by Bethany-Kris
“What do we—”
Cella didn’t even finish her statement before Marcus turned, grabbing her shoulder to shove her backward, too. “The exit down the hallway leading to the bathrooms—we’ll go through there!”
He caught sight of a couple of workers going down that way, too. Hell, there were only maybe twenty on staff during an open to the public day. But with just him there, only a handful of people were on staff to keep the place lit up and useable. He figured those ones he saw were the only ones in the front. The two in the back inside the actual bottling section of the plant would have exited out a rear door.
Marcus kept that calm demeanor even as he kept up the pace of a jog with Cella right at his side. Panicking wouldn’t do him any good, and he didn’t want to scare Tiffany any more than she probably already was.
Tiffany coughed, making her crying sound even more miserable than it already did. “Why does it smell so bad?”
He didn’t know how to tell her, but that was just what happened when shit burned. Especially when that stuff was everything. Plastic decorations on the wall. All the stuff inside the gift shop. Even the play equipment. Those weren’t things that should be burned, so when it did, the smell and smoke could be both dangerous and overwhelming.
“Turn your face to my jacket,” he told her, “and breathe into it, okay?”
She did.
Beside him, Cella tried not to seem panicked.
He could still see it.
“It’s just down the hall,” he said to Cella, “the next door on the left.”
She made it to the door before him, shoving it open which just allowed the slight breeze from the outside to come barreling into the back hallway. The bit of pressure release went away and the black, tar-like smoke billowed out behind them.
He handed Tiffany to her mother. “Take her.”
Cella did, but her wide eyes turned on him with fear. “What are you doing?”
The smoke behind him smelled so fucking bad.
Like poison.
Death.
And yet, all it took for Marcus was a quick look at the few people who had gathered at the side of the building for him to know they were missing someone.
“The plant manager,” he said, “she went into the back storage to get the suit for Tiffany. She should have come out already, and if the power is out, it’ll be dark.”
Because the goddamn place needed a lot of upgrades. There were no safety measures in place other than a few scattered emergency lights, a few of which he knew had been busted out by the forklifts in the backrooms.
“Marcus,” Cella hissed, snagging his wrist in her trembling hand before he could disappear into the building, “you can’t go back in there—it’s not safe!”
“Ma, my throat hurts,” Tiffany mumbled, hugging tight to her mother, and hiding her face in Cella’s neck. “It really hurts.”
His gaze darted between the girl, and her mother. “Just look after her. I’ll be right out. And if someone hasn’t done it already, call for help.”
“Marcus—”
“I’ll be right back—I promise.”
He let the door close behind him, and headed back into the dark, smoky hallway. Above the crackling of the flames, he could hear the phone in his pocket buzzing. He ignored it as he pulled the lapel of his blazer up over his mouth to cough into the fabric and try to give him some sort of filter to breathe without as much smoke.
Not that it helped.
Fucking pointless, really.
Marcus came back into the lobby, but quickly realized the space was far darker than it had been just minutes before. No, that was wrong—it was black from smoke. The heat from the flames felt like they were licking far too close to him as he used his knowledge of the area to head for the swinging double doors that led into the bottling plant on the right side of the receptionist’s desk.
Not that he knew if he was going the right way by sight because he couldn’t fucking see at all. The phone in his pocket kept ringing.
And ringing.
“Trina!” Marcus shouted into the bottling section of the plant.
The storage was at the back of the plant where it would be easy for the workers to move pallets of bottled syrup to the rooms at the rear. While there were exit doors in the plant, and cargo doors for trailers to back up, in the rooms where they kept things for the tours and the general public, there were none.
And chances were, Trina hadn’t even known a fire started if the power had been cut. Which was exactly why the alarm stopped.
But why had the alarm been set in the first place?
She should have been out by now.
That alarm was for break-ins. Pushing those double doors wide to enter the main floor of the plant had been a mistake because the second he did, it took the place all of ten seconds to fill with smoke.
More smoke.
The fire had traveled.
“Trina!”
In the quick moment it took for the place to fill with all that toxic smoke, Marcus found the plant manager. On the other side of the conveyer belt at the far end of the plant near one of two exit doors, apparently, the one that had its glass smashed out at the top which explained the alarm, the plant manager rested face down in a puddle of her own blood.
The wires leading into the main breaker box for the plant had been cut.
Marcus didn’t need to check to know Trina was dead.
And now he couldn’t breathe, either.
He moved for the door with the broken window, coughing harder into his jacket. The smoke crawled out of the hole leading to the outside in thick plumes, and while he tried his hardest not to breathe it in, he couldn’t help it.
How did the bikers know he would be here?
Who gave them that information?
It was all Marcus could think about as he pushed open the exit door and rushed outside into the fresh air. He thought taking in huge gulps of the outside would help, but his throat burned. His eyes watered from stinging so bad.
