Rating: PG, with minimal discussion of torture, rape, attempted murder, etc. Damn DiMeras.

Disclaimer: Sami, John, and their family all belong to NBC and Ken Corday. The story itself is my own creation.

Companion Fic: Dream Deferred is a Lucas/Allie fic; this is a Sami/Johnny fic to go along with it.

Note: This fic was written prior to John's 2007 brainwashing/resurrection, but after his "death" which led to the brainwashing on the show (and after Sami was forced to marry EJ to "save her family"). This was also written prior to the inane "John is a Brady/DiMera" reveal, but I doubt that many of you will feel the loss of that little gem.

Please forgive my lack of knowledge of Italian geography.

Warning: Some pretty extreme father/daughter sappiness. :)

The irony of it all was that Stefano really was dying. His skin had taken on a grayish-yellow tinge that was horrible to behold. Sami couldn't count the number of machines that were doing the things his body could not do for itself, even with the aid of the organs the DiMeras had stolen from John and Benjy. He never left his room, but EJ and the baby spent long hours locked in there with him, so he was more than content with the situation.

Sami wasn't content at all.

She peeked around the entryway to Stefano's sickroom. Other than protecting her son, spying was the most important task of each day. Knowledge was power, and she had far too little power.

Stefano's breathing was shallow and erratic in spite of the oxygen mask one of the doctors had placed over his face. Stefano managed to wave the mask away without moving; he had a way of projecting a terrifying kind of authority regardless of whether he was capable of motion or speech.

"Elvis."

"Yes, Father?" EJ leaned forward in his wheelchair, every inch of his lanky body quivering in anticipation of Stefano's next request.

"It is time to bring him to me."

"Yes, Father."

Sami scampered away from the door and rushed to the nursery as quietly as she could. The nice thing about EJ and Stefano's respective medical conditions was that snooping and eavesdropping were greatly simplified. She could get from Stefano's sickroom to the nursery in the time it took EJ to turn his overly complicated wheelchair around.

The baby was still sleeping peacefully in his crib. Sami's mind ran through a myriad of excuses as she placed herself protectively beside it. The baby couldn't sit with Stefano because he had a cold. He might make Stefano sick. Stefano might make him sick. The baby hadn't slept last night; he needed his rest now. She didn't know where the baby was, and it wasn't worth looking, since Stefano would probably die before they found the baby, anyway.

This last sounded ridiculous even to her, but nonetheless she eyed the closet speculatively. Sometimes the craziest ideas were the ones that worked.

Presently, EJ wheeled into the nursery. It was too late to go with any plan that required hiding her son.

"Give me the baby," EJ commanded. "Please," he added as an afterthought.

"I don't think that's such a good idea," Sami began, shaking her head. "I think he has a low fever. You never know what he could give to you, and you could give to your father, and in his condition it might be dangerous."

EJ laughed his usual fake laugh. "You'll have to do better than that, Samantha. I'm shocked that you didn't do better—you had, what, forty-five seconds while you were running up here to pretend you weren't eavesdropping on Father and me?"

Sami kept her face stony and unmoving. If she didn't confirm that EJ had guessed her whereabouts correctly, that was almost as good as not having had him guess at all.

"Give me the baby," EJ repeated.

"Your father's health—"

"He'll chance it."

She evaluated her options. EJ was still semi-paralyzed from the waist down and he couldn't overpower her. But the house was swimming with armed guards who could. She had nowhere to run, especially not if she was carrying a six-month-old child.

When she had entered this farce of a marriage, she had hoped that she would be able to protect herself, and her baby, by manipulating EJ's feelings for her. That had not been the case. Whatever her husband's feelings for her might be, his feelings for Stefano were stronger.

"If he goes, I go."

"Fine. Come." EJ turned his wheelchair around once more without even looking to see that she was following. He knew, as she knew, that she had no leverage. She was a prisoner and had all of a prisoner's rights and privileges.

She lifted her son into her arms. He awoke, but made no sound other than a contented burble at being close to his mother. He was such a beautiful, innocent child, for all that he had been conceived in rape. He didn't deserve to be delivered like a meal ordered in a restaurant to the man who had tortured his family for generations.

