Luke was totally poleaxed to realize that from start to finish, their kidnapping had lasted only sixty-four minutes. But even after he blinked a couple of times for good measure, the clock on the ambo’s dashboard still read fifteen thirty-seven, and even though Luke had seen some spectacularly shitty days in his life, the last hour had definitely slid into the top spot as the worst.

He turned toward Quinn, squinting at her through the painfully bright sunlight. “Are you okay? You’re sure you’re okay?”

Luke had wasted no time running to the ambo as soon as Ice and his Escalade had hit the past tense five minutes ago, and Quinn had followed closely behind. The latch on the storage compartment had been tricky as shit with his hands zip tied behind his back, but desperate times, and all that crap. Luke had made a holy mess of things in the process, but he’d managed to upend Quinn’s first-in bag and grab her trauma shears, flipping the things to sever her restraints before she’d returned the favor on his with unsteady hands.

She blinked at him from the spot where she stood just outside the open passenger door. Her normally fair skin had gone troublingly pale, her lips pressed in a long, thin line that clearly outlined her distress, and okay, right. That had been one hell of a dumbass question.

Nothing about this was okay.

Luke rephrased. “Quinn, are you sure you’re not hurt?”

“N-no. I…” She dropped her stare to her wrists, which were a little red from where the zip tie had circled them, but otherwise, her appearance seemed to back up her claim. “I’m not hurt.”

Relief kicked through his chest. For one wild second, Luke had an urge to reach out and wrap his arms around her, to go over every inch of her from her blond curls to her boot heels to make sure she was truly unharmed. But since she looked fragile enough to shatter in a stiff wind, he curled his fingers into fists until the impulse to touch her passed.

“Okay, good.”

Luke climbed into the passenger seat of the ambulance. His muscles ached with the sort of fatigue that accompanied a textbook adrenaline letdown, his less than stable breathing seconding the motion as he reached for the handset to the two-way.

“Wait. What are you doing?” Quinn asked, her voice panicked enough to screech his movements to a halt.

His brows tightened in confusion. “I’m calling nine-one-one.”

“Are you crazy?” she chirped, immediately swiveling a panicked gaze over their surroundings even though the entire block—hell, probably the entire freaking neighborhood—was as still as a cemetery. “Didn’t you hear what Ice said?”

Even if Luke lived to be a hundred and nine, he’d never forget what that evil bastard had said. “Of course I did. That’s why I’m calling the police.” He scraped for a breath. Put this shit at arm’s length and tackle the problem. Fix things right now.

He exhaled, blanking the emotion from his voice even though it was a task and a half. “Ice obviously runs a gang. He held us at gunpoint. Threatened us. He’s dangerous as hell, and he needs to be taken off the streets.”

“That’s exactly my point. He is dangerous! And if we tell anyone, especially the police, he’s going to come after us.”

“He couldn’t possibly get away with that,” Luke said, goose bumps rippling over his skin despite the hell-hot weather. No. No. He refused to give the thought any air time in his brain. There was a huge problem in front of him, and he needed to take care of it. Of himself. Of Quinn. Right now.

“We can go to January’s dad,” he continued. Their fire house administrator’s old man ran the intelligence unit over at the Thirty-Third district. Luke might not be tight with all of the cops over there like everyone else at Seventeen was, but Kellan’s girlfriend Isabella had visited the fire house enough for him to know she was a good detective. “The police will protect us and our families, and anyway, we won’t have to worry about it, because Ice will be in jail.”

He stuck the end of the sentence with an unspoken where he fucking belongs, but, funny, it seemed to bounce right off of Quinn, unnoticed.

“Do you honestly think a guy like that isn’t used to dodging the cops?” she asked, her blond brows flying up toward her disheveled hairline. “Or that he doesn’t have other people who would come after us if he can’t do it himself? Or that even if he does get arrested, he can’t make bail? God, Slater! We can’t tell anyone what happened today.”

“How could we not tell anyone?” Luke shot back, incredulous. “Damien kidnapped us at gunpoint, and Ice threatened our lives. The guy runs a fucking gang. Who knows what other kinds of crimes Ice is probably responsible for?”

Quinn stepped back on the pavement. She lifted a finger, probably to jam her point home, and the way her hand still visibly shook took a potshot at Luke’s gut.

“Which is exactly why we can’t take the risk. What about the two women in the picture on your phone? One of them is your sister, right? What if”—she paused, her voice wobbling before turning into a whisper—“what if he makes good on his threats against her, or someone at Seventeen?”

