The words hung in the sterile hospital room like a suspended executioner’s axe. “I need police officers in Emergency Room Four immediately. Now.”

Detective Miller reacted instantly, reaching for her sidearm, but Victor was already pulling the trigger.

BANG!

The deafening roar of the gunshot shattered the quiet of the hospital ward. Detective Miller groaned, clutching her shoulder as the impact slammed her against the wall, her own gun sliding across the linoleum floor, out of reach.

"Don't move!" Victor screamed, waving the weapon wildly between me and the injured detective. Outside, alarms began to blare, a shrill, pulsing siren that signaled a hospital-wide Lockdown Code Silver.

"Victor!" my mother’s frantic voice wailed from the doorway. She stumbled into the room, her hands covered in blood—the blood of the officer Victor had ambushed in the hallway to steal his firearm. "Victor, stop! What are you doing?! They have officers coming!"

"Shut up, Linda!" Victor barked, his face twisted in a demonic rage. Sweat dripped down his forehead, soaking his designer shirt. "She ruined everything! Do you know what she did?! She’s been recording us! She has the company ledgers! She has the federal files!"

Linda staggered backward, staring at me in absolute betrayal. "Violet... how could you? After everything we did for you? We gave you a home! We fed you!"

"You gave me a torture chamber!" I screamed back, ignoring the blinding pain in my head as I sat up straight in the bed. "You let him hit me! You watched him break my ribs when I was sixteen! You helped him cover it up! You aren't my mother—you’re his dog!"

"Shut up! BOTH OF YOU SHUT UP!" Victor roared, stepping over Detective Miller, who was bleeding profusely from her shoulder, trying desperately to stay conscious.

Victor pressed the hot barrel of the gun directly against my forehead. The stench of gunpowder and cheap whiskey rolled off him in suffocating waves.

"Give me the hard drive," Victor growled, his hand trembling on the trigger. "Give me the passwords, or I swear to God I will end you right here. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill your mother, and I’ll walk out of here before the SWAT team even sets up a perimeter."

I looked into his eyes. For ten years, those eyes had terrorized my dreams. They had made me shrink into corners, make myself small, wish I was dead. But looking at them now, inches away from my face, I didn't see a monster.

I saw a pathetic, terrified little man whose power had completely evaporated the moment he was exposed to the light.

"Shoot me," I said quietly.

Victor blinked, momentarily thrown off by my total lack of fear. "What did you say?"

"I said, shoot me," I repeated, leaning my forehead into the barrel of the gun. "Do it, Victor. Because if you don't kill me right now, I promise you, I will spend every remaining breath of my life ensuring you die in a maximum-security prison. Shoot me. Prove to my mother that you're nothing more than a pathetic murderer."

"You think I won't?!" he yelled, his finger tightening on the trigger.

"Victor, no!" Linda shrieked, suddenly throwing herself forward.

It wasn't out of love for me. It was pure, instinctual self-preservation. She knew that if Victor fired that gun, her life was over too. She grabbed his arm, pulling it upward just as he squeezed the trigger a second time.