As she did each time she walked through the house, Sami kept alert for possible escape routes. Every window was barred; every door was alarmed; every shadow, inside and out, concealed another member of Stefano's private militia.

"Don't look so sullen, darling," said EJ as he rolled down the hall in front of her. "All of this was your choice."

"I fell asleep in your hospital room in Salem, and when I woke up I was on a plane to Italy and feeling like I'd been drugged."

"You knew when you agreed to marry me that we'd live in Italy."

"I thought that was negotiable."

"I can't imagine why."

"You didn't even let me say goodbye!"

This time, he craned his neck to look at her over the back of his chair. "That was hardly my fault. I'd been lying in a hospital bed, unable to move, since we said our vows. How could I control to whom you spoke?"

"By having me drugged! By paying someone to take everything I own out of Lucas' and my apartment and flying it to Italy!"

"That part was rather thoughtful, wasn't it? You could hardly expect your ex-husband to want to store all of your belongings indefinitely."

Sami's angry retort was cut off when one of Stefano's doctors emerged from his room and took the baby from her arms. The baby smiled and cooed at Stefano, oblivious to the fact that he was smiling at a man who had destroyed hundreds of lives.

"Santo," Stefano crooned at the baby through the oxygen mask someone had replaced since Sami had last seen him. "You were right to change his name, Elvis, this suits him much better than Gianni, Giovanni, whatever it was."

Sami glared at EJ, who lowered his head and didn't respond to his father. This was the one topic that triggered his virtually non-existent sense of shame. Sami had named her son for her stepfather, whose death was the most recent of many brought about by Stefano. But where Stefano's wish was law, Johnny had become Gianni had become Santo.

EJ usually avoided the topic by merely calling his son "the baby." Sami had fallen into the habit as well, in the hopes that her supposed acquiescence on this matter would lull her captors into a false sense of security.

"Why have you brought Santo here, Elvis? Not that I am not always most happy to see him."

"You asked me to, Father," EJ answered with real concern.

"I did no such—when?"

"Just now. You said 'it is time to bring him to me' not five minutes ago."

A look of disdain crossed Stefano's sickly features. "You idiot," he breathed. Then, almost lovingly, he clarified. "I did not mean Santo. I meant my mercenary, my pawn. You must bring me John Black, one more time, that I may remind him of my final checkmate."

EJ hastily scooped the baby into his arms and passed him off to Sami. "Take him back to the nursery. Now." His attention switched to the doctors. "My father is hallucinating—John Black has been dead for six months. Please check his vital signs and adjust his medications. It is very important that he remain comfortable, but lucid." The doctors flew into a frenzy, and EJ stared once again at Sami. "Return to the nursery. GUARD!"

The guard walked with Sami to the nursery, where she was left alone but for her small son and the surveillance cameras that watched their every move.

The baby, more compliant than Will had ever been, returned instantly to sleep. Sometimes Sami wondered if the baby felt that he had to be strong for her, and if that was why it was so rare for him to fuss.

Sami slipped into her own room, which adjoined the nursery. She had never unpacked the boxes of possessions they had brought from Salem. Unpacking would have meant conceding that this was her home and she expected to stay here long enough to want her belongings.

Now, though, she rummaged robotically through one box after another. Clothes, shoes, books, photographs, bedding, CDs, and DVDs passed unnoticed under her fingers. At last, she found a small gift box. The lightweight cardboard was faded with age, but showed the signs of careful preservation nonetheless.

Sami lifted the top from the box and gasped at its contents, although she'd known what she would see, and had even sought it out. The hairbrush lay where it had lain for many years. The bristles were pristine, for they had never been dragged through hair, but the handle was well-tarnished. The tarnish was aesthetically pleasing, in a way; the brush was a bit gaudy. While expensive, it was the kind of brush that would appeal to a child. It was the kind of brush that would prompt a little girl to say "Daddy, can I have one?" every day for weeks on end, forcing her ordinarily doting father to create ever more ways to say "when you're older."

