The Firefighter’s Secret Baby

by Anna DeStefano

  “There was never a problem with the power?” Charlie asked.

  “It kind of added something to the effect—” Sam’s stand-in smirked. “Don’t ya think?”

  “Where’s Gianfranco?” Randy wanted to know.

  There were two bodies on the floor down the hall. Someone from the decoy team knelt beside them. The APD officer looked back, shaking his head and frowning, then headed further down the hallway, checking and clearing each office he passed. He touched a hand to his ear and began talking.

  “That was too close,” Charlie said. “Is Luca Gianfranco dead?”

  “He’s not here.” Glinda was listening to her teammates’ reports. “There’s—”

  “What do you mean he’s not here?” Randy rounded on her, backing her up against the bullet-shredded vending machine.

  “Gianfranco sent his own decoy.” Glinda nodded toward the two downed men. “That’s one of our APD contingent and one of our own guys.”

  “One of your deputies?”

  Glinda winced. “It explains how Luca found the hotel yesterday. How he got into this building.”

  “So where is he now? If you didn’t draw him out with this dog and pony show, where’s the man who’s trying to kill your federal witness?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “Is he tracking Sam?”

  “We don’t know. We’re—”

  “Working on it,” Randy parroted back, allowing her to step away to confer with her team. “Yeah.”

  Just like they’d been working on keeping Sam alive for two years.

  “No word from Dean?” he asked

  “They’re still on the move. He’ll report in when Ms. Gianfranco’s secure.”

  Randy checked his watch.

  It had been less than five minutes since they’d split up.

  “She’s going to be okay, man,” Charlie said beside him. He’d bent at the waist and was rubbing his chest beneath the Kevlar vest. He was still having trouble breathing. “You’ve done…everything you can. It’s out of your hands now. You have to believe that she’s going to be okay.”

  “Like we believed Mom would make it back to us alive?” Randy asked.

  Charlie blinked at the reminder. Randy slammed his fist into the vending machine that, unlike Herbie on the pediatric floor, seemed to have taken a liking to him. With a whirring clunk a can hissed from the bowels of the thing. A frosty Yoo-hoo sat in the dispenser.

  “Look at that, man,” Charlie said with a tight laugh. “This must be your lucky day.”

  Except Randy had talked Sam into this crazy plan. He’d talked her into believing this would work. And if he’d been wrong? Nothing in his life would ever be right again. Not the career Randy had lived for. Not even returning to his own family—the people who’d protected him and kept him sane since they were kids.

  Randy needed Sam and their daughter.

  He needed the hope that poured through him whenever he thought of the future they could build.

  “Yeah.” He picked up the can and popped the top. When he gulped down the smooth, frosty chocolate, all he could taste was fear. “I’m a lucky man…”

  “ALMOST THERE,” Max said.

  Sam nodded. She was scared out of her mind. But she was determined to make the most out of this chance Randy and the rest of Max’s team were giving her. She kept moving.

  Shots had erupted behind them, while Max and another deputy got Sam to the staff elevator and off the floor. They hadn’t received a report from their team by the time the elevators had opened to the garden basement. Now Max’s transmissions were being garbled from some kind of interference. No news on the outcome of the decoy. No confirmation that Luca had been contained.

  The ground floor basement level was vacant, its construction nowhere near finished. No furnishings. No partitions. Just winding hallways currently illuminated by the ambient light shining through floor-to-ceiling windows that comprised the floor’s outer wall. Max hadn’t activated any lights when they’d left the elevator. He wasn’t certain they were the only ones there.

  They passed office after office, some with doors, some merely empty shells yet to be tended to. Max and his deputy and Sam maneuvered through a maze of walls lined with plastic and half-formed Sheet-rock. A wall was always to Sam’s left. Max stayed to the right and no more than half a step ahead. His deputy covered Sam’s back.

  Max kept touching the device at his ear, trying to get a report. How much attention had the other team drawn? Had anyone been hurt in the gunfire? Randy? Charlie?

