When My Boyfriend Stepped Over Me to Save His Fake Heiress

I don't know how long we were down there. Later, someone told me it was forty-seven minutes. It felt like my whole life folded into that one small box.

Then I heard metal grinding. A crack of light cut through the dark, thin at first, then wider. Voices. Radios. A man shouting, "We got them, we got them!"

I tried to sit up. My ribs screamed and I went still again, my cheek pressed to the carpet, watching boots and flashlight beams swim past me.

"Kensley! Oh my God, is she okay?" That was Zane. Already on his feet. Already moving.

I watched his shoes step past my hand. Not around it. Over it.

He scooped Kensley up like she was made of glass, one arm under her knees, the other cradling her head against his chest, and he carried her toward the widening gap in the doors like a man walking out of a burning building with the only thing worth saving.

"She's allergic to citrus," he was saying, loud, urgent, performing. "Severe reaction. I need a medic, now—somebody get her water—"

The doors opened all the way. Light flooded in, and for a second it blinded me more than the darkness had. I heard a small crowd out there. Executives who'd stayed late. A cluster of security. Someone's camera flash went off.

"He saved her," a woman's voice said, awed. "He climbed over people to get to her."

He hadn't climbed over anyone. He'd stepped over me.

I lay there on the floor of that elevator, blood sliding warm down the side of my face, and I watched eight adults crowd around a woman who wasn't allergic to anything, wasn't hurt, wasn't even short of breath anymore now that there was an audience to perform for. Someone had already called for a stretcher. For her. She didn't need it. She took it anyway, draping herself across it with one hand pressed to her forehead like a Victorian heroine.

Nobody looked at me.

I tried to say something. My name, maybe. Help. I don't know what I was reaching for. What came out was just breath, thin and useless, swallowed by the noise of people congratulating a man for a rescue that never happened.

An executive—Whitfield, from the fortieth floor, a man I'd sat across from in a hundred meetings—clapped Zane on the shoulder. "Good instincts, son. Fast thinking." He was already reaching to shake his hand.

Zane shook it. He was smiling. I could see it from the floor, past the legs and the shoes and the hem of Kensley's cream blouse. He was smiling like a man who had just been handed exactly what he wanted.

I closed my eyes. Just for a second. And in that second I was twelve years old again, folded into crushed metal, listening to a silence where my mother's breathing used to be, waiting for someone—anyone—to notice that a girl was dying in the wreckage while the world moved around her like she wasn't even there.

Then I heard it. A voice cutting through the crowd, sharp enough that even Whitfield stopped talking.

"Move."

One word. It didn't ask.

I heard security stammer something about protocol, about the scene not being cleared, and I heard footsteps that didn't slow down for any of it. A security guard actually stumbled backward out of the way.

Then Summer was on her knees beside me. Her hands were under my shoulders before I even registered she was there, careful, certain, like she'd done this a hundred times, like she'd been waiting her whole life to do exactly this.

"Bella." Her voice cracked once, just once, and then went steady. "I've got you. I've got you, okay? Look at me."

I looked at her. That was all I could manage.

She lifted me like I weighed nothing, one arm braced under my knees, the other cradling my head against her collarbone, and she stood up with me in her arms in the middle of that lobby full of people who hadn't moved an inch to help me. Nobody stopped her. Nobody dared.

She carried me past the stretcher nobody needed. Past Whitfield, who'd gone quiet. Past Kensley, whose performance faltered for just a second when she realized the room's attention had shifted somewhere she couldn't follow.

She carried me straight toward the ambulance parked at the curb, lights spinning red and white against the dark street, and paramedics rushing to meet her halfway.

Only when they had me on the gurney, only when the doors were about to close, did Summer turn back.

She found Zane across the lobby. He was still standing there, Whitfield's hand still half-raised in some aborted second congratulation, Kensley draped dramatically over a stretcher she didn't need six feet away from him.

Summer's voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. It carried across that whole marble lobby like something cut from ice.

"You don't even know who you just left to die."

The ambulance doors closed on his face before he could answer.