I didn’t move. Every muscle in my body was coiled tight enough to snap steel, but I stayed rooted to the plastic hospital chair. If I lunged at him, if I even raised my voice, the two deputies I had spotted lingering by the nurses’ station would be in here in seconds. I would be arrested for assaulting the Sheriff’s son, and Emily would be left completely alone.

Breathe, I told myself. Assess the tactical situation.

The hospital wasn’t a place of healing anymore. It was an invisible prison. The staff averted their eyes when I walked down the hall. The head nurse on this rotation, a nervous woman who kept checking her phone, had already tried to limit my visiting hours based on “hospital policy.” Mercer had this place locked down.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” I said, keeping my voice low, modulating the pitch to sound perfectly even.

Travis tossed the flowers onto the foot of Emily’s bed. They landed heavily, jostling her broken legs. She let out a sharp gasp of pain.

“Oops. Clumsy me,” Travis said, his eyes glittering. He stepped closer to the head of the bed. His fingers traced the clear plastic tubing that fed painkillers and antibiotics into Emily’s arm. “You know, hospitals are dangerous places, soldier. So many wires. So many tubes. A tiny air bubble, a wrong dosage… mistakes happen all the time when a patient is this fragile.”

He was threatening her life, right in front of me.

“Take your hand off the IV, Travis.”

He held my gaze for a long, mocking moment. Then, slowly, he raised his hands in mock surrender and took a step back. “Just checking on a fellow citizen. My father told you what happened. She really should have watched her step at the site.”

“So you were there?”

His expression hardened. The playfulness vanished. “Careful. I called you out of courtesy. To let you know your wife was hurt. But let’s cut the crap. She took something from my office before she… fell. A little silver thumb drive.”

He leaned over the bed, invading my space, close enough that I could smell the stale whiskey on his breath.

“Give it back,” he whispered. “Or her next accident will be her last. And yours won’t be far behind.”

I stared at him. “Get out.”

He chuckled, patted the doorframe, and walked out into the hall, giving a casual nod to the deputies outside.

Once the door swung shut, I turned back to Emily. She was trembling, tears cutting clean lines through the grime and iodine on her face.

“It’s okay,” I murmured, leaning my forehead against hers. “He’s gone. You were telling me about the drive. Where is it?”

She took a ragged breath. “When they cornered me at the site, I knew what they were going to do. I managed to run toward the pediatric clinic down the street before they caught up. I didn’t have time to hide. A little girl dropped her stuffed bear on the sidewalk. I shoved the drive into the bear’s torn seam and left it on the bench just as Travis grabbed my hair.”

The pediatric clinic. That was three blocks from the hospital. But if someone had turned it in, it might be in the hospital’s lost and found, or the clinic’s reception.

Suddenly, my phone vibrated in my pocket.

It was a text from an unknown number. It was a picture of a house. A quaint, two-story colonial with a wraparound porch and a tire swing in the front yard.

My stomach plummeted. It was Emily’s parents’ house in the next county over.

A second text arrived immediately after: You have 12 hours to find what belongs to me. Or we start clearing land for a new project. Sometimes, old houses have terrible electrical fires.

I showed the screen to Emily. Her monitor began to beep erratically as her heart rate spiked.

“Blake…” she panicked, trying to sit up, screaming in agony as the metal pins in her legs pulled at her bones. “My parents—you have to warn them!”

“I will. I will fix this,” I promised, gently pushing her shoulders back down onto the mattress.

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 8:00 PM. I had until 8:00 AM to secure a piece of plastic smaller than my thumb, protect my wife, save my in-laws, and take down a dynasty.

But I couldn’t even walk out the door without the corrupt deputies following me.

Just then, the nervous head nurse walked in, carrying a fresh IV bag. But as she turned away from the window, I caught a glimpse of something metallic in her uniform pocket. A syringe, uncapped, filled with a cloudy liquid that definitely wasn’t on Emily’s chart.

She wasn’t just here to change the fluids.