The world didn't just go black; it shattered.
The cold, sterile air of the hospital stairwell felt like ice against my skin, but the heat radiating from my shoulder was a different kind of monster. I looked down at the red staining my white lab coat. The bullet had taken a chunk of flesh, a jagged reminder of how close I'd come to never seeing my son again.
But I didn't feel the pain. I felt the vacuum left behind by Leo's absence.
"Doctor! Chloe!"
The heavy steel door burst open. Marcus stumbled through, his face a mask of sweat and agony, followed by Miller. They were both leaning on each other, their guns still drawn, smoke still curling from the barrels.
"They're gone," Miller rasped, his eyes searching mine. "We took down three. The rest fled toward the parking structure."
"Leo is gone," I whispered. The words felt like broken glass in my throat. I looked at Marcus, my eyes burning with a sudden, lethal clarity. "They took him, Marcus. Nanny B... Justin... they're all gone. Someone took them into a black SUV. They called it 'The Sanctuary'."
Marcus froze, his grip tightening on his weapon. The name seemed to hit him like a physical blow. "The Sanctuary? Are you sure that's what she said?"
"Yes! Who are they? Is it the Reeds? Is it Silas?" I stepped toward him, ignoring the blood dripping from my arm. I grabbed the front of his shirt, my fingers slick with crimson. "Tell me who has my son!"
"It's not Silas," Marcus said, his voice dropping to a low, haunted register. "The Sanctuary... it's an old legend. A ghost protocol Asher mentioned once. It was supposed to be the final fallback. A place where the family goes when the world is on fire."
"So he's safe?" I asked, hope flared in my chest like a dying ember.
"Or he's in a different kind of trap," Miller interjected grimly. "If the Sanctuary has been activated, it means the war isn't just coming—it's here. And it means someone thinks Asher is dead enough that they can move his pieces for him."
I let go of Marcus and stepped back, looking at my reflection in the polished glass of the stairwell door. I didn't recognize the woman looking back at me. My hair was matted with sweat and dust, my coat was ruined, and my eyes looked like they belonged to someone who had seen the end of the world.
"I looked at the drawing of the three of us that Leo made—now crumpled and stained with a drop of my blood on the floor. He had given a copy to me and kept one. I put it back in my lab coat pocket. I had spent years running from the name Reed, trying to give him a life of sunlight and surgery. But the blood in his veins was ancient and violent, and I had been a fool to think a different last name would hide him from the wolves."
You cannot heal a cancer that wants to consume you. You have to cut it out.
"Miller," I said, my voice steadying, turning into a blade. "Can you drive?"
"I can drive a tank if I have to, Ma'am."
Miller was my own personal security guard I had requested for when I turned down Asher's men whom he said he was going to send to secure the hotel we just fled from. Being brought to this hospital after Silas shot him for not agreeing to betray me, somehow, he had developed a strong bond with Asher's men and his brother.
"You are in no condition to drive right now Miller", " the head of the guards in charge of proteting Marcus at the hospital while he recovered said as he and two other men walked up to us. "I will drive instead".
"Marcus, I assume you know where this 'Sanctuary' is. Or you know how to find out." I reached down and picked up one of the discarded handguns from the floor—the one a masked man had dropped. It was heavy, cold, and smelled of death. "We aren't waiting for a call. We aren't waiting for a ransom. We're going to find my son, and I'm going to kill anyone who stands in my way."
Marcus looked at the gun in my hand and the wound on my shoulder then at the ferocity in my face. I think you should get that stitched up first. You are bleeding and it is not good for you.
I looked at the lateral deltoid. The bullet had taken a clean strip of skin and muscle, the edges jagged and weeping. My medical brain started calculating the sutures needed—6-0 prolene, perhaps—but my mother's brain screamed that I didn't have time for sterile fields." There is no time for that Marcus. My son's life could be in danger and I can't afford to lose him as well..
Marcus gave a slow, grim nod. "The Doctor is out, I take it?"
"The Doctor died in that hallway," I replied, tucking the weapon into the waistband of my scrubs. "The Mother is all that's left."
As we moved toward the exit, the hospital sirens wailed in the distance, a mourning cry for the life I used to have. The salt air of Sonoma was a million miles away. All that mattered now was the road ahead, the blood on my hands, and the fire in my heart.
Whoever took Leo was about to find out exactly why you never corner a woman who knows exactly where the human heart is—and how to stop it. Just as we were about to get into the van, my phone buzzed and picked it up, it was an unknown number.
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