  They rounded another corner, Max taking point and sweeping the hallway first. He suddenly stopped, his hand to his ear. Something was finally getting through. His deepening frown wasn’t encouraging.

  Sam didn’t push for details, and not just because distracting the men protecting her could get them all dead. If the disturbing report was about Randy, she couldn’t bear to hear it now.

  They headed out again.

  “Just one more hallway.” Max held up a hand as they approached the next corner, the same as he had with each of the others.

  They stopped. The deputy covered behind them while Max scanned the next hall with his gun. He gave his silent Clear signal. Sam and the other deputy moved to make the turn.

  Gunfire erupted.

  “Get down!” Max yelled.

  The deputy pulled Sam to the floor. A chunk of the wall where her head had been exploded.

  “Stay down!” The deputy kept a hand on her back, the pressure against her injured shoulder excruciating.

  More gunfire.

  A thud on the ground beside her.

  “I’m hit!” Max gasped.

  Sam lifted her head to see.

  “Stay down!” the other marshal repeated. “How bad?”

  “Arm. Near the shoulder.” Max’s voice sounded more pissed than anything. “I can move. There’s more than one. Two, possibly three men.”

  “Back this way.” The deputy yanked Sam to a standing position. “You take her. I’ll cover for as long as I can. Get moving!”

  The deputy—Sam didn’t even know his name—rounded the corner and fired several shots, then pulled back, ducking while gunfire took out another chunk of the wall. Max’s left arm hung limply at his side. Blood stained what she could see of the crisp shirt he wore under his jacket. With the gun still in his right hand, he motioned for Sam to head back the way they’d just come—away from the safe room no one but his immediate team was supposed to have known about.

  “Someone was waiting for us down here,” he said through tight lips that were white-rimmed with pain.

  “Someone knew about the decoy?”

  “About our backup holding location for you, at least.” He motioned for Sam to take a left at the next corner—they’d come from the right when they’d passed this way the first time. “Maybe they only had backup people waiting here, just in case. Or maybe…”

  “Maybe Luca’s been waiting for me to come to him down here….”

  “Yeah.” Max pulled her to a stop. “One of my deputies has been helping him lead us around by the nose. Take this…”

  He handed her his gun, then bent at the waist and sucked in several breaths.

  “Max?” The Glock felt ghastly in Sam’s hand, but not unfamiliar. As much as Sam despised guns, her father had trained both her and Luca how to shoot, clean and maintain them while they were still in elementary school. “Max, are you—”

  “It’s going to be okay.” He straightened, his face dripping with sweat. He leaned into the door behind him—what looked like a conference room. “You’re…you’re going to be safe, Sam. I’m going to…get you back to your daughter…Back to that hulking fireman you’re going to build a life with. I promise you.”

  His gaze swept one end of the hallway, then the other. Then he knocked three times on the door, paused, and knocked twice more. The lock turned.

  Max smiled at her puzzled frown. “Luca’s not the only one who hedges his bets when
the stakes are high.”

  The door was flung open, the absence of support sending Max stumbling back into a man wearing nearly an identical suit. Only, this guy was twice Max’s size, and the gun he was aiming at Sam while he kept Max from kissing the carpet was twice as ugly. The instant he recognized her, he lowered his weapon.

  “Get in here before you get yourself killed.” He stepped far enough away for Sam to step inside. Leaving Max leaning against a dust-covered conference table that was only partially protected by plastic, he closed the door behind her and locked it. “And put Dean’s piece away before you do something we’ll both regret with it.”

  Pissed and shaking and pretty much convinced they were all going to die, Sam glared at the mountainous man’s condescending expression and clicked the Glock’s safety on without looking.

  “Do something with this.” She shoved the thing at him and began unbuttoning Max’s jacket. “Help me get this off him.”

