When he saw who I was carrying, the color drained from his face. “Mike—good Lord, that’s Katie,” he said, hurrying toward us and shouting to the nurses. “Get a gurney. IV fluids. Call pediatrics now.”
The next few hours blurred into one long stretch of animal fear. I sat in the hallway listening to clipped medical orders through the door. Lily was diagnosed with malnutrition and early pneumonia from sleeping in damp places at night.
They put her on treatment right away, and Katie drifted in and out of a feverish half-conscious state. The moment she was safe, her body simply shut down. Her temperature spiked. She thrashed and begged Daniel not to take her daughter.
Dr. Harris came out to me only at dawn. He pulled off his mask and sat down beside me heavily. “They’ll live, Mike. We stabilized the baby.”
“Katie is more complicated. Physically, we can get her back on her feet in a week or two. Psychologically—she’s badly damaged. Classic PTSD. Severe depression. Panic attacks. That man burned through her from the inside.”
“I’m going to destroy him, Harris,” I said, in the calm voice of a man who had already made up his mind. Harris put a hand on my shoulder. “No. Right now your job is to save your girls. Take them somewhere he can’t reach.”
In that gray hour before sunrise, I made a decision that erased my old life. I understood that my business empire meant nothing compared to my daughter’s life. From that point on, I moved with cold precision.
I was allowed into Katie’s room on the third day. She lay under IVs, pale and reduced to almost nothing. In the corner, Lily slept peacefully, her cheeks already beginning to show some color again.
Katie opened her eyes and drew in on herself. “Daddy, he won’t come here, will he?” she whispered through dry lips. I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her hand to my cheek.
“No one is coming here, sweetheart. Harris has security. As far as the world knows, you’re not here.” Suddenly she started crying, the tears slipping down the sides of her face.
“Dad, I’m sorry I gave him the condo. I was so scared he’d take Lily. I lost everything.” “Shh, honey. A condo is concrete. A car is metal,” I said, smoothing her hair back.
“You’re alive. Lily’s alive. That’s the only part that matters. I’ll handle the rest.” Over the next two weeks, I made the fastest deal of my life.
I called in my second-in-command, a loyal man who had been with me since the early days. We met in a small apartment on the edge of town. “Listen carefully, Sam. I’m disappearing. I need cash, and I need it fast,” I said, sliding a power of attorney across the table.
Sam nodded without asking questions. “Sell the business to reliable buyers. The house, the cars—everything. Move the money to the offshore accounts I’m writing down. Keep a portion for yourself. You earned it.”
Officially, I had gone abroad for medical treatment. Unofficially, I vanished. At the same time, I hired the best private investigators I could find to build a file on Daniel. What they brought me only confirmed what I suspected: Daniel had filed a missing person report on his wife using false medical records.
He was playing the role of the grieving, abandoned husband and preparing paperwork to terminate her parental rights in absentia. He had already listed the condo for sale through a shell agency. He was certain he had won…
