Chapter 8
"No!"
I shoved away from the table, my scrub top tangled, pure terror flooding my veins. Julian caught my wrist, his face turning grim.
"It's a trap, Mia. They want you up there."
"They're killing my sister, Julian! I don't care if it's a trap!"
Julian grabbed his weapon, racking the slide. "Then we don't sneak in. We hit them hard."
We took the service elevator straight to the fourth floor. The corridor was unnervingly empty, the usual ambient chime of monitors replaced by an eerie, suffocating silence. The floor nurse station was abandoned.
At the end of the hall, Room 402’s door stood wide open.
I sprinted inside.
A man dressed in sterile surgical scrubs was standing over Sophia’s bed. The ventilator tubing had been disconnected from her tracheostomy, dangling uselessly toward the floor. In his gloved right hand, the intruder held a pre-filled syringe of potassium chloride, poised three inches above Sophia's central line port.
Sophia's face was turning a horrifying shade of mottled gray, her chest still.
"Stop!" I screamed.
The intruder whirled around, brandishing a scalpel in his other hand.
Julian cleared the doorway like a thunderbolt, tackling the assassin into the medical supply cart. Trays, syringes, and glass vials shattered across the floor in a cacophony of screeching metal.
I ignored the fight entirely. My nurse training took over on pure instinct.
I grabbed the ambu-bag from the wall, slammed the mask over Sophia’s airway, and began manually squeezing air into her lungs.
*One. Squeeze. Two. Squeeze.*
"Breathe, Sophia! Come on, baby, breathe!"
Beside me, the assassin fought with lethal precision, slashing Julian’s forearm with the scalpel. But Julian’s fury was overwhelming. He pinned the man against the wall, disarmed him with a sickening crunch of wrist bones, and slammed his head into the telemetry bracket.
The assassin slumped to the floor, unconscious.
Julian snatched the discarded syringe off the floor, panting heavily, blood dripping from his cut arm. "Is she breathing?"
"Her pulse is back," I sobbed, reconnecting the main ventilator tube to Sophia’s port. The machine hissed to life, its digital screen confirming twenty breaths per minute. Her color began to return. "She's stable. She's back."
Julian bent over the unconscious attacker, ripping off the surgical mask.
It was Dr. Martinez’s personal scrub technician.
Around the technician's neck hung a golden lanyard badge belonging to Dr. Martinez himself. Tucked into his pocket was an envelope marked with the Vance corporate seal.
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"The keynote speech starts in twenty minutes," Julian said, his eyes turning to ice. "Martinez is in the auditorium right now, presenting this trial to the world press. It's time to end this."
***