She pulled the brush into her trembling hands. "Stefano wasn't delusional, was he?" she asked it. "He just didn't know I was listening."

A rare, startled scream from the baby ripped through the air. Sami stormed back into his room, dropping the brush into the box and the box into the back of the baby's stroller, where it could remain concealed, as she went.

The baby was crying hard in EJ's lap. "What are you doing?" Sami snapped.

"I'm taking my son to visit with his grandfather, now that Father has been put to rights. You will not accompany us."

Sami ignored his command and once again walked to the sickroom in the chair's wake. This time, the door closed firmly in her face. As it closed, Sami made a decision.

She screamed at the guards and stomped her foot for good measure before rushing from the area in a rage.

She yelled at each guard she passed; she jerked her head from side to side; she pounded the floor with each step. Once in a while, she would reach out and shove something breakable from the table to the floor.

If she was going to be watched in any case—and what the guards didn't see, the cameras did—she was going to make it seem that she was hiding nothing. They would think her tour of every corner of the house was a moving protest against being kept from her son, not a search for locations where a prisoner might be kept.

It wasn't hard for Sami to keep up her screaming and flailing. It even felt good to vent; her fury was real. Her younger son was sequestered with Stefano. She hadn't seen her older son for six long months. And she couldn't swear that she would even recognize her daughter, from whom she had been separate for most of the little girl's life. She didn't even know what Lucas had named their youngest child.

Then there was the matter of John. If Stefano had faked her stepfather's death to torture her family yet again…

Sami shrieked.

One of the guards snickered.

By the time Sami returned to the nursery, her throat was sore and jolts of pain were running up her legs. But she knew there was a hidden door behind the tapestry in the large room that faced west. She knew that the house had a basement even though she saw no staircase leading there. And she knew that there was a false wall in Stefano's bedroom that concealed something.

She hadn't been sitting in the rocking chair long, sipping water to cool her ravaged throat, when the sound of wheels announced EJ's return.

"Well, darling," he drawled with condescending brightness. "I heard you had quite the time while my father and I were watching the baby."

"He's my child, and you have no right to keep me from him!" Sami snapped.

"He's my child, too. And I think that Father and I may have to spend more time alone with him from now on, if this is the reaction I'll get. I do love seeing you fired up." He wheeled closer to Sami. "Your eyes bright, your cheeks flushed, your hair wild. Is your blood pounding like mine is?"

"You disgust me," Sami told him. Her stomach turned with the memory of the rape that had resulted in the beautiful child who lay in the crib beside them.

EJ, like the guard, only laughed.

Despite EJ's promise to outrage Sami more regularly, it was two weeks before Sami had another chance to explore her prison properly. Even then, the opportunity came not through EJ but through an act of nature—perhaps even an act of God.

The baby had been cranky all day, and Sami didn't blame him. She felt even more stressed than usual herself. She thought that her captors seemed to be slightly on edge, too. Perhaps they were all reduced to the animal instinct of sensing the storm, though Sami supposed that all except the baby could have foretold the storm just as well by looking out the window at the heavy gray clouds.

The rain started all at once. One instant, the air was quietly thick with tension. In the blink of an eye, the roar of rain thumping on the roof, the windows, and the ground consumed the house.

The baby began to cry.

Sami swept him into her arms and walked him back and forth, forth and back. EJ appeared to ask if anything outside the obvious was the matter, and what he could do to help.

"You could let us get back to his brother and sister," Sami hissed, trying to temper the venom of her words less she upset the baby more.

EJ laughed fakely. "If you'd prefer to have Will and your daughter taken from Lucas, that can be arranged, but not tonight. The baby obviously needs something now. What say you take a break and I'll roll him about in my wheelchair for a while? He may find it comforting."

"No one could ever find anything about you comforting."

She had to admit, though, that EJ had had a decent idea. Marlena had once told Sami that during Sami's infancy, the two of them had often gone on long drives together because that was the only thing that would calm Sami when she was upset in the night. During these times, Marlena had told Sami all about her hopes and dreams for Sami's future.

