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Chapter 614
Chapter 614:
The west wing corridor was dark, the power cut to that section of the house. Emergency lighting cast red shadows along the walls and the smell of smoke lingered, acrid and sharp. At the end of the corridor, the doors to the gardens stood open, the night air rushing in and carrying with it embers and ash.
She stepped outside.
The rose garden was indeed gone. What remained was a landscape of blackened stumps and collapsed trellises, the skeletal remains of arbors that had once held cascading blooms. Steam rose from the wet charcoal, ghostly in the moonlight.
As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw a figure standing in the center of the devastation. Cole. He stood motionless, his back to her, a solitary silhouette against the glowing embers, staring at a particular patch of scorched earth. His shoulders were slumped in a way that spoke of grief far deeper than the loss of a garden.
Above her, a section of the greenhouse roof groaned.
She looked up.
A wooden beam was burning at one end — the fire apparently extinguished, but the structural integrity gone. It hung at a dangerous angle directly above where she stood.
She did not move quickly enough.
She saw the shift in weight, the sudden give of the support bracket, the beam beginning its descent in what seemed like infinite slow motion.
Then Cole was there.
He launched himself from the center of the ruined garden, his body a projectile of pure instinct. He hit her from the side, his arms wrapping around her torso, his momentum carrying them both forward as the beam crashed down behind them. It struck his back with a sound like a gunshot. The breath left his lungs in a violent grunt. She felt the impact vibrate through his chest, through the arms still locked around her, through the body that had become a shield around hers.
𝖱𝗲𝘢d 𝘄і𝘁𝘩𝘰u𝘁 𝗂𝗻𝘁𝗲r𝘳u𝗉𝘁𝗶𝘰𝗇ѕ 𝗼𝗻
They landed hard on the gravel path, Cole beneath her, his body absorbing the shock of the fall.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then June pushed herself up, her hands finding the ground on either side of his shoulders, her knees bracketing his hips. She looked down at him. His eyes were open, dazed, searching for her face in the darkness. His breath came in shallow gasps, each one accompanied by a wince of pain.
“Are you hurt?” His voice was barely audible, thready with shock. “June — are you — did I p>
She stood.
She brushed the ash from her coat with quick, efficient movements and checked her hands for injury, finding only minor abrasions from the gravel.
Then she looked at him.
He was struggling to sit up, his right hand reaching behind him to touch his back, coming away dark with something that wasn’t ash in the moonlight.
She met his eyes.
“Thank you,” she said.
Her voice was perfectly level. Perfectly polite. The tone she might use for a stranger who had held a door open.
She turned and walked toward the main house.
She did not stop.