REDEEMING THE ROSE: GILDED KNIGHTS SERIES BOOK 1 Read online

  REDEEMING THE ROSE

  GILDED KNIGHTS SERIES BOOK 1

  EMILIA FINN

  REDEEMING THE ROSE

  By: Emilia Finn

  Copyright © 2021. Emilia Finn

  Publisher: Beelieve Publishing, Pty Ltd.

  Cover Design: Amy Queue

  Editing: Bird’s Eye Books

  Model: Tauren Jay

  Photographer: James Critchley

  ISBN: 978-1-922623-00-3

  This Book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This Book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy.

  To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of Emilia Finn’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  Looking To Connect?

  REDEEMING THE ROSE

  Mitchell

  1. Nadia Reynolds

  2. Mitch

  3. Nadia

  4. Mitchell

  5. Nadia

  6. Mitchell

  7. Nadia

  8. Mitchell

  9. Nadia

  10. Mitchell

  11. Nadia

  12. Mitchell

  13. Nadia

  14. Mitchell

  15. Nadia

  16. Mitchell

  17. Nadia

  18. Mitchell

  19. Nadia

  20. Mitchell

  21. Nadia

  22. Mitchell

  23. Nadia

  24. James

  25. Mitchell

  26. Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  It only hurts if you allow it to

  Also by EMILIA FINN

  (in reading order)

  The Rollin On Series

  Finding Home

  Finding Victory

  Finding Forever

  Finding Peace

  Finding Redemption

  Finding Hope

  The Survivor Series

  Because of You

  Surviving You

  Without You

  Rewriting You

  Always You

  Take A Chance On Me

  The Checkmate Series

  Pawns In The Bishop’s Game

  Till The Sun Dies

  Castling The Rook

  Playing For Keeps

  Rise Of The King

  Sacrifice The Knight

  Winner Takes All

  Checkmate

  Stacked Deck - Rollin On Next Gen

  Wildcard

  Reshuffle

  Game of Hearts

  Full House

  No Limits

  Bluff

  Seven Card Stud

  Crazy Eights

  Eleusis

  Dynamite

  Busted

  Gilded Knights (Rosa Brothers)

  Redeeming The Rose

  Chasing Fire

  Rollin On Novellas

  (Do not read before finishing the Rollin On Series)

  Begin Again – A Short Story

  Written in the Stars – A Short Story

  Full Circle – A Short Story

  Worth Fighting For – A Bobby & Kit Novella

  Looking To Connect?

  Website: www.emiliafinn.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EmiliaBFinn/

  Newsletter: https://bit.ly/2YB5Gmw

  Email: [email protected]

  The Crew: https://www.facebook.com/groups/therollincrew/

  Did you know you can get a FREE book? Click here for Bry and Nelly’s story: BookHip.com/DPMMQM

  REDEEMING THE ROSE

  GILDED KNIGHTS SERIES BOOK 1

  EMILIA FINN

  Mitchell

  Sirens wail outside these four mobile walls. Loud and jarring to everyone we pass, mind-altering, as those people turn and watch our ambulance race toward certain heartache. But to the occupants of this vehicle, the cry of our sirens is merely a part of our routine. Our fight music, I suppose, the way a pro might listen to something heavy and energetic on their way to the octagon.

  The red and blue lights that sit atop our rig pulse in the otherwise darkness outside. The colors spin and swirl, bounce off the brick facades on the sides of old buildings, and then they echo back again so the side of my colleague’s face shines bright; blue, then red. Blue. Then red.

  The radios crackle:

  “Fire.”

  “Accidental.”

  “Possible casualties.”

  “Minors on site.”

  I watched a movie once when I was a kid, about a firehouse in the center of a busy city. It was supposed to be inspirational—it certainly was for my brother, who grew up to become one of the guys who races around in a truck, and runs toward fire when the flames begin—but in my young brain, all I focused on, all I could think and dream about, were the people who were burnt, the families who were crying and screaming for help.

  Nixon, my one-year-younger-than-me brother, went on to become a firefighter, but me, I was obsessed with those in the movie who stood outside that building, begging, crying for help, struggling to breathe, struggling to make sense of their new world.

  My brother wanted to save buildings. I wanted to save people. And so, once we graduated high school, he went one way, and I went the other.

  Unfortunately for me, my job ties in closely with his, so when the sirens ring out and he’s drawn toward the flames, more often than not, my team is called too. We end up on the same scenes, we meet the same victims, we comfort the same people; which means, despite my fear of fire and the fact I don’t want to race toward it, I find myself heading that way anyway.

