Broken Wings (A Romantic Suspense) (27 page)

Then Richard comes barreling in and crashes into Jack, smashes him to the floor. The gun goes off with a thunderous boom, and fills the room with a peal of thunder that lances into my ears like hot needles. Richard falls on top of Jack, covered in blood soaking into his dark coat and white shirt and red tie. Jack rolls his father over.

“Dad! Jesus Christ!
Ellie
!”

“
Don’t fucking move,” Jessica snaps.

I see a look of utter desperation on Jack’s face. He freezes in place. Blood sluices between his fingers. Jessica holds the gun in her hand, hammer back, ready to touch the trigger and set it off. She has it pointed right at his head.

“Fuck, this ruins everything,” she sighs. “On to Plan B. Neither of you move. Ellie, you take one step and I’ll blow Jack’s brains out, understood? Not one fucking
move
.”

Gingerly she edges to the door, stepping over Richard’s shaking feet.

“Fucking whore,” Richard grunts.

“You should talk,” Jessica snaps. “Bye bye, kids.”

She swings the door shut.

Jack bolts for it, but the time he hits it, it doesn’t budge.

“She’s got something wedged under the doorknob.”

I’m already moving. I grab the first-aid kit out of the bathroom and run, painfully dropping to my knees beside Richard. I yank it open and find some gauze and tape. The bullet went into his side. I don’t see where it would have come out, it must still be in him. It went in low, under his ribs.

“Gonna be shitting in a bag,” he wheezes.

“Dad—”

“Help me, Jack. We need to cover the wound and put pressure on it. Wrap something around him.”

“Tie,” Richard wheezes.

I look at Jack, and he looks at me. He rips off Richard’s tie and uses it to strap down the bandage I apply to his side.

“We need to get him to the hospital or he’s going to die.”

“He’s not going to die,” I say calmly.

I move to the door.

When I touch it the handle is hot. I step back.

It smells like winter in the city. Like burning logs. Like fire.

Smoke flows under the door, little wisps at first, then more and more.

“Fuck!” Jack roars, “she lit the goddamn house on fire!”

“Jack,” Richard, rasps, “Jack, leave me.”

“What?”

“Leave me behind. Get the girl out.”

“No,” I say sharply. “Jack, we need to get this door open. Stay low.”

“Yeah, stay low. Get back, I’m going to open it.”

Jack paces halfway across the room and hurls himself into the door. He hits it so hard I wince, fearing he’s done more damage to himself. The door doesn’t show any damage but whatever is holding it closed cracks and folds with an audible wooden whine. Another blow and it flies open, and smoke surges into the room, sliding along the ceiling. The flickering light from the flames throws long shadows across the room.

“I’ll get his legs,” Jack says without missing a beat.

I can’t help him. Damn my burned hand to hell. I wrap my arms around Richard and drag him out of the room, trying to crouch as I do. He’s heavy, and it’s getting hot. I take a breath and it’s like swallowing embers. I hack and cough.

“Leave me,” Richard rasps.

“No,” I say before Jack can.

I’m not making him go through that, too.

Beneath us, there’s a bang, then another.

“Come on, time to go.”

“I’m getting up,” Richard groans, and rolls onto his side.

Somehow he gets to his hands and knees. Jack slips under his arm and I do the same on the other side. It’s not far, just down the stairs. I almost fall, my feet trying to go out from under me with Richard’s weight on my shoulder. Smoke rolls up the ceiling over our heads, growing thicker by the moment. She lit the kitchen on fire. Another bang.

At first I think it’s part of the house collapsing, but it’s a gunshot. As we make it down to the bottom of the stairs, Jack cries out. Richard’s big bodyguard slumps to the floor.

Jessica shot him in the stomach. Flopped out on the ground, he looks dead. He’s not breathing.

Behind us, the kitchen is ablaze. She must have lit some cooking oil or something on fire. In front of us, Jessica stands blocking the door, jerking the gun back and forth to keep us covered.

“Drop him.”

“Do it,” Richard wheezes.

Jack crouches and we lower him to the floor.

Jessica extends her arm. “One for each of you.”