  “No…” Max jerked away from the table, nearly falling onto Sam before he caught and righted himself. “Give her back the gun, then help me—”

  “Help you finish what that bullet started?” Sam demanded while he stepped around her to the door. “You can’t seriously be going back out there. My brother is—”

  “Going to kill us all if we just wait here.” There was a grayness to Max’s skin that made Sam bite back tears. He nodded to his colleague, who handed Sam back the Glock. Max pulled a second gun from a holster she hadn’t seen at the small of his back. “I have no idea how long we’ll be gone. No one knows about this room besides me and Fritz here. It’s secure. No chance of a leak this time. Don’t let anyone in unless they knock three times, wait three counts, then knock twice. Say it, so you’ll remember.”

  Sam couldn’t.

  She couldn’t stay here alone—waiting for Luca to kill these brave men. Wondering if he’d already taken Randy away from her, picturing what her baby’s future would be like if she had to grow up with no parents to love her, once Luca found Sam and finished this. Sam shook her head, swallowing a weak, selfish sob. She didn’t want to die alone. She wanted to see her child and the man she loved again.

  Love…

  She’d never told Randy she loved him. Now it was too late.

  Max pushed away from the door, leaving a smear of blood across its surface. He covered the hand she held the gun in.

  “I know I’ve let you down up till now,” he said. “But this was our best shot at flushing out a maniac who wants you silenced. Permanently. You were brave enough to start this. Now finish it.”

  Max flattened his back to the wall beside the door. He nodded to Fritz, who opened the door and slipped out first, gun raised.

  “Clear,” the man whispered back.

  “Lock up behind us,” Max insisted in a similar whisper. “Tell me when you’ll open it again.”

  Sam gulped. “Three knocks. Wait for three. Two knocks.”

  “Good girl.” Max winked, then he was gone.

  Sam lunged at the door and thumbed the insubstantial lock that wouldn’t stop Luca if he got that far. She sank to the floor, the last two weeks, the last two years, careening through her mind.

  You’ll make it out of this, Sam. I know it.

  She stared at the blood on her hands.

  Randy had put everything on the line for her. He’d found some way to love her and believe in what they could have, while she’d ripped his life apart and tried to leave him and their daughter behind. She stared at Max’s gun and thought of her baby girl. A baby whose future would be decided in the next few minutes.

  Gunfire erupted close by. But, strangely, Sam’s fear melted away. Because in that moment, she accepted that she’d do anything to not only protect her baby, but to raise her. To give her daughter a name and a future with her and Gabby. A life that wouldn’t be about running from her brother’s madness. A future that Randy wanted to be a part of.

  She might be alone now, but Randy was waiting for her to come back to him.

  The quiet outside the door dragged her attention back to the present. How long had she been sitting there? The gunfire. It had stopped. Footsteps…

  Were those footsteps?

  They stopped just outside.

  Sam crawled backward, until she was under the conference room table. Cringing, shaking, she leveled the gun at the door and waited. Nothing happened. Not a single sound. But whoever was out there hadn’t moved on.

  Was it Max? His deputy?

  No knock came.

  Then an earsplitting blast blew out the knob and the lock and sent the door flying inward.

  Sam screamed, as a looming figure filled the doorway.

  “Hello, sis. Long time no see.” Luca was covered in blood. Shot himself, in the chest and upper arms, he was smiling. And he was alone.

  They were together again for the first time since she’d held Peter’s lifeless body in her arms. Since she’d run from Luca and the life she couldn’t be a part of any longer.

  “What have you done?” Sam pushed to her feet, wincing at the strain on her shoulder but determined to face her brother. “Where’s Randy? Where’s Max?”

  “I’m pretty sure your baby daddy is hanging with your ex-fiancé right about now.” Luca released the clip in his automatic and snapped in a fresh one. “Swapping war stories, maybe, about how neither one of them was man enough to keep you away from me.”

