Chapter 3 - The Trapped Room
The cold, black barrel of the gun looked massive as my father pointed it squarely at my heart.
The nurse standing down the hallway screamed in sheer terror and bolted for the nearest emergency exit.
My father grabbed my arm with bruising force and shoved me violently into Emily's hospital room.
He slammed the heavy wooden door shut behind us and quickly engaged the deadbolt lock.
Emily lay completely motionless on the hospital bed, surrounded by a complex web of beeping life-support machines.
"What are you doing, Dad?"
My voice trembled uncontrollably, but I refused to break eye contact with him.
He kept the weapon trained on me while pacing erratically around the sterile room.
"You are going to open your banking app on your phone right now."
I stared at him in complete disbelief, realizing the depths of his absolute madness.
"You are holding me hostage in a hospital for twenty thousand dollars?"
He laughed a bitter, humorless laugh that echoed off the cold linoleum walls.
"I don't want twenty thousand anymore, Olivia."
He stepped closer, the smell of stale coffee and cheap whiskey radiating from his breath.
"I want the entire two million dollars sitting in your corporate business account."
My mother suddenly emerged from the small, connected hospital bathroom, wiping tears from her swollen eyes.
"Please, Olivia, just give him the money so we can leave the country," she begged pathetically.
I looked at my mother, the woman who had once baked me birthday cakes, now an accomplice to armed robbery.
"You are both completely insane if you think I am giving you a single dime."
My father cocked the hammer of the gun, his eyes burning with desperate, homicidal rage.
"If you don't transfer the funds in the next sixty seconds, I will shoot you where you stand."
He meant every single word of his threat.
I slowly reached into my purse, pretending to comply with his insane demands.
My fingers brushed past my smartphone and found the hard plastic of my emergency pepper spray.
I didn't pull it out; instead, I subtly shifted my weight toward the hospital bed.
I noticed the bright red emergency nurse call button resting on the tangled bedsheets near Emily's hand.
"I am opening the app now," I lied, keeping my eyes locked on his gun.
With a sudden, explosive burst of speed, I lunged forward and slammed my fist onto the red button.
A deafening, high-pitched alarm instantly blared through the hospital room speakers.
My father panicked, swinging the gun wildly as the heavy wooden door was kicked entirely off its hinges.
Three armed hospital security guards and two police officers stormed into the room with weapons drawn.
"Drop the gun and get on the ground!" the lead officer roared with absolute authority.
My father hesitated for a fraction of a second before dropping the weapon and falling to his knees.
My mother sobbed hysterically as the officers slammed them both onto the floor and secured their wrists in heavy steel handcuffs.
I backed away against the window, breathing heavily as the immediate danger finally subsided.
I needed to go back to my house to confront Matt and find out exactly how deep his involvement went.
I borrowed a phone from a sympathetic nurse and called a taxi to take me home.
When I finally unlocked my front door, the house was suffocatingly quiet and completely dark.
I crept quietly up the stairs and slipped into Matt's home office, desperate to find the truth.
I opened his bottom desk drawer and found a hidden lockbox tucked beneath a stack of old files.
I grabbed a heavy bronze paperweight and smashed the cheap lock until the metal lid popped open.
Inside the box rested the burner phone I had seen in his pocket earlier that morning.
May you like
I picked it up, expecting to find more text messages from my brother.
Instead, Matt stepped silently out of the hallway shadows, holding a medical syringe filled with a strange, clear liquid.