All he could taste was that smoke.
And then the coughing started again.
Until all he could do was cough.
Marcus managed to make it a good fifteen feet away from the plant before he passed out.
• • •
“Sir, please, you have to keep the mask on your face.”
Hard plastic was shoved over Marcus’s mouth as his vision cleared, and he came back to reality. He took in the chaos around him. No, that was a lie. It wasn’t chaotic inside the ambulance. In fact, the paramedic working on him did so with a calm demeanor and steady hands.
He dragged in a lungful of the oxygen pumping through the mask, but it didn’t feel like it helped to actually give him air.
“Breathed in too much of that smoke—your lungs are going to feel like hell for a while,” the man explained.
From the front of the ambulance, a new voice called back, “Did you hear the other guys back there?”
“Yeah,” his paramedic replied, “guess there was a body inside, and all the windows were busted out with crowbars and gas jugs. It’s a fuckin’ maple farm, eh? What happened back there?”
He swallowed the roughness in his throat.
He knew what came after this.
Marcus blinked.
The white ceiling of the ambulance stared back at him.
“Cella—Tiff?”
The man passed him a look. “We’re almost to the hospital. I’m about to give you a shot. It’s going to calm you down, let you relax for a bit.”
Fuck.
Marcus didn’t want anything.
He just wanted to know if Cella and—
A sharp prick in his arm followed the sensation of something cold rushing through his veins.
And that was that.
• • •
“Marcus! Marcus!”
“Sir, please step back from the gurney—”
“That’s my fucking brother, back off.”
“Sir, he
’s going to be fine, but he needs better oxygenation and—”
All at once, Marcus’s brother colored his vision. He wasn’t sure what had been in that shot the paramedic gave him, but it knocked him out good. Whether or not that was the medication’s intended purpose, he couldn’t really say.
But it worked.
“Cella called Ma,” Chris explained fast, “and we’re working on it, okay?”
Marcus opened his mouth to talk, but it fucking ached.
His throat killed him.
“I know,” Chris said, “you don’t gotta talk, man.”
Marcus shook his head, his thoughts running a million miles a minute. The mask pressed tight to his face fogged with every breath he took, and while it hurt to do it, he couldn’t help the need to breathe.
“The enforcer,” he mumbled under the mask.
Was the gurney still moving?
It felt like it.
Strange how nothing more than inhaling smoke could lay somebody out.
Damn.
“What?” Chris asked.
Marcus’s gazed darted to the paramedics wheeling him toward what he suspected was the emergency room of the hospital, and his brother seemed to understand. Chris leaned down, still walking just as fast as they moved.
“Tell me, Marcus.”
“The enforcer,” he croaked out, “at the tribute. He’s the only one who heard us talking about this weekend, Chris. He’s the only one that knew I’d be at the eastern farm.”
“Marcus—”
“Pull him in. Get the fucking info.”
The next thing Marcus saw was the ceiling of the hospital.
17.
The thing about trauma?
It never goes away.
A permanent scar on one’s soul and psyche, it stayed dormant until a trigger came along to make it flare back to life.
Muscle memory, some called it. Like a person’s body and mind just remembered what it felt like in the moment when they experienced their worst trauma, and instinct took over. It became impossible to act rationally or really comprehend what was going on when every single part of someone was screaming to survive.
Just fucking survive.
Cella barely remembered anything after Marcus went back inside the building. Just flashes of moments that led her to sit in the hospital’s emergency waiting room with her sleeping daughter tucked into her lap.
The sirens.
Smoke.
Paramedics checking her.
Someone asking Tiffany’s name.
Other details were foggier like the police that quickly came on the scene after the firefighters arrived to battle what had turned into a very dangerous blaze in only minutes. The paramedics who took her to the hospital, assuring her that she and Tiffany were fine and suffered very little smoke inhalation.
Right.
Yeah, she remembered all those details.
But not how she responded.
Not what her child said.
Just the flashes.
The moments.
So, as she sat in the hard, plastic chair of the emergency waiting room, all Cella could do was become lost in the rushing tidal waves of her past trauma. Memories thick with fear that tasted the exact same as what she felt like right now. Brief, short snapshots of a time that she hadn’t thought about in a long time because that’s also what trauma did to someone.
It made them forget.
Until it made them remember.
Cella didn’t want to go back to that time—the day when she lost William—and yet, she was thrust there all the same. No warning. No help.
No escape.
Her mind was hell.
“No, Daddy.”
She screamed at her father when he told her. Fought his hold—the hug he offered. At some point, she’d hit him. More than once. Begged for him to be lying. Puked all over the floor when they finally got her out of a hotel hallway and into the privacy of a room where they could explain more.
She could still taste the vomit.
Or maybe that was because she wanted to puke now.
Cella couldn’t be sure.
Muscle memory, again.
