I spent my wedding night alone because my husband’s grandmother said every groom in their family had to sleep beside “the matriarch” before joining his bride. My husband told me not to make a scene. By morning, I was done being polite. I opened the door and found him unconscious beside her, with an unfamiliar stain on the sheet and a tiny puncture mark on his arm. That was when the story stopped looking like a disgusting tradition and started looking like something much darker.

The operating room erupted into absolute, terrifying chaos.

Julian did not hesitate for a single fraction of a second.

He grabbed a heavy metal surgical tray and hurled it violently directly at Leo’s head.

The heavy steel caught Leo across the jaw, sending him crashing into a massive glass cabinet of medical supplies.

The gun flew from Leo’s hand and skittered across the blood-slicked tile floor.

I dove for the weapon, my fingers closing tightly around the cold, textured grip.

I raised the gun and pointed it directly at the terrified surgeons, screaming at them to back against the wall.

Julian grabbed me by the waist and pulled me toward the heavy double doors of the theater.

Eleanor shrieked in absolute fury from her surgical table, commanding her bleeding son to stop us.

Arthur clutched his bleeding shoulder, scrambling desperately across the floor to reach the emergency alarm button.

"We have to destroy the main servers before we leave!" Julian yelled over the rising chaos.

We sprinted down the sterile hallway, bursting into the clinic's centralized server room.

Julian grabbed a heavy fire extinguisher and ruthlessly smashed the massive computer mainframes into sparking, useless junk.

Decades of illegal medical harvesting records, blackmail, and corporate fraud went up in thick, black smoke.

I pulled the black ledger from my pocket and threw it directly into the burning sparks, destroying their physical backups.

The screeching wail of the facility's fire alarm system finally began to echo through the concrete compound.

We ran for the loading dock, the thick smoke hiding us from the heavily armed guards swarming the corridors.

We reached the heavy steel doors leading out into the freezing, torrential rain.

Freedom was standing exactly ten feet in front of us.

Suddenly, a deafening gunshot rang out over the sound of the blaring fire alarms.

Julian gasped loudly, his entire body lurching forward as blood instantly blossomed across the shoulder of his hospital gown.

He collapsed onto the cold concrete floor, gripping his bleeding wound in agony.

I spun around, raising my stolen weapon toward the dark hallway.

When my newborn 'passed away,' my mother-in-law leaned in and said

My Husband Left Me Alone in My Car While I Was in Labor

“You’re Dead When We Get Home,” He Snapped

Eleanor was standing in the doorway, disconnected from her life support, holding a smoking revolver in her trembling, decaying hands.

She aimed the barrel directly at my stomach, her eyes wide with psychotic, murderous intent.

Chapter 9 - The Escape