“I find myself with no assurances,” Alexander said as Thomas opened his eyes.

“The only assurance I will give you is that you will die if you don’t let me leave.”

“I require more.”

“Isn’t the fact that I’ve always kept my promises to you enough?”

“You have been a man of your word,” Alexander said. “But your promises were what positioned you, my brother, and me in this dilapidated suite of rooms. Your promises, though always held, are the reasons my life was and is nothing more than a series of experiments. Of isolation. Of misery. Your promises, Doctor Straus, are the precise reasons why I may rather kill you and with your death, assure my own potential demise, rather than to see you walk free.

“You are asking me to trust you, Doctor Straus? Trust? You never entertained even the possibility that I wanted to have at least a chance at a real life. You presented yourself to me as my protector, my savior, when all along you were nothing but my captor. I was nothing more than your chance at fame. I know it wasn’t you who stole me from my family, but it was you who kept me from them. You could have said something. You could have kept the promise you made when you swore your oath to become a doctor. What of that promise, Doctor Straus?”

Thomas O’Connell had sat up and was quietly listening to the conversation between his brother and Doctor Straus. Neither noticed that Thomas held a gun in his hand, but both heard the loud knocking at the door.

CHAPTER FORTY

Derek turned on his Maglite once he heard Thomas’s footsteps pounding up the stairway. He took no time to inspect the near vacant loading docks as he made his way across the area and into the stairway. He paused only at the bottom of the flight to listen to Thomas’s steps. He heard a door creak open two floors above him then he heard nothing.

The stairway was littered with discarded papers, broken glass, and pieces of insulation. As Derek made his way up the stairs, he turned off his flashlight, not wanting to give Thomas any visual signs of his approach. He paused after each step, straining his ears to hear. When he reached the second floor landing, he heard Thomas knocking on a door and demanding to be let in.

Silently, he craned his neck into the hallway, just in time to see Thomas walk through an open doorway and just in time to hear the door’s lock screech back into position.

He paused, catching his breath before moving towards the door. In his hands he held his small flashlight and a seven-inch, serrated, fixed-blade Gerber knife.

“Hope I’m not bringing a knife to a gun fight,” he thought to himself as he reached the door. “I wonder if this is a situation that Ralph would consider me leaving a better option than me staying.”

He pressed his ear against the cool, steel door. Though muffled, he could hear Thomas arguing with someone. He heard a voice return Thomas’s demands. A voice so weak, so thin that Derek questioned if the person Thomas was speaking with was preparing to make the great leap into the unknown.

He then heard a yell, followed by a quick scuffle. The thud sent vibrations into Derek’s legs.

He backed away from the door and stood in the pitch-black silence. His army and police academy training screamed at him to call for backup. He knew his life may very well depend on his next decision. And as he weighed the decision to either get help or to get into the room, Derek thought of Lucy and the look she would give him whenever he told her about his day at work. She never liked the risks he and the other members of the police force were expected to take on a daily basis.

“Risks are part of the job,” he would tell her. “And, we never go into a situation without backup.”

Now, standing in a dark hallway, the only glimpse of light coming from a setting sun and filtered through a dusty and smudged window at the hallway’s end, he knew he had no backup. Only Ralph knew where he was, but no one knew the option he was considering. He had no set plan if he were able to gain access to the room. No strategy. No emergency plan. But Derek was driven by his sense of responsibility. He was paid to keep Thomas O’Connell safe, and while Derek thought he may have been set up by the O’Connells, he didn’t know for certain. What he did know was that the person he was charged to keep safe was behind the locked door in front of him.

Derek Cole walked up to the door and knocked loudly several times.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“Popular place, this Ward C is,” Alexander said. As he turned away from the door and towards Straus and Thomas, he shuddered when he saw that Thomas was pointing a revolver directly at his head.

“If you so much as move towards me, I will blow your brains out.”

“You have my full attention,” Alexander said.

The knocking at the door resumed.

“Tell me,” Thomas said, “what did you do to my father?”

“You mean ‘our father?’”

The person knocking at the door switched from using his knuckles to pounding on the door with this fist.

“What did you do to him?” Thomas demanded.

“He was on the list.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“You also are on the list, dear brother.”

Despite Straus’s prognosis, Alexander’s reflexes remained insanely sharp. He leaped towards Thomas, driving his shoulder into Thomas’s chest. The shot fired came a half of a second too late, the bullet found no flesh, only concrete.

With little resistance, Alexander wrenched the revolver from Thomas’s hands. Straus, sensing an opportunity, bolted towards the door. He reached the door, slid the bolt free, lifted the steel bar-bracing and pulled open the door. His way was blocked by a man he’d never seen. Then his movement was halted by the bullet entering his lower back, ripping through his muscles and sending him to the floor. He lay half in the hallway and half still in the hub room of Ward C.