“Wait, what the fuck do you mean?” she heard someone ask sharply to her left.
Cella glanced in that direction, recognizing the two men huddled together in the corner of the room as Marcus’s brothers.
Christopher.
Bene.
She heard their conversation.
In her mind, though, she saw her father. He’d come to her room that morning to ask if she wanted to have breakfast with her mother. They’d been at the hotel overnight for her cousin’s wedding. Someone in the hallway had said something to her father. That horrified look on his face when he turned back to Cella in the room ...
She would never forget that look.
That moment when she knew something happened to William.
Tiffany had been in the car when they shot it up, and run him off the road. He wasn’t really the target, he was just easy for them to attack. A way to make a point to the Marcellos because that was how the fucking mafia worked.
Her husband hadn’t needed to be the person who started the war between her family and another one. He didn’t even need to be made. He just had to be an easy fucking target and connected to their family in some way.
“It’s definitely the bikers, then?” she heard Bene ask.
“All the witnesses, the few people that were at the place,” Chris replied, “all said the same thing. They heard the bikes—the two at the lobby actually saw the bikers go past and throw the shit through the windows. So, yes.”
“Fuck. Dad is gonna—”
“Let Marcus handle it,” Chris said fast. “That is what Dad needs to do.”
“Yeah, I know, but ... whatever, how the fuck did they even know Marcus was there today? And why the hell didn’t he just put those assholes down months ago when they first started causing problems?”
Wait ...
Had this been happening for a while?
Were the Guzzis having issues with rivals that had turned violent?
The thought made Cella sick because she hadn’t known. If she had, then she very well might have made different choices for her daughter’s safety. She’d trusted Marcus to keep them safe. That’s what he told her he would do, but how was keeping information like that from her making sure they were safe?
“Because it’s Marcus.” Chris blew out a hard breath, adding, “It’s Marcus, Bene, and he knows better than to just answer violence with more violence. It’s the last resort—always.”
“Yeah, and look where it fucking got him.”
“You don’t even know what you’re fucking talking about, man.”
In her lap, Tiffany shifted in her sleep. Cella should wake her daughter up, and get her something to drink. She was sure her throat was probably still dry and aching. A lot like hers in that moment, although only partly caused by the smoke she’d inhaled. The rest of that pain was from all the tears she kept holding back.
She couldn’t cry.
Not now.
Not here.
Once she started, she was not going to stop.
As it was, she had barely held it together for this long. Dragged back through the memories of her husband’s murder while being terrified for her child today, and a man she fell in love with, allowing herself to be vulnerable to this very thing again ... she couldn’t cry yet.
“We pulled the enforcer in,” Chris said, “because that’s what Marcus asked for us to do thinking it was him who gave the bikers the information about where to find him. Little late to apologize to the guy because his fucking brain matter is all over a cement floor in the west end’s warehouse, but it wasn’t even him. This wasn’t even meant to be an attack on Marcus, okay? So you don’t know what you’re fucking talking about, Bene, just shut up.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Seems the fucking farm notified everyone on their social media that the p
lace would be closed down to the public for the day because they had a special guest coming in. Marcus probably wouldn’t even have known they did that. I bet the fucking bikers just thought it would be an easy hit—it might not even have been the Quebec chapter of the Riders that did it. It could have been any one of the chapters that rode in thinking they’d let the Guzzis know they were in town. Marcus being there was just circumstance.”
“Fuck,” Bene breathed. “Where’s Ma and Papa?”
“On their way. I called Corrado, too.”
Bene cleared his throat. “I sent Beni a message ‘cause he had some shit to do today, but I’ll call again.”
Cella heard it all, of course.
Her heart ached for a man who lost his life for reasons she didn’t even understand. Her soul hurt for the child in her lap who had cried herself to sleep.
And as for her?
Cella?
She still couldn’t fucking breathe.
Still couldn’t get those memories to leave.
• • •
A person connected to the mob knew how events like these went down once police became involved. Of course, the say nothing, saw nothing approach was always best and the only thing acceptable to la famiglia.
However, she found it disgusting how the second the police realized the maple farm and plant were attached to the Guzzi name, and the second victim of the fire who actually needed medical attention—Marcus—was identified as a Guzzi, their entire demeanor changed.
They were no longer victims.
They were just connected.
For a bit, Cella had the benefits of Marcus’s family deflecting the police attention on her and Tiffany—who had finally woken up from her nap—while they waited for the doctor to give the okay on Marcus, and allow visitors into his room.
She was pissed.
Terrified.
Mad like nothing else.
But God, she stayed there. Through her flashbacks, and the ache in her throat from a lump that formed and wouldn’t leave no matter how many times she tried to swallow it down. She stayed even though her heart raced so fast it felt like it was going to explode out of her chest. She didn’t move out of her chair even when all she wanted to do was hide away and cry because of the horrors this day dredged up for her.