I throw myself at her. The gun goes off. The world becomes a high-pitched whine, shrieking in my ears. I’d be blind in my left eye if I could see out of it. She fired the gun right next to my head. The bullet hit the ceiling above. I have her wrist, spin her around, but she has two hands and I have one. She shoves her other hand in my face and pushes me off. As she tries to swing the gun around to shoot me in the face, Jack grabs her and we all three go tumbling to the floor.

Then with a groan, the house starts to come down. Flames lick along the timbers of the second floor and one of them, dry as fresh kindling,
cracks
and splits in the middle, and falls. Jessica shoves me aside and runs for the door. Jack pulls me back just in time as the falling beam hits her legs and slams her to the ground with the force of a giant’s fist.

“Help me!” she shrieks.

Jack looks at me like I’m crazy as I try to dig her out. I grab the beam and pull with all my strength but it won’t move. Jack joins in without a word and pulls. It shifts and Jessica wrenches free. Her leg is badly broken, fractured in more than one place.

Jessica’s hand snakes out and she tries to pull me into the fire. Jack grabs my arm and yanks me back, and Jessica falls, shrieking in pain from her broken leg. She twists and goes down bad, and we both stare at her.

She landed wrong on the broken beam. A shard of wood, as thick as my arm and wickedly pointed, juts through her middle just before her breastbone. She stares at it in disbelief, mouthing a wordless argument, like she can talk her way out of it.

I start to reach for her and then another beam falls. Flaming wood dives from the ceiling and a great slab of burning timber crushes her face as she screams, her voice rising in keening agony until it fades out in a wordless shriek and she goes limp, the flames licking up her legs and arm.

“We have to go, now!”

“The door!”

“I know, front window! The office!”

Jack shoves the door open. The flames haven’t reached the office yet. We drag Richard inside, then pull the big man, Frank. It’s like pulling a car. My arms and legs are screaming and I’m bleeding from my right thigh and I don’t know how it happened. Every breath is hot agony. We have to get them out.

“Leave me,” Richard wheezes again.

Jack picks up my dad’s old desk chair and hurls it through the window. He throws the curtains over the broken glass, then with a massive groan of effort, heaves his father bodily from the floor and drops him on the ground outside. I try to help him move Frank, but my efforts hinder more than they help. Jack wrestles him through the opening then lifts me over and drops down himself, collapsing beside me.

I step back. Sirens wail as a column of smoke rises from the roof of my home, swirling into the sky with the embers.

Jack

There are fourteen steps between the far side of the waiting room and this one. I know because I’ve walked the distance exactly two hundred and thirty-six times. Counting is the only thing that keeps me from throwing a chair through the window.

I fucking
hate
hospitals. The chemical smell in the hallway, the tacky, worn carpet, the cheap, shitty chairs, the ugly painting of a sailboat on the wall, the television tuned to
The View
with the missing remote.

It’s been thirty-six hours and I haven’t slept. I should be in there with her, but they wouldn’t let me. They said it was too dangerous.

So here I am, counting down the seconds. It’s like that old psychological thing, Xeno’s Error. Or Zeno’s Arrow. Something like that. Every second stretches out longer and longer into infinity until every step takes a year. I’ll be an old man before I hear the news.

I am I going to be a father, or a widower?

I realize I’m pacing faster and faster until I’m running back and forth, tapping the wall with my hand before darting back. I only stop, panting, when the door opens.

My heart rockets into my throat, but only for a moment. It’s not the doctor.

It’s my father.

He’s lost about ninety pounds and walks with a cane now. He was right, he does shit in a bag now. Over the last year he’s been pushing me constantly to take my so-called job with the company and the answer has always been no.

“She pop my son out yet?”

I sigh. “Do you even realize how much of an asshole you are?”

“Yes,” he groans, lowering himself into a seat.

Frank would be right there with him, but Frank took a severance package after he was wounded. We still exchange phone calls and emails now and then. He opened a restaurant that specializes in hot dogs. I’ve been there a few times with Ellie.

“So nothing yet, I take it.”

“No. They won’t let me in the room while they deliver the baby.”

My father sighs and the sigh turns into a cough.

“That’s not good.”

“No it isn’t.”

“You ought to sit down for a while.”

“I’d rather not.”

I go back to pacing, walking this time.

