Chapter 10 - Blood and Fire
The guard’s fingers dug into the fabric of my coat, but Adam hit him like an uncoupled freight train.
Adam’s shoulder drove directly into the guard’s solar plexus, lifting the two-hundred-pound man off his feet and slamming him into the cedar playhouse with an impact that shattered two of the leaded-glass windows. The guard’s pistol flew from his holster, skittering across the crushed stone path and landing five feet away in the boxwood hedge.
"Adam, no!" I screamed, catching Clara as she stumbled backward on the steps, her balance thrown off by the shuddering impact of the wall behind her.
The second guard was already drawing his weapon, his face set in a cold, bureaucratic mask of lethal intent. "Back off! Step back from the principal or I will fire!"
"Don't shoot!" Helena Sterling’s voice cracked into a high, hysterical screech from the terrace. She was running toward us now, her velvet slippers kicking up wet clumps of turf, her cashmere robe flapping open to reveal her thin, manicured throat. "Not in front of the house! You idiot, Vance is on his way from the airstrip! If you discharge a firearm here, the FAA will log the incident!"
*Airstrip.*
The word hung in the humid morning air like sulfur.
The second guard hesitated, his pistol leveled at Adam’s chest, his eyes darting toward the winding lane behind us.
In the distance, past the horse paddocks and the manicured tree line, the high-pitched, twin-turbine whine of a private helicopter rose above the hills. A Eurocopter EC135, dark blue with gold registration numbers along the tail boom, was descending rapidly toward the private helipad at the northern crest of the property.
"Get her in the car," Helena ordered the second guard, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps as she reached the bottom of the playhouse steps. She reached out with long, manicured nails to snatch Clara’s wrist. "Marcus, take Clara to the hangar! The flight plan is already filed! We leave for Zurich in twenty minutes!"
"Zurich?" I stood between Helena and the girl, my arms spread wide, my body an iron shield against the limestone steps. "You're fleeing the country? Because of a dying nurse? Because of what Sarah gave the police?"
Helena’s face twisted into an expression of aristocratic disgust, her lips pulling back over small, capped teeth.
"Sarah Miller was a morphine addict who couldn't keep her hand out of the dispensary safe," Helena hissed, her eyes darting toward the descending helicopter whose rotor wash was already flattening the tall grass of the paddocks two hundred yards away. "My father gave that woman fifty thousand dollars to keep her mouth shut after Kincaid restructured the delivery records! She lived seven years on our charity!"
"You didn't buy a baby for charity," Adam spat, his forearm pinned across the first guard’s throat against the broken cedar wall of the playhouse. He was bleeding from a cut above his eyebrow, a crimson trickle running into his stubble, but his eyes were blazing with a clarity I hadn't seen in seven years. "You bought my daughter because you couldn't stand the shame of your own baby dying while you were drunk behind the wheel of an Aston Martin!"
Helena went rigid.
The silence between them was louder than the screaming turbines of the approaching helicopter.
Sarah’s notebook had contained more than just transport manifests; it had contained the confidential toxicological reports from the night Helena Sterling was admitted to the VIP trauma bay at St. Jude.
*Blood alcohol content: .18. Positive for diazepam.*
Her own infant hadn't died from prematurity; it had died from massive placental abruption caused by Helena crashing her sports car into a concrete retaining wall on Route 29 at two in the morning on August 13.
"She is my daughter," Helena whispered. Her voice was no longer loud. It had turned into a terrifying, dead monotone. "My father paid three million dollars to clear that NICU floor. He built that research wing for Kincaid. Without my family's money, your other three brats would have suffocated in their incubators before the weekend was out. We saved your family, Mr. Holloway. We just took our commission."
"Mommy?" Clara’s small voice piped up from behind my hip.
She wasn't looking at Helena anymore. She was looking at the gold medical alert bracelet on her left wrist. With small, deliberate fingers, the seven-year-old girl pulled the safety clasp open.
The gold band, heavy with the Sterling family crest, dropped into the crushed limestone at my feet.
"Clara!" Helena gasped, reaching for the child’s arm. "Put that back on! That monitors your oxygen saturation!"
"My name isn't Clara," the girl said. Her slate-gray eyes were steady, fixed on the woman who had raised her in a gilded cage. "My name is June. The lady with my face said so."
