Chapter 4 - The Weight of a Pillow
The silence in the room became heavy, filled only by the rhythmic shuck-shuck of the ventilator and the high, thin whine of the cardiac monitor.
"Adrian is weak," Cordelia said, her fingers moving from my cheek to the corner of the heavy hospital pillow. "He would spend the next ten years sitting in that chair, feeling guilty, paying for private nurses, letting the family capital drain away to keep a corpse warm. He doesn't have the stomach for the final stroke. He never did. His father was the same. I had to manage his father's exit as well, though that was much simpler—a bottle of digitalis and an old man’s weak heart."
My heart rate monitor spiked slightly—two extra beats per minute.
Cordelia noticed. She looked up at the monitor, a small, satisfied smile touching the corners of her thin lips.
"Ah," she murmured. "So you are in there. Excellent. I should hate to think I was wasting this conversation on an empty room."
She took hold of the second pillow—the one the nurse had placed beside my head to keep my neck from shifting. It was heavy, filled with dense medical foam.
"The nurses are down at the station having their shift meeting," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh, hot whisper. "The cameras in this corridor have been experiencing 'technical difficulties' since three o'clock. A small contribution to the hospital’s building fund ensures that security is very understanding about these little glitches."
She lifted the pillow.
"They will find you in twenty minutes," she said. "The official cause will be a sudden pulmonary embolism. Quite common in patients with full-body casts and severe spinal trauma. Adrian will cry. The papers will run a lovely photo of you from the museum gala last year—the one where you wore that dreadful green dress that made you look like a leafy vegetable. And by next spring, the foundation will be whole again."
She leaned her weight into the pillow, pressing it down over my face.
The world went dark.
The smell of her perfume was the first thing that hit me—thick, chemical, suffocating. Then came the pressure. It wasn't just her physical strength; she was leaning her entire upper body onto her hands, using the edge of the bed for leverage.
Inside the cast, my lungs immediately began to signal panic. My ribs, already cracked and knit together with titanium pins, screamed as the pressure shifted my chest wall. I couldn't move my arms. I couldn't kick. My legs were dead weight in the plaster.
But I had my thumb.
I didn't try to fight her off. I knew I couldn't. Instead, I pressed the button on the device three times in rapid succession—the emergency signal Jonah had told me to use if things went south.
Click. Click. Click.
The air inside my mouth grew hot and thin. My vision, already limited to the blackness of the foam, began to fragment into bright, sparking stars. I could hear Cordelia’s breathing through the pillow—short, sharp grunts of exertion. She was old, but she was driven by forty years of unchecked entitlement and the cold certainty that she was entirely untouchable.
"Die, you little gray clerk," she hissed through the fabric. "Die and let my son go."
My heart monitor began to sound a continuous, high-pitched alarm as my heart rate crossed the 140 mark. The sound was deafening in the small room, a frantic, electronic shriek that should have brought a nurse running from three doors down.
But no one came. Cordelia had paid for forty minutes of silence, and she was getting every second of it.
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My lungs felt as though they were filled with hot sand. My mind began to drift away from the hospital room, back to the diner in Ohio, back to the sound of my mother’s voice calling out orders over the clatter of heavy ceramic mugs. Two eggs over easy, Lily. Watch the toast.
Then, the door to my room didn't just open—it shattered against the wall.