Sami was fairly certain that Marlena had never once hoped for this. She might have had a nightmare or two about it, though.

In lieu of EJ's wheelchair, Sami pulled the baby carriage from the nursery and placed the baby inside it. To her mingled relief and disgust, the baby began to settle after she had walked one circuit of the inside of the house. Each time she slowed or stopped, his wails began afresh and mingled with the roaring rain outside. So she continued to walk around and around, pushing the carriage before her, listening to the rain, and noticing once more each spot she thought might conceal a hidden room or an escape route.

She and the baby had been at this for the better part of an hour when the thunder began. The baby was no more disturbed by the rumbling than by the rain, but Sami was more than a little unnerved as the flashes of lightening and claps of thunder came ever closer together.

When they coincided completely, there was a horrible sizzling noise and the lights went out. Sami stopped in mid-stride, expecting a generator or backup generator or something to kick in and restore electrical power. Stefano DiMera was not likely to let the weather get in the way of his comfort, and most especially not when he depended upon electricity-powered machines.

The electricity didn't return.

And Sami was in the room with the tapestry.

If the lights weren't on, the cameras weren't running.

Even if the cameras were running, what could they see in the darkness?

She pushed the baby's carriage close to the wall and pulled back the tapestry to reveal the door. There were noises behind it. She and the baby had a fellow prisoner; of that there was no doubt.

Going on the assumption that the enemy's enemy was her friend, Sami slid back the deadbolts and opened the door.

There, before her, considerably more alive than she had been led to believe, was John Black.

"Good, Samantha, I thought you knew I was here," he said.

Sami proved him wrong by passing out.

She regained consciousness almost instantly, brought back as much by the baby's terrified cries as by John's insistent entreaties and the light slaps of his hands on her face.

"Come on, Sami, get it together," he growled, though not unkindly. "Act like someone taught you how to handle this kind of thing."

The one who had taught her to handle this kind of thing was, of course, John. The lessons hadn't taken particularly well. Sami had once told Lucas that she was good at creating drama, but she wasn't good at handling it. She'd rarely been so honest with him or herself.

But even if Sami didn't always stay cool and collected in the face of trauma after shock after ordeal, she did have decent maternal instincts. She struggled to her feet and lurched toward her son. He calmed slightly at her touch, but his wails didn't stop.

"Is he all right?" John prompted, looking frantically to one side and then the other. No guards had come running, at least not yet. The shouts from the direction of Stefano's sickroom let Sami and John know that most of the household was engaged elsewhere.

"He just doesn't like the storm," Sami told John.

"He may not, but it couldn't come soon enough for me." John took two long strides toward the front of the house before turning to glare at Sami. "Well? Do you want to stay here?"

Almost more of a shock than the revelation that John was alive was the revelation that John expected them to leave. For months, Sami had done nothing but wonder how she and the baby might escape. Now that the moment was at hand, she had a bizarre inclination to argue.

Just as John made a motion to grab Sami and the baby and force them bodily from the house, something snapped into place in Sami's mind. She put one hand on the carriage and pushed it firmly in John's direction. The motion returned the baby to silence at once.

John gestured for Sami to stay back as he rounded the corner, then beckoned her forward. "There might be a secret door in Stefano's room," Sami whispered.

"I think the front door will work fine for us, don't you?" he whispered back as they huddled in the shadows.

"Even if the guards aren't watching anything else, they're watching that!" Sami protested.

John raised an eyebrow; the sight made Sami's throat close up and her vision grow misty. She willed herself to get a grip. Her son was counting on her. Back in Salem, her family was counting on her to make sure John got back to them safely. "You're probably right. I'll go first. If anything happens, either run like hell in the other direction or wait for another opportunity. But get yourself and your son out safe. Don't worry about me."

Sami shook her head. "Let us go first. They won't do anything to hurt the baby or me. That's not what EJ wants."

"EJ isn't calling the shots. If he thinks he is, he's deluding himself. That old man will never give up the power, not even if he really does die some day."