  “They’re saying it’s under control.” Luc, my colleague and friend, tears the steering wheel to the left and starts us on the last street before we reach our destination.

  Together, our eyes come up to the angry, hot, sky-high towers of flames in the distance, their ferocity attempting to prove Luc’s words false.

  “Building is made up of twelve apartments, eight of which are rented,” he reports. “Forty-three occupants, one toaster fire, and a nosy old lady across the street who raised the alarms. Our job is to treat smoke inhalation.”

  Eyes narrowed, I study the scene laid out in front of me as Luc brings the rig screaming to a stop behind the one that was called before us.

  This town is small, the hospital, small. There are only so many medical and fire crews available before we have to call on our neighboring towns for backup. Calling out three fire trucks and more than one ambulance tends to leave this town teetering on a razor’s
edge. If we’re busy over here, then the rest of this town’s residents better be behaving themselves.

  Or else.

  The clock in the dash reads a little past midnight, but the moon shines bright in the sky, even through the smoke pulsing from the top of the engulfed building.

  One single toaster did all this. One person who wasn’t watching what they were doing. Now this entire building is fucked, and all these people will have to find someplace else to live.

  “Let’s start with the loudest folks,” Luc teases. Sort of. “Fire’s hot as Hades, and not what I’d call under control, but what do I know?” He looks to me with smiling eyes, a playful grin, and unsnaps his belt as soon as he kills the engine. “Radios say it’s under control. No injuries that are gonna kill anyone. Kari’s on scene.” He looks to the bustling crowd and smirks when he catches sight of his beautiful girlfriend working on a small family of three. “She ain’t shouting at assholes to move faster, so I think maybe we’re late to the party, and all is well.”

  “Loudest first,” I repeat. “Guy with the least blood on their shirt when this is done wins. Loser buys breakfast at end of shift.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Pushing his door open so the smell of burning everything tickles my nose, and the sounds of crying children pulse in my ears, Luc races to the back of the rig and yanks the doors open to get a stretcher out. Then we start working through the deluge.

  It could be worse, I think to myself as I follow suit. It often is. So with a shake of my head, and a chuckle under my breath when Kari’s playful gaze meets mine through the bullshit, I get to work, knowing there will be three of us at breakfast, and Luc will most likely be buying.

  He doesn’t know how not to make a mess when he’s on the job.

  I work on automatic while Luc shouts his orders twenty feet on my left, and Nixon, my brother the fire lieutenant, shouts his on my right. Kari is like Luc’s mop-up crew. He treats the worst of it, then she comes along, tidies up, and pats hands so that those who he moved on too quickly from to reassure know that everything will be okay.

  Every now and again, pressure builds inside the crumbling building, the way pressure builds outside with tired crews and terrified residents, until there’s a boom and a release of pressure, and then more heat, more cries for help, for attention, for comfort… Then everyone gets back to work and continues to fight against the flames and fear.

  And I… continue doing what I do.

  In silence, in meditative consistency while I try to ignore the orange balls of heat that dance in my peripherals, I clean and dress wounds, wrap limbs, support one woman’s possibly broken clavicle—she tripped on the stairs, she said, on the way down in the craziness once the alarms sounded. I keep an eye on a pair of kids who go back and forth from tears, to ‘This is the coolest shit I’ve ever seen!’ and when the top floor crumbles in and the fire crews take a minute to duck for cover, I cast a glance across the crowd until I catch sight of my brother and make sure he’s okay.

  We might only be eleven months and thirteen days apart in age, but he’s still my younger brother, and it’s my job to make sure he isn’t getting hurt on the job.

  If he does, Mom will kill us both.

  “Alright. That’s all I can do for right now.” I finish securing a temporary sling for a woman’s busted arm. Her cheeks are smudged with dirt and soot, and perhaps a little old blood, tracked over with tears. “Take a seat over by the grandma in the muumuu. Don’t move, and I’ll get you to the hospital soon for x-rays. First I gotta—”

  Nothing. I gotta see, and hear, and do nothing, except take in the blood-curdling scream that echoes in the night so loud, so fucking gut-wrenching, that everyone’s eyes snap up. Even the fire crews, whose only job is to save the building, glance across and almost blast the source of sound with their hoses before snapping back to work.

  Her scream is like a lighthouse, a beacon in a stormy sea, and at the bottom—on the rocks, so to speak—lays a child’s body, limp and bloody.

  My eyes whip away from my patient—her name is Claudia—and across the distance that separates me and Luc. His eyes come to me, but he’s bloodied from his patient, his hands are busy wrapping a guy’s head, and right beside him, Kari is hip-deep in making sure her patient doesn’t bleed to death.

