Chapter 19 - Through the Flames
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Heat slammed into my face like an open blast furnace, searing my lungs with every ragged breath I took. I dropped low to the wet tiles beneath the rising cloud of black smoke, coughing violently as flaming orchids and wooden trellises crashed down around the stone fountain, cutting off any path toward the rear door.
Through the smoke-streaked front glass doors, Damon reached the entrance.
"Elena!" His voice was raw with sheer terror as he wrenched furiously at the locked iron handles from the outside, the heated metal searing his bare palms. "Stand back from the glass! Get down behind the fountain!"
Coughing until black spots danced across my vision, I crawled behind the curved stone basin of the fountain, wrapping my soaked silver skirt over my mouth and nose just as the iron frame of the roof groaned under the intense heat.
Outside, Damon didn't wait for tools. Wrapping his tuxedo jacket tightly around his bleeding right forearm, he picked up a massive cast-iron garden urn from the terrace steps and drove it with superhuman fury straight through the double-paned tempered glass of the greenhouse doors.
CRASH!
Once. Twice. A third time, until the entire reinforced glass panel exploded inward in a shower of glittering shards and freezing rain.
Without a second’s hesitation, Damon lunged straight through the jagged frame and the wall of fire. Flames licked at his sleeves as he vaulted over a burning cedar beam, reached the fountain, and scooped me up into his arms as effortlessly as if I weighed nothing at all.
"I've got you," he rasped against my temple, shielding my head and body completely with his own frame as he charged back out through the shattered doorway into the pouring rain—two seconds before the central glass dome of the greenhouse collapsed inward in a towering geyser of sparks and molten glass.
We tumbled together onto the wet grass of the lawn. I clung to his neck, gasping in the cold night air while rain washed the soot from our faces.
Blue and red police lights flooded the estate driveway as a dozen NYPD cruisers and fire trucks screamed through the front gates, led by Harrison and Evelyn’s private security detail. Near the east service gate, four officers slammed a screaming, mud-soaked Camille onto the hood of a patrol car, snapping steel handcuffs around her wrists while another team dragged Senator Kensington’s hired gunman out of the house in irons.
Damon knelt in the mud, cradling my face between his burned, bleeding hands, his eyes wild as he searched every inch of me for injuries.
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"Never do that to me again," he choked out, his voice breaking as he crushed me against his racing heart. "If that roof had come down on you, Elena, there wouldn't be enough left of this world to bury."
I held up my soot-stained phone between us, where the recording timer was still ticking past six minutes. "It's over, Damon. She confessed to everything."