Sami started to say that some day might be today, but stopped herself. When you said it out loud, nothing ever sounded quite as ridiculous as claiming that Stefano DiMera was mortal.

John took advantage of her hesitation to stroll out the front door. Sami was left with no option but holding her breath. When it seemed clear that there would be no explosion or cry of pain, she lifted her son into her arms with shaking hands and a pounding heart.

Her knee slammed into something protruding from the back of the carriage; instantly, she remembered the day weeks before when she'd hidden the still-boxed hairbrush there lest EJ realize it had some special meaning to her. Without realizing what she was doing, she clutched it in her free hand as she made for the door.

A roaring filled her ears as she dashed across the threshold. The baby screamed; Sami screamed, too. She nearly tumbled to the ground.

"It's rain, sweetheart," her own voice assured the baby with more calm than she felt. "It's rain." Not a bullet, a mercenary, or some crazy biological warfare masterminded by Dr. Rolf, but rain.

Her feet slid in all directions as she launched herself ahead. She couldn't see anything through the pounding rain, but whatever was in front of her couldn't be worse than what was behind her.

"JOHN?" she screamed into the void.

"SAMANTHA, HERE!" came the answering shout, like they were playing a perverted version of Marco Polo.

That was when the deafening sound of a gun without a silencer cut over the roar of the rain.

Sami fell to the ground, startled but unhurt. "Sweetie, sweetie, you're okay?" she managed. The baby was screaming, but not with pain. It was about as much reassurance as she could hope for under the circumstances.

"SAMANTHA, GO FORWARD AS FAR AS YOU CAN!"

She crept forward. A flash of lightening gave her a quick glimpse of her surroundings. The world went dark again, then bright again, then dark again. Somehow, the brief moments of illumination made the world more confusing instead of less. She saw a tree and reached for it twice, three times before she was able to touch it. It seemed to move between flashes; closing her eyes might have made things easier.

Further gunshots did not make things easier. She sensed that one had come far too close, and that was what convinced her to resume her headlong sprint until suddenly she was ankle deep in water.

She tightened her grip on the baby, whose cries continued.

"John?" she asked shakily, not able to find enough of her voice to yell.

"Here." He was close enough that yelling wasn't necessary. "Into the boat."

"How did you get a boat?" she asked breathlessly, wincing a bit as she splashed into the what was more or less a rowboat.

"We're on an island. They have boats." With a grunt, John shoved them into the choppy water.

The next flicker of lightening seemed a little dimmer and a little longer than the others. Sami was able to make out John's face, and, to her horror, a dark stain on his left sleeve. One of the bullets had hit its mark.

"Oh God," she whispered.

"What?" Oars had materialized from somewhere, and the boat was putting distance between the trio and their prison with impressive swiftness. "Are you all right? And the baby?"

"We're fine. But your arm…"

"Yeah, a little bit of a graze. No big deal."

"It's always a big deal when you get shot. I know, I've been shot. And you spent six months in a coma because that bastard EJ—"

Her voice rang out over the storm until it was broken off by John's laugh. "Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I love it when you get outraged on my behalf. It reminds me of when you were a little girl and you couldn't stand it when someone looked at me funny, let alone raised his voice to me."

Sami decided that this was not the time for sentimental reminiscing. "Let me row or something," she commanded. "You're going to hurt your arm."

John brushed her off. "You make sure to hold onto that one." He nodded at the child in Sami's arms, who, seeming to realize that things were looking up despite all sensory evidence to the contrary, was at last quiet. "What's the kid's name, anyway? I never heard anyone call him anything but the baby."

The lump in Sami's throat made it almost impossible for her to answer. "Johnny," she managed in a hoarse whisper. "It's Johnny."

Tears spilled down her cheeks.

John lowered his head as he pulled hard on the oars, thrusting the boat forward, but that didn't hide the fact that tears were falling in his lap, too.

An odd conglomeration of bridges, rivers, and buildings half-lit by flickering lights swam into view through the fog and rain quite unexpectedly.

