SHE LOCKED US IN WITH A MONSTER

Maria’s hands were perfectly steady.

She wasn’t wearing her usual gray housekeeper uniform. She wore dark jeans and a black jacket, her hair pulled back into a tight knot. The quiet, deferential woman who had plugged in the electric blanket just hours earlier was completely gone.

“Back away from the nurse, Paul,” Maria said. Her voice was like ice.

Paul froze, his hands hovering in the air.

Salvatore stared at the woman who had lived in his home for fifteen years. “Maria? What the hell is going on?”

Maria didn’t look at him. She kept the gun aimed at his oldest son.

“I’m sorry, Mr. DeLuca. But your mother is right. Paul has been poisoning you. And the men outside this door are waiting for the signal that your heart finally gave out.”

Daniel, standing near the window, held his hands up in surrender. “Maria, put the gun down. You’re the housekeeper. You don’t know what you’re involved in.”

Maria finally shifted her gaze to Daniel.

“I know exactly what I’m involved in,” she said quietly. “My name isn’t Maria. It’s Sofia. Anthony DeLuca is my father.”

Salvatore stopped breathing.

He stared at her face, searching for the resemblance. The dark eyes. The sharp jawline.

“Anthony’s daughter,” Salvatore whispered. “You’ve been in my house for fifteen years.”

“To watch you,” Maria said. “To make sure what happened to my father never happened to you.”

Rosa let out a soft, broken wail, leaning against the locked hospital door.

I stepped between Salvatore and the line of fire, wrapping a pressure bandage around his arm where I had removed the IV. He was sweating profusely. The withdrawal from the counter-agent patches, combined with whatever was in that IV bag, was throwing his system into shock.

“He needs a doctor,” I said sharply. “Real medicine. Not patches and poison.”

“He can’t have hospital doctors,” Maria said, keeping the gun raised. “The toxin Paul used is synthetic. The moment they run a standard tox screen, it interacts with the reagents and causes massive cardiac arrest. That’s why Paul brought him to this specific hospital. He owns the lab tech.”

Paul smiled. A slow, chilling smirk.

“You’re smart, Maria,” Paul said, leaning back against the wall. “But you’re trapped in a locked room. My men are outside. And Dad has maybe twenty minutes before the neurotoxin finishes binding to his receptors without his little patches.”

“We have the antidote,” Maria said.

“No, you don’t.”

Daniel spoke this time.

I turned toward the younger brother.

Daniel wasn’t holding his hands up anymore. He was holding a syringe.

Before anyone could react, Daniel lunged—not at Maria, but at his own grandmother. He grabbed Rosa by the hair and jammed the needle into the side of her neck, pressing the plunger down.

Rosa gasped, her eyes going wide, before collapsing to the linoleum floor.

“Ma!” Salvatore screamed, trying to tear himself out of the bed. I threw my entire body weight across his chest to keep him from collapsing onto the floor.

Maria swung the gun toward Daniel, but she hesitated. He was using Rosa’s slumped body as a shield.

“You think I’m the mastermind?” Paul laughed bitterly from the corner. “Daniel is the one who found Grandpa’s old pharmaceutical contacts. Daniel is the one who secured the synthetic toxin.”

Daniel dropped the empty syringe. He looked at Salvatore with absolute disgust.

“You were never going to modernize the family, Dad,” Daniel said coldly. “You were perfectly happy running shipping crates and gambling rings. Grandpa built a billion-dollar biochemical empire in the shadows, and you let it rot because of your morals.”

Suddenly, the reinforced glass window of the ground-floor hospital room shattered inward.

Glass exploded across the room.

A figure in a heavy trench coat stepped through the broken frame from the rain-soaked courtyard.

He was in his late sixties. Silver hair, scarred face, holding a heavy silver pocket watch in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

It was Anthony DeLuca.

And as he stepped into the light, he tossed something onto Salvatore’s lap.