“Please,” I begged, a wave of dizziness washing over me as the monitors beside my bed began to beep faster. “Leave. I’m… I’m not well.”
She laughed, a short, sharp, ugly sound. She stepped closer to the bed, her voice dropping to a low, venomous hiss. “You think that ‘thing’ in your belly is going to keep him? You think it’s a trump card? It’s not. It’s a chain. And he’s finally free of it.” She leaned in, her face inches from mine. “You’re just… pathetic. You’re holding on. He chose me, Emily. He chose me. So why don’t you and that burden of yours just disappear?”
“Step away from her.”
The voice was not a shout, but it was the most powerful sound I had ever heard. It was deep, resonant, and carried an absolute, unquestionable authority that made the air in the room vibrate.
Olivia froze, her smug expression dissolving into one of shocked confusion. We both turned to the door.
A man stood there. He was tall, impeccably dressed in a dark suit that bespoke immense wealth and power. He was in his late fifties, his hair graying at the temples, his face etched with lines of command. He looked at Olivia, his gaze so cold and piercing that she physically recoiled. Then, he looked at me.
My heart stopped for a different reason. I knew that face. I knew it. It was the face I had stared at a thousand times, the one in the single, faded photograph my mother had kept hidden in her jewelry box her entire life. The man who had, according to my mother, died before I was born.
“You…?” I whispered, my world tilting on its axis.
“Get out,” the man, Thomas Reed, said to Olivia, his voice a quiet, final judgment. “Now.”
Olivia, sensing a power far greater and more dangerous than her own, didn’t argue. She scrambled out of the room, her composure shattered.
Thomas Reed stepped inside, his eyes never leaving my face. They were my eyes. “I’m your father, Emily,” he said, his voice thick with an emotion that belied his hard exterior. “I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”
The shock… the revelation… the confrontation… it was too much. The room began to spin. A sharp, agonizing pain seized my abdomen, and the monitors beside my bed erupted in a deafening, continuous wail. Thomas’s face dissolved into a mask of panic. “Nurse!” he roared. “Nurse, get in here! Now!”
