2026-07-07 03:58:33"Moss." Brett's voice was stripped down to essentials, no greeting, no preamble. The voice he used when things were bad. "You're seeing the news?"
"I'm looking at it now."
"Los Vangees is gone. The flames have breached multiple ridges and are bearing down on residential zones and resorts. The state had activated its cross-county mutual aid protocol."
Derek straightened. “What does that mean for us?”
"We're deploying at 0200. All available personnel."
A pause. "It's bad, Derek. They've already got casualties. Command wants experienced people at the front."
Another pause, heavier than the first. "Say goodbye to your family. Properly."
The call ended.
Derek stood still for a moment, phone in his hand, the wildfire flickering silently on the screen.
He needed to leave. Now.
Yet after three years under the same roof, some stubborn part of him still believed Erin deserved a few parting words. Not because he still loved her. Whatever he had once felt had been worn down long ago. But three years of marriage should have ended with something more than a closed door.
When he looked up, Erin and Dick had already changed the channel. They sat together on the couch, close and comfortable, like a picture of the family Derek had never truly belonged to. The sight should have hurt. Instead, it only confirmed what he had finally accepted.
He opened his mouth.
Erin looked over, "Why the hell are you still here?"
The words died in his throat.
In the end, he just walked to the bedroom and pulled his duffel bag from the top shelf of the closet.
Derek packed in eleven minutes.
He had lived in this house for three years. He had painted two of the walls himself, assembled the furniture from flat-pack boxes on a Sunday afternoon with a YouTube tutorial and no help. He had hung the curtains, fixed the leaking tap under the kitchen sink twice, re-grouted the bathroom tiles one weekend when Erin had a conference in Denver and he had nothing else to do but make the house better.
Eleven minutes was all it took.
One duffel bag. Clothes, his spare boots, his grandfather's watch from the nightstand drawer, a paperback he hadn't finished. He stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked around for anything he'd missed.
There was nothing. Everything else, the furniture, the art on the walls, the good knives in the kitchen was hers. Had always been hers. He saw that clearly now, the way you see a room differently once you've decided to leave it.
He zipped the bag.
In the living room, Erin was laughing again. The sound followed him down the hallway, light and unbothered, the laugh of someone whose evening had not been meaningfully disrupted.
Derek paused at the key rack by the front door. His key was on the second hook, the one he'd installed himself because the original rack only had one. He unclipped it from the ring, set it on the small shelf beneath the hooks, and walked out.
The door closed behind him with a quiet click.
No slam. He hadn't wanted to give her that.
The fire station was twenty minutes away. Derek sat in the back of the cab with his duffel on his lap and watched the city slide past the window. Normal Saturday night — restaurants lit up, couples on sidewalks, a group of college kids spilling out of a bar. The world continuing at its regular pace, indifferent.
His leg throbbed steadily beneath the bandage. He pressed his palm against it and breathed.
When the cab pulled up to the station, Brett was outside running through the deployment checklist with two junior crew members. He looked up, saw Derek climbing out with a duffel bag, and went very still.
Derek crossed the lot before Brett could say anything.
"I'm here. I'm good to go."
Brett was actually caught surprised, he looked hard at Derek and then at the bag. Then at Derek's face. Then at the bag again.
"You need not to worry, I have arranged everything at home and I don't want my wife to be heartbroken looking at his belongings if I didn't come back." He cleared his throat.
Brett had been a firefighter for nineteen years. He had a particular talent for knowing when a man didn't want to be asked about something, and a particular respect for that boundary. He studied Derek for one long moment, then put a hand briefly on his shoulder.
"Get your gear on," he said quietly. "We roll at 0200."
Derek nodded and moved past him toward the locker room.
He was pulling on his turnout coat when he heard the footsteps too deliberate, too leisurely for someone preparing a deployment. He didn't need to turn around.
"Well, well." Christian Browning's voice had a particular quality, like something expensive that had gone slightly off. "Didn't expect to see you here, Moss. Thought you'd be home with the wife."
Derek kept his back to him, fastening his coat.
Christian moved into his peripheral vision, flanked by the two crew members he kept close, not friends, exactly, more like an audience he'd cultivated. He was already in his gear, which meant he'd had it on for a while, which meant this entrance had been planned.
Everybody knew that Christian was a nepo-baby whose family had essentially bought his position. The station was currently choosing between Derek and Christian for the soon-to-be-vacant Captain's seat.
Christian knew perfectly well that Derek vastly outclassed him in both skill and the crew's respect and to suppress Derek's rising prestige, Christian abused his authority to assign Derek to the most lethal deployments, keeping his own clique safely resting at the station.
"This isn't a standard callout," Christian continued, a very apparent fake smile on his lips. "Los Vangees is a different animal. Command structure, terrain, resources, nothing like working your home district." He paused to let that settle. "A man who's distracted out there.. emotionally compromised, let's say.. that's a liability. To the team. To the mission. If you make any mistake or disobey orders, you will face suspension upon return" His smile was perfectly calibrated. Plausible deniability baked right in.
He paused before maliciously adding, "But that is of course, if you survive."
"Christian." Brett's voice came from the doorway, flat and cold as concrete. "We have twenty-three minutes to deployment. If your gear isn't checked and your team isn't briefed, you can explain that to the incident commander in Los Vangees."
Christian held the smile for one beat too long, then let it drop. He looked at Derek.
"Best not give me any leverage out there" he said quietly. "That's all I'm saying."