Helena’s jaw dropped. The fragile veneer of her high-society composure shattered into a hundred jagged pieces.
"Take her!" she screamed at the second guard. "Marcus, grab her! Shoot the father if you have to, but get her to the chopper!"
Marcus stepped forward, his pistol coming up, his finger tightening on the trigger guard.
*BAM.*
The sound wasn't a gunshot. It was the catastrophic, metal-tearing crunch of a heavy vehicle demolishing the wooden paddock fence behind the garden.
Adam’s beat-up Ford F-250 didn't come down the paved driveway.
My brother-in-law, Ben, was behind the wheel.
The truck crashed through the cedar rails, throwing splintered white wood fifteen feet into the air, its four-wheel-drive tires digging deep ruts into the manicured emerald lawn as it roared toward the playhouse at forty miles an hour.
Beside him in the passenger seat, my mother Elaine was leaning out the window, a heavy metal tire iron gripped in both hands, screaming like a banshee over the roar of the V8 engine.
Marcus jumped backward to avoid the truck’s bumper as the Ford locked its brakes, sliding sideways across the crushed stone path, spraying a cloud of white dust and shredded grass that engulfed the entire courtyard in a blinding white fog.
"Rachel! Get in!" Ben bellowed, kicking the driver's door open while the truck was still rocking on its suspension.
"Grab her!" Helena was shrieking through the dust, her fingers clawing at the sleeve of my coat.
I didn't think. I scooped June up into my arms.
She weighed almost nothing—the weight of a shadow, the weight of seven years of missing prayers. Her arms wrapped around my neck instantly, her face burying itself into the hollow of my throat with an instinct older than memory, older than law, older than the Sterling millions.
Adam broke away from the guard he had pinned, lunging through the dust to grab the tailgate of the truck.
"Ben, go!" Adam roared, swinging his legs over the metal bed as the first guard scrambled to his feet, reaching for his weapon in the grass.
Helena lunged through the settling dust, her hands reaching for June’s ankles as I climbed into the cab.
"You can't take her!" Helena screamed, her manicured fingers catching the heel of June’s white knee-sock, tearing the fabric. "She has no legal identity! She doesn't exist on paper! You will be hunted by every federal marshal on the East Coast!"
I turned in the truck seat. With my free foot, I kicked the passenger door outward with every ounce of strength remaining in my body.
The heavy steel door slammed into Helena Sterling’s face with a wet, sickening crack.
She fell backward onto the crushed limestone, clutching her shattered nose, blood pouring through her fingers onto her pristine cashmere robe.
"She exists," I said through the open window as Ben slammed the transmission into reverse, the truck roaring backward over the destroyed flower beds. "Her name is June Holloway. And she’s going home to her birthday cake."
The truck spun around, its tires catching purchase on the gravel lane, rocketing away from the chateau toward the lower ridge.
Through the rear window, I watched the blue Eurocopter touch down on the private helipad behind the house.
A tall, silver-haired man in a bespoke gray suit stepped out from the rotor wash, flanked by four men carrying tactical cases. Vance Sterling looked down the hill toward our retreating truck, lifted a satellite phone to his ear, and spoke two words before the dust swallowed the ridge.
In my arms, June was trembling. Her small fingers reached up and touched the wet tears on my cheek.
"Mommy?" she whispered over the roar of the truck's engine.
"Yes, baby?"
"Is there really cake?"
I pulled her closer, my chin resting on the crown of her auburn head, my eyes burning as I looked at the road ahead.
We were twenty miles from home. The state police would be mobilized within five minutes. Vance Sterling owned the county judges, the highway patrol commanders, and the hospitals.
And then, Adam’s phone, lying on the dashboard, lit up with an incoming call from an unknown restricted number.
Adam hit speakerphone.
A man’s voice, cold, deep, and measured as a funeral toll, filled the cab of the truck:
"Mr. Holloway. You have twelve miles before the state troopers close the bridge on Route 29. Turn left at the abandoned quarry on Mile 14. If you want your four children to live through the night, you will leave June by the weigh station and walk away."
The line went dead.
May you like
June looked up from my chest, her gray eyes widening in sudden, terrible realization as she pointed through the windshield.
At the crest of the hill ahead of us, blocking both lanes of the narrow blacktop, three unmarked black SUVs had already formed a barricade across the asphalt, their high-beams cutting through the morning fog like twin swords of fire.