Just like that, the potshot turned into a riot. “He wouldn’t. We’d be safe,” Luke said, but damn it, his voice said he was suddenly only seventy-thirty in the balls-out certainty department. After everything Momma Billie and Hayley had been through ten years ago, he couldn’t even bear the thought of one of them having a paper cut, much less being tortured by a sick son of a bitch like Ice.

Still… “Quinn, this is crazy. We were assaulted, and a man is dead. We have to report what happened.”

“No, we don’t,” she insisted. “We haven’t even been gone for an hour and a half. We can radio dispatch and tell them the call was a false alarm, then say we went to grab something to eat. Or that we went to go work on your training. Or, God, almost anything. But we can’t call the police, Slater. We can’t tell anyone what happened. Please. We can’t take the chance that Ice will make good on his threats.”

Tears filled her dark blue eyes, and she swiped at them angrily, as if she were supremely pissed at their presence. But her vulnerability disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, replaced less than a second later by a look of sheer determination Luke knew all too well.

And the more her words—hell, the reality of what had just happened to them—sank in, the more he realized she wasn’t wrong.

Ice knew where they lived. Knew where they worked. Knew who was close to them and who they cared about. He couldn’t take the risk, however small, that something might happen to Momma Billie or Hayley. Not when the stakes were that high.

“I’m going to call the false alarm in to dispatch,” Quinn said quietly, looking at the handset on the dashboard in front of him. “We get them on a fairly regular basis, so they won’t think anything of it. If everyone else is back at Seventeen when we get there, we’ll just say we went on the call, and after that, we went to get a late lunch at Pizza Joe’s. We already sanitized the equipment, and Ice made us leave the biohazard bags at the safe house. We’ll re-stock our first-in bags before we go back to the house with the supplies in the rig. No one will be the wiser.”

Luke paused. Christ, this was completely surreal. Had he and Quinn seriously been sitting in the back of the ambo, stocking tape and gauze and syringes like nothing-doing only two freaking hours ago? And more importantly, were they really about to cover up a crime?

Luke took in the frightened seriousness on Quinn’s face, then replayed Ice’s words in his head, the vicious threat sending a frigid chill up his spine, and yeah. Yeah, they really were.

“Okay,” he said, the single word like sawdust in his mouth as he gave up a slow nod. “From here on in, the last hour and a half never happened.”

* * *

Quinn walked slowly and carefully through the engine bay, returning the chorus of cheerful hellos that January, Kellan, and Dempsey lobbed in her direction from the common room. Keeping her boots on a slow, steady line, she made it all the way to the locker room in the back of the house before promptly emptying the contents of her stomach.

“Whoa!” came a familiar female voice from the other side of the stall, and a minute later, Shae appeared at the crack in the door. Damn it. “You okay, Copeland?”

“I’m fine,” Quinn shoveled out by default. “I…” Was kidnapped at gunpoint. Lost a patient to a brutal drive-by. Thought for sure I was going to have my brain splattered on a dirty warehouse floor. “I must have eaten something funny.”

“That doesn’t sound too funny,” Shae said, stepping back on the tile as Quinn forced her legs to standing and auto-piloted her way to the sink to rinse her mouth. Ugh, at least she had the pale and shaky bit down cold. “You sure you’re alright? If you’ve got food poisoning—”

“Nope. I’m totally fine.” Quinn made sure to send her smile all the way up to her eyes even though it took more energy than she could afford to spare. But she didn’t have a choice. She had to act as if everything was all systems go, because if she didn’t, Shae would notice in about two point two seconds. And since backing down was far enough outside of Shae’s wheelhouse to be measured in light years…yeah, Quinn was going to have to sell the hell out of ‘fine’.

She amped up her smile until her teeth hurt. “One ride on the vomit comet does not food poisoning make. I’m sure it’ll pass. How was the brush fire?”

“Ah, Station Six beat us to the scene, so it was mostly contained when we got there. Riding with Dempsey on engine again was kind of fun, though. Even if he does think he’s hot shit now that he’s on squad.” Her green stare sparkled with sudden mischief. “Speaking of the shuffle, how’s it going with Slater?”

“Fine.” Ugh, Quinn was going to need to expand her vocabulary if she had a prayer of getting through this conversation unscathed. “I mean, you know, he’s good. He made a great catch with that deaf patient this morning. I think we’ll work together just…” Shit. “Fine.”

Shae laughed, leaning one hip against the sink beside her and thankfully not seeming to notice Quinn’s lack of verbal grace. “The way you two dance around each other is so freaking cute, I swear.”