"It's beautiful," said Sami in surprise, and she even turned Johnny's face from her shoulder so he could see, too. "Look, honey, it's gorgeous. It looks like— John, are we in Venice?" For the umpteenth time that day, the world seemed to tilt unexpectedly on its axis. All the time she'd been trapped in EJ and Stefano's prison, she had never expected that she was so near something that was a part of the real world. She had always hoped to travel to Venice—amongst myriad other places—with Lucas.

"That would be my guess, too. Sorry the two of you didn't get better weather for your first gondola ride."

"The gondolier more than makes up for it," she assured him. She saw a flash of pain in his eyes as they exchanged a small smile, and her panic returned tenfold. "You're still hurt! We have to call for the police, for a doctor, for—"

"We have no idea who's on DiMera's payroll," John interrupted. "We'll hope phone service isn't out and try to contact the ISA, see if they can send someone safe to help us out. Brady's in Vienna, Carrie's in Switzerland—there's someone on this side of the Atlantic to wire money if nothing else."

They were deep into the famous canals by now, and through the mist Sami spotted what looked like it might be a public telephone. "Good eye, Samantha Gene," John congratulated.

Noticing the phone was simple; getting to it was a sweaty, slimy, slippery, raw mess that involved Sami nearly tumbling into the canal as she climbed out of their battered wooden boat carrying both Johnny and the box. She looked around anxiously as John dialed what seemed like a hundred numbers. No one was paying them any mind; most everyone seemed to have the sense to stay inside during a rainstorm so intense it seemed almost apocalyptic. For all Sami could see, she, John, and Johnny were the only living creatures in all of Venice.

"Sami!" John snapped, and she realized that her mind had wandered. "See if you can find anything that looks like a landmark or an address."

She was loathe to stray more than a few feet from John, lest he disappear (or she fall into the canal with no one to pull her out), but she obeyed, shivering from both fear and wetness as she did. The first few signs she saw were meaningless to her. She spoke little Italian; most of what she did know had been taught to her by Franco Kelly, whom she would just as soon forget. More recently had learned a few words from reading the letters written by Colleen Brady and Santo DiMera, but the results of that experience had hardly been more pleasant than her year on death row.

At last, she found something meaningful. She rushed back to John. "Sant'Elena," she managed.

"Sant'Elena," John repeated into the phone. "Yes… no. Yes… all right. I can't see the bridge, from here, I can barely see the hand in front of my face, but I'll believe you if you say… thanks, you're a miracle worker."

"TELL THE MIRACLE WORKER YOU NEED A DOCTOR!" Sami shouted, hoping her voice would carry to the other end of the line.

"That was not necessary," John reprimanded as he hung up.

"Was too," said Sami, because sometimes being stranded in a strange city in the middle of the night in a rainstorm of epic proportions with no one but her infant son and the man who had raised her made her feel about four years old.

That earned her another raised eyebrow. "Just when I was afraid you might have matured."

Sami smiled as charmingly as she could with her hair plastered to her raw, suddenly weather-beaten face. "No worries."

John ran one finger down the side of her face. "With a smile like that, no one could ever believe you get into so much trouble. My four other kids between them don't—"

"Wasn't there a bridge we were supposed to be looking for?" Sami interrupted. "I'd rather my son didn't drown out here." Her change of subject was perhaps rude, but she wasn't in the mood to hear about how Carrie never got herself married to a DiMera, and Belle never had a baby by one, and Brady didn't think he could end the whole feud by himself, and Eric had never been held prisoner on some Italian island. In fact, she didn't think she'd ever be in the mood to hear that.

She found herself half-tempted to announce to John that Belle had taken Philip to her bed days before she'd married Shawn-Douglas, just to prove that she wasn't the only one in the family who ever screwed up, but she bit her tongue and followed John down a path that looked much like every other.

Short minutes later, though, a brightly lit building rose before them and someone was holding a massive, colorful umbrella over her head. "Welcome to the Hotel Costa," he said in English, and Sami was too tired to wince even though his accent sounded just like Franco's. "You asked to have a doctor standing by?"

"It's nothing."