  “Shut up.” Sam felt for the safety on Max’s weapon. Flipped it off. “Don’t talk about them. You don’t deserve to talk about them, you heartless—”

  “And your federal protectors? Very clever, having a secondary exit route all mapped out, just in case this secret appearance of yours to care for your sick child drew me out. Nice touch with the decoy upstairs, too. Too bad I’ve run my own bait and switches for years. Too bad I own someone in every local and state law enforcement office within three hundred miles of here. Don’t they get that I’ll do whatever it takes, pay whatever it takes, to keep my sister from screwing me over to the feds? It’s hell, constantly being underestimated. Especially by my own flesh and blood.”

  “You have no blood in your veins.” Sam’s right hand was shaking.

  She raised her left arm, wincing at the agony in her shoulder. But she wrapped both hands around the butt of the gun. She pictured her baby’s face. Then Randy’s.

  The pain vanished.

  “You’re not going to shoot your own family,” Luca taunted. “You need me, Samantha. Why won’t you do what I say, so you can be with Gabby and have my protection back?”

  “We may share the same parents, but you’re nothing to me now. And I don’t need you to get Gabby back.”

  “When are you going to learn to stop trusting anyone but real family?”

  “Monsters…Death…That’s all our real family has meant to me. Lies and destruction, all for money and power and control.”

  Sam had finally found what she’d been looking for her entire life, nine months ago when she’d looked across a crowded street in a city she’d never been to, and watched Randy laughing with his brothers.

  “Well, no worries.” Luca’s smile was the same as she remembered from their childhood. It was the classic Gianfranco smile their mother had said had won her over, the first time she’d met their father. “You won’t have to endure being part of our monstrous family much longer.”

  Sam could read her death in his eyes.

  “You’d really do this?” She shook the gun at him, then she dropped it to her side. Had it really come to this? One of them had to die, for the other to have the life they wanted. “You’d do this to Gabby?”

  “What?” A cold-blooded murderer gazed back at her. “Would I take away the sister who’s determined to tear apart the only world Gabriella’s ever known? The world I can give her as the head of our family. Somehow I think she’ll get over it.”

  Gabby, growing up with Luca teaching her. Controlling her. Sam’s baby, growing up without her mother. Maybe even witho
ut her father…

  Over Sam’s dead body.

  “You forgot one thing in your latest bait and switch, big brother.”

  “What’s that?” Luca sounded almost indulgent.

  “Me.” She raised Max’s gun.

  Luca didn’t even blink.

  Why would he?

  Sam had been a threat to herself all their lives, but she’d never dared challenge Luca directly. She’d wanted the safety and security of their family too much. She’d been content to let someone else call the shots. Even when she’d run to the federal prosecutor.

  “You’re not taking away the life I want again,” she insisted.

  “What life? Whoring around with some firefighter and getting yourself knocked up? Pouting in federal protection, because I wouldn’t let you have Peter.”

  “Wouldn’t let…You killed him, Luca! You killed the man I loved, while I was sleeping less than an inch away.”

  “I eliminated a threat to my control, just like our father taught me to.” Luca’s hand tightened on his weapon. “Just like I am now. It’s not my fault you refuse to understand the meaning of family and loyalty.”

  “Oh, I understand it just fine.”

  Sam pointed the Glock at her brother’s nonexistent heart, while she thought of Randy’s mother and what Jasmine Montgomery had sacrificed so her children could live free.

  “You’re just not my family anymore, Luca.”

  They fired at the same time.

  The kick from Max’s Glock knocked Sam backward. Pain streaked through her shoulder.

  She dropped the gun, her fingers numb, only then realizing that fire was also shooting through her chest. She glanced down at the bullet hole in her borrowed dress shirt. She lifted incredulous eyes to catch the shock mirrored in her brother’s expression. Her shot had blown a hole in his chest, too, but he still held his gun.

  “You bitch,” he growled. He stumbled a step closer, the automatic aimed at her head this time. “You shot me? You ungrateful bi—”

  Sam closed her eyes, knowing it was over.

  She saw the faces of her real family one last time. Randy. Their daughter. Gabby.