Derek closed his eyes and breathed in, he had to ignore him and so he did completely.
Christian chuckled and left. His audience followed.
Brett waited until the footsteps faded, then crossed to his own locker without comment. That was the thing about Brett, he understood that some situations didn't need words. He'd said what needed saying. Derek had heard it.
Derek picked up his helmet.
Through the station's open bay doors, he could see the convoy assembling in the lot, engines, support vehicles, the equipment trailer. Crew members moving with the focused, quiet efficiency of people who understood what they were heading toward. No bravado. No noise. Just preparation.
Somewhere out there, a mountain was burning.
Derek settled his helmet on his head, snapped the chin strap, and walked toward the light.
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Chapter 96: What They'll tell her
They learned it was a daughter in late summer, at a routine appointment Fae had insisted on attending alone at first, then called Derek from the parking lot afterward, her voice carrying a kind of unsteady joy she rarely allowed herself in public."A girl," she said. "Derek, it's a girl."He left the office immediately, something he'd never done before for anything short of an emergency, and found her sitting in the car, the sonogram image already pressed flat against her palm as though she couldn't bear to let it crease."A girl," he repeated, sliding into the passenger seat, and felt the word settle into him with a particular weight he hadn't anticipated, the shape of a specific small person, finally, rather than an abstract hope.They told Jacob that evening, and he received the news the way he'd received everything lately, with an openness that would have seemed foreign to the composed man Derek had first met in a hospital bed over a year and a half earlier."A granddaughter," he
Chapter 95: The Announcement
Fae told him on a Tuesday morning, quietly, the way she told him everything that mattered most, without ceremony, simply true the moment it needed to be said."I'm pregnant," she said, setting down her coffee cup with careful precision, as though the cup required more attention than usual to keep her hands from shaking. "Six weeks, the doctor thinks. I wanted to be certain before I said anything, even to you."Derek set down the report he'd been reading and looked at her for a long moment, feeling something settle and expand in his chest at once, too large for any single, careful sentence to hold."Fae," he said, and found he had nothing more composed prepared, the plain fact of it simply too large to dress up with anything else."I know," she said, and her eyes were wet, though she was smiling, the particular unguarded smile she'd learned to allow herself fully since the wedding. "I've been sitting with it for three days, trying to find the right way to tell you, and I think there is
Chapter 94: Spring
By April, the foundation's work had settled into something that felt, for the first time in over a year, less like crisis management and more like an institution with its own steady rhythm.Fae had hired properly now, two additional staff members beyond the original skeleton crew, both found through Voss's careful recommendations, people who understood the particular delicacy this work required, truth delivered without cruelty, support offered without condition. The round-table conference room two floors below the boardroom had become too small for the operation it now housed, and Derek had quietly arranged for an entire floor to be converted, not flashy, nothing that announced itself, just space enough for the work to breathe."We need a name," Fae said one evening, reviewing letterhead drafts with the particular thoroughness she brought to everything. "Something beyond 'the foundation.' Something that actually says what we do.""Elena's name," Derek said. "I've been thinking about i
Chapter 93: What Elisabeth risked
The message came through an intermediary, careful and indirect the way everything connected to Elisabeth Hartenstein had always been, and it reached Victor's office on a grey February morning with an urgency that cut through the office's usual procedural calm."She's requesting protection," Victor told Derek and Fae, relaying the message word for word. "Not from prosecution. From her own structure. She says that since handing over the folder, she's noticed surveillance she believes originates from within the older network, people connected to whatever remains above even her former authority.""She said she'd stop interfering," Derek said, "not that she'd be safe once she did.""No," Victor agreed. "I think she understood the risk when she handed Jacob that folder. I think she's only now confirming the risk was real rather than theoretical."Sera, consulted immediately, authorized limited federal protection, a careful arrangement given Elisabeth's unusual status, neither witness nor fu
Chapter 92: Fae's answer
The call came from an unexpected direction, three days before Christmas, and it was Fae, this time, who needed to sit down after receiving it.Halloran's team, continuing to process Elisabeth's folder, had cross-referenced a name Fae hadn't expected to see surface in any of it: her own birth mother's, listed in a decades-old record connected to a logistics firm the Hartenstein structure had quietly controlled in the years before Jacob adopted her into the West name."I need to tell you something," Fae said that evening, finding Derek in the study, her voice carrying an unsteadiness he'd rarely heard from her. "Halloran found my mother's name. In the old records. Not connected to anything violent, nothing like what happened to Elena. But connected."Derek set aside the report he'd been reading and gave her his full attention."Tell me," he said."She worked for one of the shell companies," Fae said. "A junior bookkeeper, nothing significant, the kind of ordinary employment that wouldn'
Chapter 91: The Main House
They moved in gradually, over the first two weeks of December, nothing rushed, the way Fae had insisted everything in this family now happened, slowly, with room left for it to settle properly.Derek took the study at the end of the east wing as his own working space, not Jacob's, a separate room Pruitt had quietly prepared weeks earlier, as though he'd anticipated this arrangement before anyone had spoken it aloud. Fae claimed the sitting room with the piano no one had played in thirty-one years, and on their third evening in the house, she sat down at it, tentative, and picked out a simple melody she admitted, laughing, she'd only half-remembered from childhood lessons.Jacob, passing the doorway, stopped and listened for a long moment before continuing on, and Derek, watching his father's face in that brief pause, thought he understood exactly what Jacob was hearing: not Fae's halting, imperfect scales, but the simple fact of music existing in that room again at all.The foundation
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