"He was shot. Look at his arm." Sami tried to raise her own arm to point, but every nerve and muscle was suddenly determined to disobey her now that they were out of the rain and away from their captors. She nearly lost her grip on Johnny, and she did drop the box, not that she cared any longer. Her mind was fuzzy and she didn't remember why it had mattered.

A uniformed concierge noticed her precarious grip on her child and held out her arms, mentioning something about in-room daycare in heavily accented English. As quickly as Sami's strength had left her, it returned. "My son stays with me!" she told them all firmly. No one offered any argument; instead, she and John were led to an ornately mirrored elevator (not that she wanted to see her refection at the moment, and certainly not from fourteen angles) and then down a corridor to a pair of rooms before which stood a pair of guards.

The doctors shooed her away from John immediately, and without argument she walked into her bathroom with Johnny—carefully leaving the door open lest there be any signs of a struggle to overhear.

She ached for a shower and her bed, but Johnny had to come first. Despite her best efforts, he was soaked to the skin; there had been no avoiding it. She divested him of his sodden garments and filled the basin of the sink with warm water so she could bathe him properly. To her relief, someone had thought to send up dry diapers and a soft baby blanket. She'd get new clothes for her son the next day, by which time she hoped the rain would have stopped. Already it seemed like she couldn't remember a time when it hadn't been raining.

Once Johnny was clean and dry and remarkably content—try as she might, Sami could find nothing wrong with him—Sami set about making herself clean and dry as well. For what seemed like the millionth time that day, tears threatened to close off her throat as she pulled on a white terry bathrobe provided by the hotel. The last time she'd worn a robe like this, she'd been with Lucas. She had no way of knowing what Lucas thought of her now. That he still loved her seemed too much to hope for; that he liked and respected her, and had told their daughter about her was a more reasonable wish.

She lifted Johnny, who was safely asleep, into her aching arms and went in search of John or a phone. She was too tired to wonder what time it was in Salem, but she didn't care. She was going to call Lucas regardless of whether she woke him.

She found John and the phone in the same place. "It's not working," he told her before she could ask. "Something to do with the storm. It's going to be a while before we can get through to Salem."

Sami made a face as she laid Johnny in the crib and let herself collapse to the nearest bed. "Are you sure it's the storm? You don't think they're just holding us here so they can bring us back to that place?"

"I'd be lying if I said that thought never crossed my mind, but I think it's the storm," John confirmed. He was eying Sami oddly, but Sami was hard-pressed to care. Her eyes were already closing.

"What?" she demanded. All right, so it didn't matter if she was mostly asleep. She always cared when someone looked at her strangely.

"They brought up some food along with the crib and diapers and stuff for the baby."

Sami nodded. "I saw."

"They also brought up a box you apparently dropped in the lobby." He pointed to a table on which sat the hairbrush, removed from the box, which was drying out beside it.

"Well, I dragged it all this way. It was nice of them to pick it up," she said with forced levity. "I'll have to leave a tip. Except I don't have any money or any way of getting any."

"It's been taken care of."

Of course it had.

"How's your arm?" Sami asked, hoping that that would distract John from the subject of the brush.

"The doctor agrees with me that everything was fine and you were overreacting."

Sami considered. "I really doubt the doctor said that getting checked out after getting shot is overreacting."

John didn't argue. Instead, he did something much worse. He picked up the brush and tossed it from one hand to the other. "You never even took it out of the box?"

"I took it out of the box a few times. Do you think the hotel could send up some rice cereal? Johnny's starting to try a few spoonfuls once in a while."

"Already done. I thought he was the right age for that. You may have taken it out of the box, but you never used it. You begged me for that brush every day for most of a year."

"And every day you told me I wasn't old enough." Sami fussed with Johnny's blanket, half-hoping that her son would wake up and require her attention.

"I thought getting it would make you happy."

Sami turned and glared at John. "You gave it to me the first Christmas that you weren't my father because you didn't have to worry about spoiling me if you weren't my father. Don't you think I would rather have had you?"

To his credit, he looked properly chastised. "Well, that wasn't really an option for any of us."

