The Price of Oxygen: How My Husband Poisoned My Veins, Abandoned Our Dying Child, and Found His Reckoning on a Vancouver Highway

Before we moved on Julian Holloway, there was one final, unavoidable debt of truth that had to be collected.

Marcus Hayes and Vance escorted me to the federal detention annex beneath the US District Court.

Tristan Holloway had not yet been transferred to Colorado.

Because of the ferry shooting and the biological warfare disclosures, he had been pulled from the transport line and held in a subterranean, soundproof interrogation suite.

I walked into the observation booth behind the one-way glass.

Tristan was sitting at a steel table bolted to the concrete floor.

His arms were secured to heavy iron rings, his feet clamped in orange shackle boots.

The tailored Italian suits were gone, replaced by a drab, oversized orange jumpsuit.

His nose was crooked—broken from his crash on the Sea-to-Sky highway—and his eyes were sunken, hollowed out by fear and despair.

He looked like a ghost of the arrogant, beautiful architect who had sworn to love me until death did us part.

I picked up the intercom receiver and pressed the button.

"Look at me, Tristan," I commanded through the glass.

Tristan’s head jerked up.

When his eyes found my silhouette behind the mirror, he began to tremble so violently that the chains rattled against the iron table.

"Reese..." his voice came through the speaker, raspy and cracking. "Reese, please... you have to tell them."

"You have to tell them I didn't want to do it!"

"You gave our son poison every single day for six months," I said, my voice completely devoid of pity.

"You watched me lose the ability to walk."

"You watched me crawl across the kitchen floor while you stood in the doorway, drinking coffee with Chloe Davenport."

"Julian forced me!" Tristan screamed, slamming his cuffed fists onto the table.

"You don't know him, Reese! You don't know what my father is!"

"When I was twelve years old, he had my mother committed to a private asylum in Vermont because she found his balance sheets!"

"He killed her with synthetic tranquilizers and called it a stroke!"

"If I said no to him, he was going to take Leo anyway, and he was going to erase me from the face of the earth!"

"You chose your inheritance over your own child's life," I said coldly.

"I thought Leo would survive it!" Tristan wept, tears and snot running down his face unchecked.

"The computer models said children had an eighty percent survival rate!"

"I was trying to keep us wealthy! I was trying to save our future!"

"Our future ended the moment you poured the first drop into his bottle," I told him.

Tristan slumped forward against the cold steel, sobbing uncontrollably.

"He’s not going to stop, Reese..." Tristan choked out between gasps.

"My father doesn't fly into Seattle with lawyers."

"He flew in on his private Gulfstream with a tactical retrieval team from South Africa."

"He’s not going to Boeing Field to negotiate with Marcus Hayes."

I leaned closer to the glass, my eyes narrowing.

"Where is he, Tristan?"

"He’s at the private deep-water marina on Orcas Island," Tristan whispered, staring at the floor in sheer terror.

"His private mega-yacht, the *Sovereign Dawn*."

"It’s registered under a Panamanian maritime charter."

"It carries an offshore surgical suite and its own high-speed telecommunications relay directly to our patent servers in Zurich."

"If he reaches international waters outside the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the US government cannot touch him."

"And he has a secondary dead-man's protocol."

"What dead-man's protocol, Tristan?" I demanded, my heart dropping.

"If the Seattle authorities try to seize *Aethelgard*," Tristan whispered, looking up at the mirror with haunted, hollow eyes, "he will wipe the antidote synthesis records from the master cloud."