One too Many

Chapter 50

Ian

The emergency alert on my phone buzzed once, then again, then erupted into a continuous shriek that made my blood turn to ice. Around the packed emergency waiting room, I saw my brothers' faces snap toward their own devices as the same alarm tore through the chaos of crying families and medical personnel rushing between trauma bays.

"Cardiac distress," Asher read from his screen, his face going white. "Severe arrhythmia detected."

But that wasn't possible. We'd left her stable just twenty minutes ago, surrounded by the best medical equipment money could buy, in a secure room with—

"She's flatlining," Cole's voice cracked as he stared at his monitor. "The signal... it's gone completely."

The world tilted on its axis. One moment I was standing in a crowded waiting room, the next I was sprinting through hospital corridors with my brothers flanking me like a pack of wolves, our footsteps echoing off sterile walls as we raced toward her room.

"Move!" Dominic roared at a group of nurses who scattered out of our way, their startled faces blurring past as we careened around corners and through double doors.

The door to Samara's room stood open, swinging gently on its hinges like an accusation. Beyond it, only emptiness.

The bed was rumpled but vacant, medical equipment abandoned and silent. Wires that should have been monitoring her vital signs lay scattered across the floor like discarded snake skins. The VAD console blinked uselessly, its screen showing nothing but flat lines and error messages.

"No," Oscar breathed from behind me, his massive frame filling the doorway. "No, no, no..."

I stood frozen in the center of the room, my mind struggling to process what I was seeing. She'd been here. Twenty minutes ago, she'd been right here, weak but alive, surrounded by machines that were keeping her heart beating.

Now there was nothing.

"CCTV," Dominic barked, already moving toward the nurses' station. "I want every camera feed from the last hour, now!"

But Elena was shaking her head before he even finished speaking. "The system went down forty minutes ago. Some kind of technical malfunction, maintenance is working on it, but..."

"Forty minutes?" The timing was too convenient, too perfect. "That's not a malfunction. Someone planned this."

Zaid was at the window, staring down at the loading dock six floors below. "There," he said suddenly, pointing at tire tracks barely visible on the wet pavement. "Fresh tracks leading toward the east exit."

"He has her," Zayin said, his voice hollow with the kind of despair I'd never heard from him before. "That sick fuck has our sister."

The room erupted into controlled chaos as everyone started talking at once, escape routes, search patterns, how to mobilize every resource we had to tear the city apart looking for her. But underneath all the tactical planning, I could hear something that terrified me more than any enemy I'd ever faced.

Time.

We were running out of time. Samara's heart was failing even with the VAD supporting it. Without proper medical monitoring, without the medications keeping her stable, how long did she have?

"Wait," Oliver said suddenly, his voice cutting through the frantic discussions. "Wait, wait, wait." He was staring at his phone, his fingers flying across the screen with desperate intensity. "The heart monitors. The one we gave you guys yesterday."

I looked down at the small device that is supposed to be in my ear, the one that had been silent since the moment we'd arrived at the hospital. "It's not working—"