Chapter 9 - The Nurse's Triage
A cold, terrifying fury washed through me, stilling the tremble in my limbs, sharpening my vision until everything moved in crystal-clear slow motion.
He hadn't been blackmailed.
He hadn't made a desperate mistake.
Matthias had planned this massacre from the very beginning. The affair with Fiona was just a diversion, a way to manipulate Logan and siphon the Hensley funds, while setting up his own family and his pregnant wife to be incinerated in an insurance fraud scheme worth hundreds of millions.
"That sick bastard," Logan whispered, raising his pistol, his knuckles white.
"Wait," I commanded under my breath, placing a firm hand on his wrist. "There are three more armed men upstairs. If you fire that shot, they come down behind us. We get boxed in."
"What do you want to do?"
I glanced toward the wall beside us. Mounted inside a glass case was the Halon fire-suppression lever, alongside an industrial oxygen tank used for the estate’s wine preservation equipment.
Beside it sat an emergency trauma kit.
I knew that kit. I had packed it myself when Matthias's father had his first cardiac scare last Christmas.
Inside that kit were three pre-filled syringes of Succinylcholine—a paralytic agent used for rapid-sequence emergency intubation. It stops every muscle in the human body within sixty seconds. Without a ventilator, you cannot move, you cannot pull a trigger, you cannot scream.
"Logan," I whispered. "Can you hit the emergency Halon alarm from here?"
"Yes."
"Count to three. Pull it. When they scatter for the air vents, take out Viktor. Leave Matthias to me."
"Serena, he’s dangerous—"
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"He's a coward who hides behind hired guns," I spat, slipping the glass door open and palming the cold plastic syringe from the red kit. "And I'm about to give him his final injection."
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