shots drew all the attention to him. Bullets pinged off the brass handrail and shattered the smoky glass of the elevator car. The glass splintered and ricocheted like the bullets, biting into his skin like a swarm of bees.
His finger jerked off the button, and the doors began to close. But he couldn’t leave Josie and the child alone up here with no protection. Despite the other man’s warning, he had to play the hero. But it had been nearly four years since he’d been anything but the villain.
Had he gotten rusty? Would he be able to protect them? Or had his arrival put them in even more danger?
“THEY’RE ALL BAD men,” CJ said, his voice high and squeaky with fear and panic. “They’re bad! Bad!”
He was too young to have learned just how evil some people were. As his mother, Josie was supposed to protect him, but she’d endangered his life and his innocence. She had to do her best to keep her little boy a little boy until he had the time to grow into a man.
“Shh …” Josie cautioned him. “We need to be very quiet.”
“So they don’t find us?”
“First we have to find a hiding place.” Which wouldn’t be easy in a darkness so enveloping she could barely see the child she held tightly against her.
She had been able to see the shots—those brief flashes of gunpowder. She’d run from those flashes, desperate to keep her son safe. But now those shots were redirected toward Brendan, and running wouldn’t keep CJ safe since she couldn’t see where she was going. She moved quickly but carefully, testing her footing before she stepped forward.
“Are they shooting real bullets?” he asked.
To preserve that innocence she was afraid he was losing, she could have lied. But that lie could risk his life.
“They’re real,” she replied, aware that they’d come all too close to her and CJ. “That’s why we need to find a place to hide until the police come.”
Someone must have heard the shots and reported them by now. Help had to be on the way. Hopefully it would arrive in time to save her and her son. But what about Brendan? He had stepped into the middle of an attempted murder—a double homicide, actually. And he hadn’t done it accidentally. He had tracked her to the roof, maybe to kill her himself. But perhaps he’d be the one to lose his life, since the men were now entirely focused on him.
She shuddered, the thought chilling her nearly as much as the cold wind that whipped around the unprotected rooftop.
“Let’s go back there, Mommy,” CJ said, lifting his hand, which caught her attention only because she felt the movement more than saw it.
“Where?” she asked.
“Behind those big metal things.”
She peered in the direction he was pointing and finally noted the glint of some stray starlight off steel vents, probably exhaust pipes for the hospital’s heating or cooling system. If only they could escape inside them.
But she could barely move around them, let alone find a way inside them. The openings were too high above the rooftop, towering over her. As she tried to squeeze around them, her hip struck the metal. She winced and swallowed a groan of pain. And hoped the men hadn’t heard the telltale metallic clink.
“Shh, Mommy,” CJ cautioned her. “We don’t want the bad men to hear us.”
“No, we don’t,” she agreed.
“They might find our hiding place.”
“I’m not sure we can hide here,” she whispered. She couldn’t wedge them both between the massive pipes. The metal caught at her clothes and scraped her arms. “We can’t fit.”
“Let me try,” he suggested. Before she could agree, he wriggled down from her arms and squeezed through the small space.
She reached through the blackness, trying to clutch at him, trying to pull him back. What if he’d fallen right off the building?
She had no idea how much space was on the other side of the pipes. A tiny ledge? None?
A scream burned in her throat, but she was too scared to utter it—too horrified that in trying to protect her son she may have lost him forever.
But then chubby fingers caught hers. He tugged on her hand. “Come on, Mommy. There’s room.”
“You’re not at the edge of the roof?” she asked, worried that he might be in more danger where he was.
“Nooo,” he murmured, his voice sounding as if he’d turned away from her. “There’s a little wall right behind me.”
“Don’t go over that wall,” she advised. It was probably the edge of the roof, a small ledge to separate the rooftop from the ground far below. A curious little boy might want to figure out what was on the other side of that wall.
“Okay, Mommy,” he murmured again, his voice still muffled. Was he trying to peer over the side?
She needed to get to him, needed to protect him, from the men and from himself. She turned sideways and pushed herself against the space where CJ had so effortlessly disappeared. But her breasts and hips—curves she’d barely had until her pregnancy with him—caught. She sucked in her stomach, but it made no difference. She couldn’t suck in her breasts or hips. “I can’t fit.”
CJ tugged harder on her hand. “C’mon, Mommy, it’s a good hiding place.”
“No, honey,” she corrected him, her pulse tripping with fear that he’d go over the wall, “you need to come back out. We’ll find another one.”
But then she heard it. She tilted her head and listened harder. And still it was all she heard: silence. The shooting had stopped.
What did that mean?
Was Brendan dead? Were the men? Whoever had survived would be searching for her next—for her and her son. The silence broke, shattered by the scrape of a shoe against the asphalt roofing.
She sucked in a breath now—of fear. But it didn’t make it any easier for her to squeeze through the small space. And maybe pulling CJ out wasn’t the best idea, not when he was safe from the men.
She dropped his fingers. “You stay here,” she said. “In the best hiding place.”
“I wanna hide with you.”
“I’ll find a bigger hiding place,” she said. “You need to stay here and play statue for me.”
She had played the game as a kid when she’d pretended to be a statue, completely still and silent. On those mornings that CJ had woken her up at five, she’d taught him to play statue so she could sleep just a little longer. Now acting lifeless was perhaps the only way for CJ to stay alive.
The footfalls grew louder as someone drew closer. She had to get out of here, had to distract whoever it was from CJ’s hiding place. But first she had to utter one more warning. “Don’t come out for anyone but me.”
Her