"I know. I get that now. But I didn't then." She went back to fidgeting with Johnny's blanket. "When you're a kid, you don't get to decide anything for yourself. Sometimes everything starts seeming really random. No, you can't have cookies for dinner. No, you can't stay home from school. No, you can't have that hairbrush. No, you can't live with the only parent you've ever known anymore. Looking at that brush made me feel awful."

"That was the hardest thing I ever had to do, letting you and Eric go. But I knew your mother would take care of you and I knew I didn't have an icicle's chance in hell of winning any kind of custody battle. I had no identity, no income, nothing. I wasn't going to put you and Eric in the middle of a fight that could only end one way. But every second that I didn't fight, it killed me. It was the only choice I could make short of kidnapping the two of you—and believe me, I considered that."

"I know." Sami left off playing with Johnny's blanket and went to sit beside John. "I told you, I get it now. If Johnny or Will turned out not to be my child, I'd do anything to hang onto him. But on the other hand, if I go back to Salem and Lucas says 'our daughter doesn't even know you, she should stay with my new wife who raised her,' I'd do anything to get to her, too."

"I don't think you're going to have to worry about Lucas having a new wife or asking you not to see your daughter. Give him some credit."

"I give him a lot of credit, but I'm scared anyway. I don't even know my only daughter's name. EJ and Stefano had me out of the country before Lucas and I had a chance to decide."

"You don't need to know her name to love her. She doesn't care who named her, unless it was something awful. Lucas was saying something about calling her Lucasanna, wasn't he?"

Sami laughed; she'd forgotten that. "He wouldn't let me call her Jezebel, so I'm pretty sure he was kidding about Lucasanna."

"You wanted to call her Jezebel?"

"Why does everybody look at me like that when I bring that up? Queen. Strong woman. That's what I want for her." John did not look convinced. "At least everyone agreed that there was only one thing we could call Johnny. Everyone but the DiMeras, but they're out of the picture now.

"Thank you for that," said John quietly.

"I told you, before Stefano took you. You're my father, too. I couldn't say that for a lot of years, when I couldn't see it from your side and it just felt like you abandoned us because you got a better offer. But I can say it now."

"And you also know I don't love you any less than Belle or Brady, right?"

This time, Sami started to cry in earnest and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

The suite in the hotel had three rooms, but Sami fell asleep in the same room as John, and when she woke up a few hours later, it was to John's voice. He was sitting on his bed, talking quietly into the phone. Sami could tell by his tone that Marlena was on the other end of the line.

"Is that Mom?" she asked unnecessarily. She jumped from her bed to his, planting herself close to his side so she could hear her mother's voice. Obligingly, John held the phone between them so they could both hear.

"Mom?" Sami repeated.

"Sami! Oh, sweet girl, it's so good to hear your voice."

"You, too, Mom."

"Are you really all right? And John? And your little boy?"

"We're all good. We can't wait to come home and see you."

"I can't wait to see you, either. But right now, I have someone who needs to say hello before you get on the first plane back to Salem."

Sami waited for a long second, expecting to hear Belle's voice, or maybe Roman's. Who else would be waiting with Marlena?

"Sami?"

"Lucas!" In her shock, she started saying a million things at once, and so did he. She quieted before he did, though, because what he was saying demanded her full attention. "We found the person who fixed the tests. Johnny is my son, it's been proven three times now, and that should be enough for anyone."

Sami's heart pounded in her ears. The news was almost too good to accept. "And my little girl? How is she?"

There was a pause, which gave Sami more than enough time to panic. "What happened to my daughter?"

"Nothing, nothing happened. Allie's fine. She's wonderful. Perfect, even. She just misses her mommy and her twin brother."

"Allie?" she murmured.

"Alice Caroline. I—well, I didn't know if I was ever going to see you again, and I had to call her something. It wasn't like I wanted to name her without you."

"I love the name, Lucas, and I love you."

"Love you, too."

"Three of the best words in the English language."

"Three of the best? I don't think there are any that are even close."

Sami smiled. "See you this afternoon."

She heard Lucas' breath catch on the other side of the ocean. "You're right," he admitted. "That's just as good."

The End