoleum to stand at complete attention, despite the fact that his vitals had just spiked up to oh-shit territory. “No, sir.”
“Really?” Westin’s gray-blond brows winged upward, his arms flexing tight as he knotted them over the front of his crisply pressed uniform shirt. “Did you get a recent promotion I don’t know about, then? Because last I checked, both Captain McManus and Lieutenant Crews outrank the shit out of you.”
“I can explain,” Alex started, but Westin cut him off with no more than a single shake of his head.
“You shoved a superior officer to the ground before disregarding his command to stand down at the scene of an active fire, and then you disobeyed a direct order from a lieutenant in this house to fall out. You are going to have to do a hell of a lot more than explain to get yourself out of this.”
Shock combined with realization to form a cocktail of fuck-me in his veins. “I didn’t mean to knock McManus down.”
“Your intentions don’t mean a thing in the face of your actions,” Westin popped back, his stare going thermonuclear and wedging the rest of the story in Alex’s throat. “Every time you try to clean up a mess, the only thing you do is end up filthy. And it is getting harder and harder for me to keep hosing you off.”
Anger snapped up from Alex’s chest, and it blew past his already questionable brain-to-mouth filter in one swift gust. “I only wanted to get around the guy, and anyway, he put his hands on me first.”
“But you upped the stakes when you retaliated, not to mention when you ran into that building. McManus wants your head on a Thanksgiving platter, Donovan. But since I’m pretty sure he’ll settle for your job, you might want to change your tune.”
Icy fingers of dread slithered between Alex’s ribs, digging in hard. “You can’t be serious,” he breathed. Being a firefighter was the axis that had kept his world spinning for the last eight years. The job wasn’t what Alex did, it was who hewas,as much a part of him as his blood or breath or bones. He could not—under any circumstances—lose it.
This house was the only family Alex had.
“There has to be a way I can get around this,” he said, channeling all his effort into a level voice even though his pulse had surpassed warp speed. “I might not always go by the book, but come on, Cap. I belong here. I’m a good firefighter.”
“You are a good firefighter,” Westin agreed, the surprise in Alex’s chest morphing quickly into trepidation as the captain added, “But lately I’ve got to wonder if you’re forgetting the difference between bravery and recklessness. We lost a good firefighter from this house two and a half years ago.” His gaze shot through the window to the wall outside the office door, where a framed photo of Mason Watts hung in silent memorial, and Alex’s gut went for the full free fall. “I won’t lose another, especially not over something that can and should be controlled.”
He scraped in a breath, unable to keep his exhale from going hoarse over his words. “I can’t lose this job, Captain Westin. You know I can’t…” He broke off. Sucked in a breath. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Westin paused for a minute that lasted a month. “According to the personal conduct policy, there is one option.”
