Tainted Gold (Providence Gold 3)

“I know man,” he rasped as he rubbed my back. “I know.”

“EMT, get the EMT! We’ve got three.” A voice yelled over the shouts of the men fighting the fire.

Just as I looked up, a man whose face was covered in black soot came out carrying someone, followed by one of the firemen who had someone over his shoulder.

“He can’t carry her like that, the baby,” I shouted, trying to push through to get to them.

That’s when I recognized Chris’s face underneath the dirt smeared across it and then saw the long hair of the person he was carrying.

Lily!

“You son of a bitch. You mother fucking son of a bitch!” I bellowed, not even recognizing my own voice.

“It wasn’t me,” he croaked as he got nearer to us and let the EMT take her out of his arms. “It was Rob,” he gasped, falling to his knees in front of me, struggling to get oxygen into his lungs.

“Rob?” Levi growled next to me. “Rob who?”

At that moment, I couldn’t have told you who anyone was, apart from the woman who was getting an oxygen mask put over her face while they stuck shit to her body and looked at a screen. Just then, they pulled her dress up, and I saw her bare stomach, the perfect mound that my son was making…

I’d never in my life felt anything like it. It was like someone had reached into me and ripped my heart out of my chest. No drama, no bullshit, it was like my world was ending as one of them signaled to the other, slammed the door shut, and then the sound of the siren started screaming over the noise the fire was making.

Did you know that fire made a noise? It was surreal. It had its own screaming noise too, along with a roar.

“Tate,” Levi shook me, but I couldn’t look away from the lights moving quickly down the street away from me. Lily was in that ambulance. My son was in it. “Tate, fucking snap out of it, you asshole,” he roared, giving my face a slap. “She needs you, so grow a pair of fucking balls and let’s go. Lily needs you.”

Out of all of that, it was the last three words that snapped me out of it. Sure, I’d get him back for slapping me in the face later, I might have been out of it at the time but I could still feel it. For now, Lily needed me, and where she was, I was. She and the baby were my priority, and anything else could wait.

“This one needs to go now!” another voice yelled, and I turned around to see them working on Lily’s dad, one paramedic pumping his chest, while another one steered the gurney onto the waiting ambulance.

How the fuck did this happen?

Looking down at Chris who was still on his knees on the floor, his shoulders shaking, I met Levi’s eyes and nodded. At the same time, we bent and hooked our arms under his, picking him up and taking his weight.

“Come on, man,” I grunted, moving so that my arm supported him around his back. “You need to get to the hospital.”

I’m not going to lie, his panting worried me. I’m also going to divulge the epiphany I had in that second. The man had carried Lily out of the burning bar. He could have left and stood outside it waiting for one of the firemen to do it, but he hadn’t. He’d gone above and beyond for her, and at the same time for my son. I owed him.

The epiphany was – even someone you think is scum can open your eyes to what humans are capable of. They can teach you a valuable lesson that helps steer you through life, seeing the world through different eyes than you did before. Even someone who had done something really shitty can turn around and atone for their sins with one single act of humanity.

That’s what he’d done tonight.

Later on, I’d find out in turn that someone I’d overlooked could do the most heinous thing that almost cost me everything. Their reasoning was ridiculous, it was weightless, and the consequences of it almost took lives.

So, I’m not sure my epiphany outweighed that last discovery, but it sure as hell changed me as a man.SeventeenTateWhen we’d arrived, we’d passed Chris off to a doctor who was waiting with a gurney to assess him. I’d sat in the back of the truck with him the whole way encouraging him to keep breathing as he wheezed and coughed. As we’d pulled into the hospital’s parking lot, Levi had driven right up to the entrance and screeched to a stop, falling out and yelling for a medic – a freaking medic like we were in a war movie.