Chapter 9 - The Hostage in the Sky
The agony of the contraction hit me like a freight train, seizing my entire torso in a vice of cramping muscle that made me gasp out loud, my knees buckling beneath my maternity coat. Sarah caught me under my arms with military strength, hoisting my weight up and draping my arm over her shoulder.
"We have to move! Right now!" Sarah barked into her lapel mic, addressing Gabriel down in the command vehicle. "Gabriel! The patient's membranes just ruptured with bloody show! We have an active emergency labor situation on floor forty-two! Have the extraction vehicle running at the loading dock!"
"Copy that! Security loop expires in thirty seconds—get to the freight elevator now!" Gabriel’s voice crackled urgently in my ear.
Sarah turned us toward the locked double doors, but before we could take three steps, the heavy mahogany table behind us crashed violently against the floorboards.
Arthur Vance had lost his mind. With his corporate empire evaporating on the projection screen above him and his board of directors frantically dialing their legal counsel, the aristocratic facade had completely disintegrated, leaving behind a desperate, cornered sociopath who knew he was facing the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary.
"Nobody leaves this room!" Arthur roared, yanking a heavy, brass-based crystal decanter from the center of the table and smashing the bottom against the mahogany wood, leaving him holding a jagged, lethal spear of lead crystal.
He lunged across the space between us, bypassing his paralyzed board members and kicking a leather executive chair out of his path to block the double doors. His face was mottled with purple rage, his breath coming in ragged, animalistic wheezes as he pointed the shattered crystal directly at my face.
"Dad! Stop!" Julian screamed from the head of the table, his voice finally breaking with genuine terror as he saw his father raise the weapon against his laboring wife. "Dad, put that down! The police are already going to be called—you can't do this!"
"Shut up, you pathetic coward!" Arthur spat without taking his eyes off me. "If she walks out of this building with that child, we lose everything! The firm defaults at midnight! I am not spending my final years in a federal cell because you couldn't control a woman!"
Arthur advanced on us, his eyes dropping to my bleeding, laboring abdomen. "We’re going to my private helicopter on the roof pad right now. Julian, call Thorne! Tell him to get his medical team to the private airstrip in Bedford! We take the child by C-section on the flight to Zurich, and then we dump her body in international waters!"
"Over my dead body, you twisted son of a bitch," Sarah growled, stepping squarely in front of me to shield my pregnant frame.
With blinding speed, Sarah didn't reach for her pepper spray—she drew her collapsible steel tactical baton, flicked her wrist with a sharp snap to extend the sixteen-inch weapon, and swung it with maximum kinetic force directly at Arthur’s incoming right wrist.
The steel baton struck Arthur’s forearm with the sickening, wet sound of fracturing bone.
Arthur let out a high-pitched, agonizing shriek, the shattered crystal decanter flying from his hand and crashing harmlessly against the marble wall. He stumbled backward, clutching his broken arm against his chest, his face draining of color as he collapsed onto his knees among the champagne flutes and laptops on the floor.
"Julian!" Arthur wheezed, looking up at his son with wild, pleading eyes. "Don't just stand there! Grab her! Grab the baby!"
Julian stood frozen by the projection screen, his hands trembling at his sides. He looked at his father—the broken, screaming tyrant who had dictated every second of his life—and then he looked at me, standing in a pool of my own amniotic fluid, holding my swollen belly with tears of agony and defiance running down my face.
For the first time in his thirty-four years of life, Julian made a choice that wasn't scripted by Arthur Vance.
He didn't step toward me. Instead, Julian reached down, grabbed the heavy oak chair he had been sitting in, and shoved it violently across the aisle, blocking his father's path to us. Then he looked at Sarah, his eyes hollow and filled with absolute, unshakeable remorse.
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"Take her," Julian whispered, his voice cracking as sirens finally began to wail from the city streets forty-two stories below. "Get my son out of here. Please."
Sarah didn't waste a second on gratitude. She half-carried, half-dragged my laboring body through the double doors into the hallway, leaving Arthur Vance screaming curses at his son on the floor of his ruined boardroom.
