Chapter One: The Sedative
I wasn’t supposed to be home.
Officially, I was on medical leave. Unofficially, I was recovering from a classified assignment and a jagged piece of shrapnel lodged dangerously close to a major artery—a wound nobody in my family knew existed. I came back quietly. No warning. No phone call.
When I pulled into my parents’ driveway, catering vans choked the curb, and workers were raising a massive white tent across the immaculate lawn. Then I remembered. Chloe’s wedding.
Inside, my mother, Sarah, was barking orders at decorators while my father, Thomas, paced the hallway with his phone pressed to his ear. Chloe stood in the center of the living room, draped in a white silk robe, surrounded by a flock of nervous bridesmaids.
She looked at me, her eyes sweeping over my faded tactical jacket and pale face. “Oh. You’re here.”
That was my welcome home. Ten minutes later, she had me carrying boxes upstairs. Crystal gifts. Accessories. Heavy centerpieces.
“Don’t drop them,” she warned, not looking up from her phone.
The first trip hurt. By the third, the stitches beneath my jacket felt like they were ripping apart. I stopped at the landing, pressing a hand against my side. When I pulled it away, my fingers were slick with blood. Chloe happened to walk past. Instead of looking scared, she let out a long, theatrical sigh.
“Can you not be dramatic today of all days, Maya?”
I tried one more trip. Halfway down the stairs, my vision grayed out. The edges of the world dissolved, and my knees gave way. I hit the hardwood floor, the heavy box crashing down beside me in the middle of her wedding chaos.
“I think I need a hospital,” I gasped, the pain suddenly blinding.
At the ER, the triage nurse took one look at my ashen face and immediately called for a wheelchair. I mumbled something about severe abdominal pain and recent trauma. Her expression tightened into professional alarm.
Then Chloe stepped between us. “She’s just being dramatic. It’s probably a panic attack. Let her wait.” And then, incredibly, she turned and left to get back to her fitting.
My parents arrived twenty minutes later. The attending physician explained that my blood pressure was collapsing. He placed consent paperwork for an emergency CT scan on the counter.
My father looked at the paper, then at the doctor. “How much is this going to cost? We are not authorizing unnecessary testing because she wants attention before her sister’s wedding.”
The doctor argued. My father’s jaw set into stone. He signed the refusal against medical advice.
I lay on the gurney, disbelief cutting deeper than the physical agony. My own father was leaving me here to bleed out over a wedding.
He leaned over my bed, his face entirely unreadable. “You’ll be fine, Maya. Just get some rest.”
I felt a sudden, sharp prick in my IV line. I looked down. My father’s hand was pulling away from the port. He had just injected something into my line.
“Dad?” I slurred, the room suddenly tilting.
He didn’t look angry. He looked terrified. His eyes darted toward the hallway. Through the fading edges of my consciousness, I followed his gaze. Two nurses were walking toward my bay. Except they weren’t walking like nurses. Their steps were measured, tactical, heavy. One of them reached into his scrubs, not for a stethoscope, but for a metallic cylinder.
My father had realized what they were before I did. He was putting me under. He was creating a legal medical nightmare to force the hospital to crash-cart me, knowing it would draw security and prevent a quiet assassination.
But I was fading too fast. My hands grew icy. The monitor beside me began to scream. Beneath the fear and the encroaching darkness, a decade of conditioning took over. My numb fingers slid beneath the reinforced lining of my tactical jacket, finding the hidden compartment. I found the flat, unmarked emergency beacon. Blackglass.
As the fake nurses stepped into the bay, pulling a syringe that certainly didn’t contain medicine, I pressed the button. Hard. I broke the seal.
Then the line beside me went flat, and everything went black.