  Dropping Claudia’s arm faster than I mean to, so fast that she cries out from the pain, I grab my bag and dart around my small crowd and across the hard-packed earth. I hurdle over the kids who are still vacillating between cool and oh fuck¸ past my watchful brother and his crew, and skid to a stop in front of the screaming woman when her legs collapse, and she drops to the ground.

  I dive forward on instinct—not to catch her, but to catch the child. A little girl, I think. Maybe three or four years old. Fabric clings to her skin, burned and blistered, so flesh and a kitty-cat design mesh together in a gruesome display that will visit me tomorrow in my dreams.

  I lay the child on the ground and fumble in search for a pulse. Her hair should be blonde, shoulder-length, and perhaps a little wavy, but most of it is gone, burned up and destroyed, right alongside the left side of her face.

  Destroyed.

  My heart pounds in my chest, and my hands want to shake, but training means I don’t allow them to. My eyes water from our close proximity to the fire and smoke, and I guess the fire crew thinks we’re a little close too, because water rains down over my back as they angle their hoses closer.

  They don’t spray me directly, but they’re not letting me or the girl combust either.

  The woman who carried her out howls, screams, and sobs while I work carefully to peel a little of the girl’s dress away. I don’t want to do more damage, but I need to get a clear look. I need a fucking hospital, lights, a sterilized space to help her get better.

  No pulse.

  I say it in my head, over and over again. No pulse. No pulse. No pulse. And if I was objective enough to sit back and observe what’s really going on, I’d acknowledge that I’m too late. She’s already gone. It’s hopeless.

  But I try anyway.

  I brush what little hair she has away from her face, open her airways, and breathe for her. One breath. Two.

  Her chest should lift. Her little lungs should fill. But as Kari skids to a stop beside me and tries to help, our eyes are drawn to the bubbling at the girl’s stomach.

  I breathe again, attempt to fill the baby’s lungs, but we both hear the bubbling, and we see the way her lungs remain void.

  “Mitch.”

  “Come on.” I say it, I pray for it.

  Meanwhile, the woman who carried her out—perhaps her mother—drops back like a sack of rice. Eyes roll into the back of her head, her cheeks turn deathly white, and then she’s gone. Asleep, and away from her horrifying reality.

  “Come on, sweetpea. Come on.”

  “Mitch!”

  “Come on,” I say again, and breathe for the child. Because she reminds me of my sister, my baby sister who spent her life in and out of hospitals. Her body was always too small. Her hair, too light. Her skin, too pale.

  If I didn’t breathe for her when she’d needed it, then she wouldn’t be here anymore. So I do the same for this baby. I breathe, even though it’s useless. I try to bring her back, and when a man’s pained roar echoes in the space around us, I shield the girl, protect her from what I think might be more danger, only to find it’s worse.

  So much worse.

  “Cady?” Cries of anguish peal louder than anything else here. Louder than the groan of failing steel. Louder than the shouts of the fire crew trying to keep us safe as we kneel too near the engulfed building. Louder still than Luc’s shouts as he demands Kari move our party the fuck away from the collapsing structure before we’re all dead.

  “Mitchell!” Kari demands. “We have to go.”

  “Cady?” the man cries.

  “Mitchell Rosa!” Nixon booms, both in my ear and over the radio. “Move!”

  “
Cady?” The father throws himself into our huddle, knocking me a little to the side. “Baby?”

  “Kari!”

  “Mitchell!” Kari jumps to her feet and races around our group. Grabbing the unconscious woman under the armpits, she begins backing away. “Pick them up. Now!”

  I look to Nixon as he battles a war with himself: stay and fight the fire, or flee his mission and fight his brother. Then I glance up in the direction everyone else’s eyes go, and gulp when I catch sight of a massive air conditioning unit, swaying and dipping as it perilously hangs on by seemingly nothing. It could be as simple as a power cord. A hose. But something is keeping the one-ton cube suspended fifty feet in the air… and every firefighter here knows it’s coming down.

  “Mitchell!” Nixon roars again. “Move it, now!”

  “Cady!” The father clings to his little girl, covers her body with his where she lays in the dirt, and cries into her mutilated chest.

  “Mitchell!”

  Kari’s authoritative tone brings my gaze to her. She doesn’t need to say anything else. She drags the unconscious woman, who weighs easily fifty pounds more than she, across the ground and toward where we parked the ambulance when we arrived on scene.

  A groaned warning sounds from above. My eyes snap up, they water from the smoke, the heat, the sheer force of what was once a toaster fire, but is now an inferno, then my stomach drops when whatever was tethering the air conditioning unit in place snaps.