"Fine! I'll just take Max and go join his father in the grave! Clearly someone here doesn't want us alive anyway!"
Leah snatched up a paring knife from the counter and pressed the blade against her wrist.
Donald lunged for it. "Leah, calm down! I'm the one who calls the shots in this house, and I already promised you. You'll get every cent!"
He wrestled the knife away, then pushed the money across the table toward her.
"This million is yours. Even if it means shortchanging my own daughter, I will never shortchange you and Max."
I stormed into the kitchen and came back with a cleaver. "I'd like to see who dares touch my daughter's ransom money today!"
Leah rushed at me, sobbing. "Then just kill me! Without that money, Max and I are dead anyway. Go ahead, hack me to pieces!"
She even thrust her neck forward on purpose.
"Come on! Right here! Do it!"
I had already lost all reason. I swung the cleaver straight at her throat.
Leah hadn't expected me to actually do it. Her entire body went rigid, frozen in place.
If Donald hadn't yanked her backward in that split second, the blade would have buried itself in her neck. Instead, it grazed past her nose, shearing off a sliver of flesh from the tip.
Leah clapped both hands over her bleeding nose and shrieked. "She's insane! Zoey's lost her mind! She's trying to kill me!"
I leveled the cleaver at both of them. "Anyone who touches my daughter's ransom money today dies. That's a promise."
Donald held out his hands, palms up. "Honey, calm down. Put the knife down. Give it to me."
"I can't calm down. I need to save Sabina!"
"Okay, okay. We'll go save Sabina. All the money is yours. Nobody's touching it."
He stuffed the cash back into the bag, then slid it toward me, slow and careful.
"It's all yours. Every dollar. Just calm down."
"Put the knife down, and we'll go get Sabina right now."
My fingers closed around the bag, and for the first time, a sliver of steadiness returned to my chest.
I picked up the bag and turned for the door. That was when something slammed into the back of my skull.
Blinding pain exploded through my head. My legs buckled and I hit the floor.
"Leah, what are you doing?! You could kill her!"
"She'd deserve it! Who told her to run off with all that money just to save that little money pit!"
"That's everything this family has! If she hands it all to the kidnappers, how are we supposed to survive?"
"Mom and Dad need their medication. Max still needs his trip abroad and tuition at the private academy. This whole family can't go down in flames because of her worthless brat. Why should we?"
Rage burned through me. I tried to push myself up, tried to scream back at her, but my body wouldn't cooperate. I couldn't even form a complete sentence.
Donald made three thousand dollars a month. Barely enough for his own pocket money. Leah didn't work at all.
His parents were both on welfare. Two hundred dollars a month between them.
I was the one keeping this entire household alive.
The three million dollars in that bag came from selling my parents' house. It had nothing to do with any of them. Not one cent.
And now that shameless parasite wanted to claim it as her own, while my spineless husband stood there protecting her.
If anything happened to my daughter, I would haunt them from beyond the grave.
"Relax, she's not going to die." Leah's voice floated above me, casual and unbothered. "If I hadn't stopped her, she would've handed every last dollar to those kidnappers, and we'd never see a penny of it again."
A sudden, frantic pounding rattled the front door. Donald opened it. Standing on the doorstep was Leah's brother, Thomas Fox.
"Sis, you said the second I closed on the house, you'd wire the money right back to me. So where is it?"
"Oh, you know how it is. The money hit Zoey's account and she went and withdrew the whole thing in cash before I could do anything." Leah gestured at the bag on the floor. "It's right here. Let me get it to you now."
