Page 81 of Claiming Liberty

“Wake up, Angel,” she says.

My eyebrows pinch with confusion. “What?”

She caresses my face, flames pouring from her fingertips as the rest of her is engulfed. “It’s time to wake up.”

My eyes crinkle at the sound of glass breaking. A loud crash. Something being thrown through a window.

“Ramos!” a voice yells.

I can tell it’s close, but everything seems so far away. Like it’s happening outside the tiny bubble I’m in, and I’m a mere spectator of this. Or I’m hallucinating. Or dead.

“Shit,” the voice growls.

Warm air brushes along my scorched skin when my weight lifts, large hands against my torso. “Kingsley, help!”

Peter. It was Peter’s voice.

I must be in hell.

I urge my eyes open, but my lids feel like they are buried beneath sandbags. The strain that’s been constantly flexing my shoulders suddenly releases, and my upper body slumps forward.

I rock back and forth and feel as if I’m floating out to sea on a crude raft. A cloud hovers over the sun, basking me in total darkness as the inferno raging around me is doused by all the water.

Then I fall onto a rock.

“Wakeup, you son of a bitch.”

Something slaps against my face, and a stinging sensation radiates from the point of impact.

“Come on, breathe, damn it!”

Breathe.

I’m not breathing.

My lungs expand with a loud gasp as oxygen fills my chest cavity, and my eyes shoot open as painful, hacking coughs roar from my charred sternum. Someone rolls me onto my side while liquid soot drains from my mouth.

My body aches as it alternates between sucking in air and choking it all out, both actions completely outside my control.

A hand forcefully slaps my back, helping the gunk in my lungs to loosen.

By the time I’m done coughing, my throat feels like someone’s taken a razor blade to it.

I roll onto my back, regaining strength with each breath, and stare up at Peter. Peter. The man who wanted nothing more than for me to be dead.

I catch sight of my house up in flames behind him.

Why the hell would he save my life?

“Hello to you too, asshole.”

I cough and spit again, cringing as I sit up. There are people shuffling around, but it looks like most are headed away from my house. Toward the manor.

The manor.

My eyes widen as I look at the top of the manor above the trees.

Liberty.