Chapter 4 - The Escape
The heavy smoke burned my eyes and clawed at my throat the second I inhaled it.
Vance kicked the locked wooden door repeatedly, but it refused to yield.
We were trapped inside my sister’s house, breathing in the same surgical sedative they had used on Mia.
I realized my sister had rigged the house with a chemical trap, knowing I would eventually come looking for answers.
My vision began to blur, and my legs felt as heavy as lead.
Vance grabbed a heavy brass lamp from the desk and smashed it repeatedly against the window frame.
The reinforced glass cracked but did not shatter completely.
I dragged myself toward the desk, desperately searching for anything that could help us.
My hand brushed against a heavy iron letter opener hidden under a stack of papers.
I tossed it to Vance, who jammed it into the crack of the window and pried with all his strength.
The window frame splintered and burst open, letting the cool night air rush into the toxic room.
We tumbled out onto the lawn, gasping for breath and coughing violently into the grass.
As my head cleared, I looked back into the office and noticed a small silver flash drive taped to the underside of the desk.
I reached back through the broken window and grabbed it just as police sirens began wailing in the distance.
We scrambled over the back fence and threw ourselves into Vance’s car, speeding away before the patrol cars arrived.
Vance plugged the flash drive into his encrypted tablet while steering with one hand.
The screen lit up with hundreds of bank statements and emails between my sister and Julian.
The documents proved they had bribed the family court judge and the emergency dispatcher to frame me.
We finally had the evidence to destroy them and get Mia back.
My phone rang with a call from the hospital, and I answered it frantically.
It was the sympathetic nurse from earlier, her voice trembling with panic.
She told me that Julian had just forcibly removed Mia from the life-support machines against medical advice.
He had loaded her into a private ambulance heading for the city's private airfield.
The nurse warned me that Mia’s heart rate was dropping rapidly without the hospital equipment.
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If Julian put her on a pressurized airplane in her condition, her lungs would collapse.
We were thirty minutes away from the airfield, and Mia only had minutes to live.
