Chapter 5 - Thirty Seconds of Oxygen
Richard slammed the SUV into park directly in the breakdown lane of the highway, threw his door open, and dove into the back seat. The world outside ceased to exist—the roar of semi-trucks blasting past at seventy miles per hour, the screaming wind from the ocean, the horn of an oncoming sedan swerving around his smoking vehicle. There was only Lily’s face, pale as parchment, her lips darkened to the shade of a bruised plum.
“Lily. Lily, look at me!”
He pinched her tiny nose, tilted her chin back, and sealed his mouth over hers, delivering two measured breaths of air. Her chest rose, then fell passively. No cough. No involuntary reflex. Her carotid pulse was a faint, erratic flutter, like the wings of a dying moth trapped behind silk.
One, two, three, four, five...
He performed chest compressions with two fingers, counting aloud through clenched teeth, his mind racing through every basic trauma protocol he had learned during his years commanding offshore salvage vessels. Chamomile tea. White foam. Cyanide would have killed her in sixty seconds. Organophosphates? A pesticide derivative. Atropine. She needs atropine immediately.
On the sixteenth compression, Lily’s throat convulsed. She expelled a mouthful of clear, bitter fluid that smelled distinctly of bitter almonds and crushed foliage. A second later, a weak, ragged gasp tore through her airway. Her eyelids fluttered open, unfocused and glazed with tears.
“Daddy…” she whimpered, barely louder than the Pacific surf crashing against the rocks eighty feet below the cliffside road. “Tastes… like bad medicine.”
“I’ve got you, baby. Daddy’s got you,” Richard choked out, tears finally breaking past his discipline, hot and stinging against his salt-encrusted cheeks. He wrapped her tight, feeling her heart resume a fragile, stumbling rhythm.
He lunged back into the driver’s seat, slamming the door. The damaged right front wheel was grinding against the wheel well, shuddering the entire chassis, but the engine still turned. He accelerated back onto the highway, hazard lights flashing, heading toward Santa Monica General Hospital—the nearest facility with a pediatric trauma unit.
As he crossed the county line, his phone chimed. The cellular jammer was out of range.
Notifications flooded the screen in a torrential cascade of vibrations. Missed calls from his corporate secretary. Security alerts from the estate’s automated fire system. But one message stood out, delivered from an unlisted number with a digital file attachment:
Check the garage surveillance backup before you trust the hospital staff. Evelyn isn’t working alone, Richard. Look at your own family tree.
May you like
The attached file was an old black-and-white hospital intake record dated thirty-two years ago. Richard glanced down at the preview image while keeping one hand on the wheel. It was a birth certificate from an obscure clinic in Zurich.
The child’s name was redacted, but the listed mother was Clara Vance—his late wife. And the father listed on the document was not Richard Thorne, but a name that turned his blood colder than the Pacific depths: Julian Thorne, his estranged older brother who had supposedly committed suicide ten years ago.