The words snagged Quinn’s attention, and okay… “What way we dance around each other?”

“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you don’t see it.” At Quinn’s drop-jawed silence, Shae added, “The way he looks at you so intently, but pretends he’s not looking at you at all. He’s so into you. In that weird, quiet sort of way.”

The image of Slater’s stare, brimming with intensity as he tied that bright red cloth over her mouth, crashed into her mind’s eye unbidden.

“He’s a serious guy.” Her heartbeat accelerated. Get it together, girl. You’re right here in the fire house, no bad guys in sight. Everything’s fine. “But he’s not into me. He looks at everybody like that.”

A sound emerged from Shae’s throat, somewhere between a scoff and a full-on snort. “Try again, sweet cheeks. Because it takes two to eye guzzle, and you, my friend, are guilty as charged. Not that it’s a bad thing. Like I said, the back and forth is actually pretty adorbs. I’m just waiting for one of you to make a move.”

Quinn wanted to make some crack about how Shae’s relationship with Capelli was giving her couple-vision, or maybe even throw her hands up and admit that, yep, she totally had been ogling Slater on the (apparently not so) down low for the last handful of months. But instead, she found herself rooted to the bathroom tile with her brain honed in on how Slater’s hand had felt on her back, calm and strong when she’d been anything but, and oh God, she needed to get out of here. Fast.

“You know what, you might’ve been right about that food poisoning thing,” Quinn said, and bingo. Nothing like the suggestion that you might toss your cookies to make even the best of friends take a step back. “I’m not really feeling so great.”

“Do you want me to go get Bridges?” Shae asked, but Quinn shook her head. The last thing she needed now was an expanded audience.

“No. I mean, I don’t think it’s anything major. But I’m going to go lie down for a while just to be sure. Better safe than sorry, you know?”

“Okay,” Shae said, her gaze a mixture of concern and sympathy. “Just text me if you want me to break into C-shift’s pantry stash to rummage for Saltines or Gatorade.”

At that, Quinn managed a weak smile. “You’re just looking for an excuse to get them back for always leaving the engine with barely any gas in it.”

“Maybe.” Shae waggled her light brown brows as she pushed off the sink. “But seriously, if you need anything…”

“I’m sure I’ll feel better once I lie down.”

Waiting until her friend’s footsteps had disappeared from the locker room, Quinn let out a wobbly exhale. She had to treat what had gone down today like a really bad call. Yes, it had happened, and yes, it had been fucking terrible. But if she wanted to get past these stupid shakes, she had to forget about it and move on.

She had to be fine so no one found out the truth that would put everyone she cared about in danger.

Quinn poked her head past the locker room door, relieved to see a clear path between her and the hallway leading to the bunk room. At this time in the afternoon, it was pretty rare that anyone was sneaking in a nap unless they’d worked a double, and relief spiked when she discovered that today was no different than usual. She slipped past the curtained entryway leading into her assigned bunk, which was really just a ten by ten cubicle sectioned off from the other dozen just like it by a few sections of eight-foot cinderblock half-walls. The dimly lit space housed a twin bed, a metal chair, a small nightstand, and—most importantly right now—the biggest batch of privacy she was going to get under the roof of this fire house.

Funny, in her entire five years as a paramedic here, Quinn had never once wanted to get away from everyone.

With her body suddenly weary, she toed out of her boots and lay down on her bed. The shadows and silence tag-teamed to press against her from every direction, but when she closed her eyes to ward them off, their teeth only grew sharper.

You’re either gonna save his life, or I’m gonna end yours…

You know this feeling you have right now? This fear of dying? I want you to remember this feeling…remember it…remember…

Quinn’s eyes flew open, her pulse racing, her breaths sharp and erratic. She tried to focus on her surroundings—she should feel safe in the bunk room, in this fire house full of the best friends that were her only family. But Ice was out there—listening, waiting, watching—and her stomach cramped, her skin crawling with dread she couldn’t shake. Quinn scraped for an inhale, a scrap of calm thought, God, anything that could serve as a lifeline, however tenuous.

Nothing came but the echo of Ice’s words in her head. The blood-chilling fear in Jayden’s eyes as he’d told her how badly his wound hurt. The bruising thrust of Damien’s gun lodged between her shoulder blades. Pressed hard against her forehead.

I will make every single person you care about feel what you’re feeling right now, and then I’ll make you watch while I blow their fucking brains all over the floor...

Quinn barely got her pillow over her mouth before she began to sob.