“I did that.”

“Did what?”

“Paced. At first, anyway. When it was time they brought me in for the delivery. When you were born.”

“Don’t try to win me over with sappy bullshit, Dad. It’s not going to work.”

He sighs again.

We continue to wait. In the twentieth hour, my mother arrives with my half sisters. The room feels more full. They take to the grubby pile of toys in the corner while my mother sits on the far end of the room from my father.

Walking between them, I can feel the fury, mostly from her. It’s like sticking my hand between two magnets pushing into each other from the wrong ends.

Ellie’s uncle is the last to show up. Well, next to last. Fitzgerald brings everyone dinner from the steak shop down the street. I skip the meal and pace instead. The waiting room smells like grease, Velveeta, and onions. Except for the kids’ baby-sized steaks, they don’t have onions. Fitz knew, somehow. He’s good at that.

My mother and Ellie’s uncle talk the most. My father sits hunched forward, big hands propped on his cane. The apelike hair that covers his hands and arms has gone all white as snow and thinner than it once was. The only dark remaining on his head is his big beetle eyebrows. In a few years, if he makes it that long, he’ll have nothing but a ring of white around his head.

So we wait.

I finally get too tired to pace and sit down next to Ellie’s uncle, across from my mom.

“I wish my brother was here to see this.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

This should be a happy time of anticipation but there’s a heavy pall over the room. Even my sisters feel it. They sit cross-legged and watch cartoons after Ellie’s uncle figures out how to work the television, but their eyes are quick, seeking. Kids always know when there’s something wrong.

“Mister Marshall?”

After all that, I didn’t see the doctor come in. My father jerks awake and then deflates a little in the seat when he realizes he’s not being addressed.

I get up and rush to the doctor. I expected him to show up wearing a mask and apron and come in covered in blood with a mournful look on his face, but he’s just in scrubs.

“Follow me.”

With every beat my heart climbs a little higher as I walk down the antiseptic-smelling hallway. The door to Ellie’s room is open. I can see her silhouette through the curtain blocking her off from the view from the hall.

In the intensive care maternity ward, I have to wash my hands before I can see my wife. The soft bleeping of her heart rate on the monitor lifts my spirit a little, but then I hear her weeping softly.

My last shreds of self control break and I shove through the curtain into the room to find Ellie lying propped up in bed, whimpering as she holds a bundle in her arms.

Oh God, my child…

A tiny hand, pink and perfect, reaches up and grasps at her.

I rush over and bite my fist to stop from crying out. A perfectly healthy baby rests against Ellie’s breast, staring at the new world around her. Her little blue eyes lock on me.

“Hi, Daddy,” Ellie murmurs, but it comes out garbled from her crying. She hasn’t stopped.

“Ellie? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She sucks in a breath. “I was so scared.”

My child’s fingers wrap around my thumb.

“I know. I was afraid I’d lose you both.”

“It’s not that. I mean I was scared of that, but…”

She barks out a sob. “She’s not crying. I thought she’d be afraid of me.”

I lean down and kiss her forehead.

“Why would she? You’re her mommy.”

“Take her.”

I lift my child into my arms and stand up. She’s so light, I can barely feel the weight.

“Hi.”

She’s a little young to reply but she smiles.

Ellie reaches for her, and I deliver our daughter into her arms and kiss her lightly on the forehead. She’s pale and covered in sweat but she’s never been more beautiful to me than she is right now. She’s absolutely angelic as she holds my child in her arms. Her soft smile is so real, so easy, so relaxed that I wish I could keep it forever. Our lives are never going to be easy. Ellie will always carry the marks of what Jessica did to her, to us, both physical and spiritual, but those marks don’t matter, not to me. They’re part of her and they’re beautiful.

“We need a name.”

“What was your mom’s name?”

“Amber.”

“Amber it is.”

Thank you for reading
Broken Wings
. I hope you enjoyed it!

Comments are welcome at
[email protected]

For more information on current and upcoming books, please sign up for my newsletter here:
eepurl.com/0qieT

Love bad boy romances? Visit our
Facebook group!

Ready for more? Flip to the next page to start
Blackbird
or
click here to return to the table of contents
to view the rest of the bonus books!