Chapter 25 - The Fire on the Ridge
We burst into the main kitchen just as a massive shudder ripped through the lodge’s timber framework. The sound of shearing wood screamed through the walls like artillery fire.
In the living room, Evelyn and Olivia were huddled together near the shattered front door, shivering violently as the blizzard howled through the broken glass. The heavy snow was drifting four feet deep inside the entryway, cutting off any escape through the front.
"Where is the emergency exit?!" Evelyn shrieked, her voice thin with pure terror as she saw the plaster cracking along the living room ceiling. "Rebecca, you said there was an exit!"
"Through the mudroom! The underground wood-chute leads directly into the reinforced carriage house!" I yelled over the deafening groan of the settling timbers. "Go! Now!"
Cole leaned heavily against me, each step costing him immense pain, but his jaw was set, his focus entirely on getting me through the hallway. Deputy Miller dragged Victoria along by her elbow; she had gone completely silent now, her face pale, staring blankly as the fortune she had killed for vanished beneath tons of collapsing mountain stone.
We reached the mudroom at the back of the lodge. The heavy cast-iron door to the firewood delivery chute was bolted with a heavy steel bar. Cole and I threw our weight against the bar, forcing it upward with a screech of rusted iron.
"Down! Slide through!" Miller ordered, shoving Evelyn and Olivia into the angled concrete chute first. They slid down into the darkness with frantic yelps.
"Cole, you go next," I urged, trying to push him toward the opening.
"Not without you, Becca," he said, his voice ragged, his eyes locking with mine with an intensity that made the chaos around us fade into background noise. "I spent twelve years wondering why my mother abandoned me. Tonight, I saw who she really was. I am not losing the only person who actually taught me what family means."
"I'm right behind you," I promised, pressing my forehead against his for a fraction of a second. "Go!"
Cole slid down the chute.
Before I could follow, a sharp, violent crack exploded behind us.
Marcus, bloody, soot-stained, and clinging to life by pure animal fury, staggered into the mudroom doorway. His shotgun was gone, but in his right hand, he held a red emergency flare, already hissing with brilliant, blinding crimson fire.
"Nobody leaves," Marcus snarled through bloody teeth. He threw the burning flare directly toward the open heating-oil line that fed the lodge’s central furnace.
"No!" Deputy Miller shouted, diving toward the mercenary.
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The flare hit the fuel line. A deafening *whoosh* of white-hot flame erupted across the back wall of the mudroom, instantly cutting off the path back to the living room and turning the narrow corridor into an inferno.
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