Chapter 8
The barrel of the automatic pistol shifted from Emma to Mark in a heartbeat.
"Dad!" Mark screamed, ducking his head over newborn Noah, shielding the baby with his shoulders as he curled into a ball on the floor. "Don't! Dad, please!"
"Give me the boy," Richard commanded, his voice dead, flat, and completely devoid of humanity. "Hand him to me right now, or you won't live to see the indictment, Mark."
"Richard, stop!" Denise cried out, scrambling across the floor on her hands and knees, grabbing her husband’s trousers. "That is your son! That is your own flesh and blood!"
"He’s a liability!" Richard snarled, kicking Denise’s hands away with the heel of his dress shoe. "He just confessed to federal sabotage on an open court line! He’s dead weight!"
"And what are you, Richard?" Emma’s voice cut through the shouting like a blast of freezing wind.
While Richard’s back had been turned toward his son, Emma had moved.
Ignoring the blinding, searing agony tearing through her lower abdomen, she had swung her legs over the edge of the hospital bed. Her bare feet touched the cold linoleum. Her hospital gown was spattered with faint drops of blood where her incision had begun to seep, but her posture was upright, rigid, and terrifyingly imposing.
In her right hand, she held the heavy stainless-steel IV pole, its weighted base hovering two inches above the floor like a medieval war club.
Richard wheeled around at the sound of her movement, raising the pistol back toward her.
"Get back in that bed!" Richard shouted.
Emma didn't get back in the bed. She took a step forward, her knuckles white around the steel pole.
"Put my son on this mattress, Mark," Emma commanded, never taking her eyes off Richard’s gun. "Now."
Mark didn't hesitate. Crawling on his knees, sobbing openly, he pushed past his father’s legs and thrust the swaddled infant up onto the hospital sheets. The moment Noah’s back touched the linen, Carla lunged forward, sweeping the baby away from Richard’s reach and clutching him tightly against her own chest beside the bassinet where Lily lay.
"I have him, Emma!" Carla cried out, her voice thick with tears. "I have him! He's safe!"
Richard realized in an instant that he had lost everything. The documents were unsigned, the children were out of his grasp, his family had turned on him, and a federal judge was recording his every breath.
A feral, suicidal madness twisted his features.
"If I go down," Richard hissed, centering the iron sights of the weapon directly between Emma’s eyes, "I'm taking Ethan's prize with me."
His finger squeezed the trigger.
The hammer fell.
Click.
The dull, hollow snap of a dry fire echoed through Room 412.
Richard froze. He blinked in utter disbelief, pulling the trigger a second time, then a third.
Click. Click.
"Did you really think Ethan left ammunition in his personal hangar safe, Richard?" Emma whispered, taking another measured step toward him. "He swapped those rounds for dummy training brass three weeks before he disappeared. He knew you'd steal the gun from his desk the moment he was gone."
Richard stared at the useless weapon in his trembling hand, his jaw slack, his entire world crumbling into dust.
"You..." Richard choked out. "You knew..."
"I knew everything," Emma said.
With a single, explosive sweep of her arms, Emma brought the heavy base of the stainless-steel IV pole around in a brutal, horizontal arc.
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The solid metal struck Richard squarely across the side of his jaw.
The impact sounded like a baseball bat cracking against wet wood. Richard’s head snapped violently to the right, his teeth shattering as he flew sideways, his body crashing hard over the bedside tray table. Folders, legal papers, and plastic cups scattered in a chaotic blizzard across the floor as Richard slammed into the linoleum, motionless, blood pooling beneath his cheek.
