You locked yourself inside a crime scene

He spun in circles beneath the falling dust, barking into his phone, only to realize the signal inside the sealed warehouse was gone. He kicked at a shutter panel. He screamed for the helicopter pilot. He even tried prying open a side door with a bent length of steel, but the emergency lockdown had already rerouted the internal bolts.

Then the sirens started.

Not one.

Several.

Rescue crews. Fire. Police. Federal safety response.

Elias looked back at me so fast it was almost comical. Until that moment, he still believed he had time. Time to finish me. Time to delete the narrative I had just built around him. Time to become the grieving leader by sunrise.

Now all he had was me, the rubble, and whatever my transmitter had released.

He knelt beside me again, but his voice had changed. “Victor, listen carefully. When they get in here, you tell them I came back for you.”

I almost laughed, but blood rose in my throat instead.

He pressed his hands against the beam trapping my legs, pretending effort for cameras he still hadn’t located. “Do you hear me? I’m the one who tried to save you.”

“Then save me,” I whispered.

He didn’t move.

The cutters finally screamed through the eastern shutter. Flashlights tore through the dust. Men in hard helmets shouted for silence, then for medical kits. A federal agent stepped through the breach behind them, eyes moving once from my crushed legs to Elias’s immaculate coat.

Interesting, that look said.

Elias instantly dropped to one knee. “Thank God,” he breathed. “I came back in for him.”

I turned my head toward the agent. My chest burned. My vision blurred. But I still caught the smallest reflection of red light in the cracked wall above Elias’s shoulder.

The recording was still running.

Then I saw someone else beyond the responders.

My sister Nora.

She stood behind the caution line, pale as dust, staring past the stretcher team and straight at Elias — not at me.