My Pregnant Wife’s 8 Brothers and Father Beat Her So Badly We Lost Our Baby—Then Laughed in My Face Outside the ICU, Never Knowing I Was a Mafia Boss. One Text Brought Their Empire Crashing Down… But When I Saw Who They’d Secretly Paid Inside the Hospital, My Blood Ran Cold.

"You think Reeves was going to let her leave this room?"

Thomas Hart suddenly broke, his nerves shattering under the immense pressure. He pointed a trembling, manic finger at the immobilized surgeon. "It wasn't my idea! It was Dad's! Dad said if Clara woke up, she’d still have the files! She backed up the data to a remote cloud drive that only her biometric key could unlock! We had to keep her under! We just needed to keep her sedated until we could crack her phone!"

"Sedated?" I asked, looking back at Dr. Reeves.

One of my operatives wrenched the surgeon's arm back, forcing him to look me in the eye. Reeves’s face was slick with sweat, his breath hitching.

"Speak, Doctor," I commanded. "Every second you waste decreases the likelihood of your family waking up in their beds tomorrow."

Reeves broke instantly. "They... they told me she was brain-dead!" he sobbed, tears spilling down his pale cheeks. "Thomas told me she fell down the stairs, that she was in an irreversible vegetative state, and that the family wanted a compassionate terminal withdrawal! He offered me three hundred thousand to expedite the cardiac arrest so they wouldn't have to endure a prolonged hospice battle!"

"You're lying, you sick bastard!" Thomas lunged toward the doctor, but my operative caught him with a brutal, short-range elbow to the solar plexus. Thomas collapsed to the floor, gasping for air, curling into a fetal position.

"A compassionate withdrawal," I murmured.

I took the syringe from my operative's hand. I walked over to where Thomas lay writhing on the floor. I knelt beside him, placing the cold stainless-steel needle against the skin of his neck, right above the carotid artery.

Thomas froze. His eyes bulged with sheer, paralyzing horror. "Adrian... please... Adrian, no... we're brothers... we’re Clara’s brothers..."

"You lost the right to speak her name the moment you pinned her arms behind her back in your father's library," I whispered into his ear.

"Adrian, stop!"

A frail, cracked voice broke through the silence of the corridor.

I froze.

Through the observation window of the ICU, Clara was awake.

Her hospital gown hung loose over her fractured frame. One of her eyes was swollen shut, surrounded by deep, purple hematomas. Her lips were split, her breath hitched behind a nasal cannula. Her hand was pressed flat against the glass, her fingernails scraping weakly against the pane.

She was looking directly at me.