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Luna Noa thought she could outsmart everyone—the guards, the doctors, and certainly the Spencers, who had abandoned her the moment the gavel fell. But her greatest con may be her last. Trapped behind bars in a maximum-security women’s facility, Luna was gambling everything on one final lie: a meticulously faked pregnancy emergency.

The plan was simple, brutal, and utterly selfish. She had used stolen medical knowledge to simulate a sudden, life-threatening internal crisis—all designed to get her outside the prison walls, even just for a moment. Her goal was to swap places with her visiting lawyer’s unsuspecting assistant, allowing her to disappear into the city while the assistant took her place behind bars.

Her only accomplice was her cellmate, Grace, a master manipulator serving a life sentence for corporate espionage and an unexplained, fiery incident involving a yacht. Grace joined the game, eager for the distraction and promised a hefty sum wired into an offshore account.

Two master manipulators. One deadly plan. But the line between ally and enemy blurred the moment Grace realized Luna had used her earlier—betraying Grace in a smaller, previous prison scheme to secure better commissary privileges.

The Final Deception

The signal was the scream. Loud, piercing, and terrifyingly convincing.

“My baby! I’m losing the baby!” Luna shrieked, clutching her abdomen on the cold concrete floor of their cell.

Guards rushed in. Luna played the part of the panicked, failing mother-to-be perfectly. She was pale, sweating profusely from pills she’d smuggled in that induced a rapid heart rate, and her breathing was shallow. A nurse on staff quickly confirmed the crisis: Tachycardia, severe cramping, and potential internal hemorrhage.

The only thing Luna needed to stabilize her condition for transport was a dose of her prescribed anti-anxiety medication, which she pretended to take daily.

As the burly guards, already frustrated by the high-profile nature of Luna’s conviction, frantically prepared her for the short trip to the prison infirmary, Grace moved with lethal efficiency.

“Here, honey,” Grace cooed, holding out the small, paper cup containing the necessary pill and a sip of water. “Breathe deep. It’ll be okay.”

Luna swallowed the pill instantly, her eyes bright with triumph. She had done it. Grace was weak. The Spencers were fools.

But Grace’s eyes, fixed on Luna’s retreating form, were cold and venomous. She reached into her pocket—a pocket Luna never thought to search—and pulled out an identical pill. She held it to the light, then crushed it beneath her heavy boot, scattering the harmless white powder.

“You won’t outplay me twice, Luna,” Grace muttered under her breath, a wicked smile spreading across her face. “You took my money and my shot at parole. You were getting out, but you won’t be enjoying it.”

The pill Luna swallowed wasn’t her anxiety medication. It was a fast-acting, high-dosage cardiac depressant—a sophisticated poison Grace had hoarded during her years in the prison laundry, stolen from a shipment intended for the prison’s geriatric unit.

Mid-Transport Collapse

The escape unfolded exactly as Luna planned, until the moment it didn’t.

She was half-carried, half-dragged by two guards through the long, echoing corridor toward the prison’s emergency bay. The scent of antiseptic and stale air filled the narrow space.

Just a few more yards, Luna thought, her heart hammering wildly (a genuine side effect of the poison now working against the effect of her initial stimulant). The infirmary. The transfer papers. The assistant.

She was rehearsing her next line—a plea for water, a sudden dizziness—when the depressant hit her system with the force of a wrecking ball. The hammering in her chest stuttered, slowed, and then felt like it stopped entirely.

Moments later, Luna collapsed mid-transport—but before she hit the ground, her body arched in a sudden, violent spasm.

The two guards struggled to hold her weight. One let out a startled shout.

“She’s seizing!” the nurse running ahead screamed, turning back in horror. “Get the crash cart!”

Luna’s eyes rolled back in her head. Her skin, already pale, took on a blue-gray hue. She was barely breathing. Her meticulously planned, fake medical emergency had become terrifyingly real.

The Second Con

The infirmary instantly plunged into a frantic scene of resuscitation. Defibrillator paddles were charged. Adrenaline was pumped. Guards were ordered out.

Meanwhile, back in the cell block, Grace watched the ensuing chaos with cool satisfaction. Her revenge was complete. Luna would either die, or be left a vegetable—either way, she wouldn’t enjoy her freedom.

But what Grace, and everyone else, didn’t know was the second, even more dangerous layer to Luna’s deception.

Luna hadn’t planned to use her lawyer’s assistant to escape. She planned to use Grace.

Hours before the incident, anticipating Grace’s inevitable attempt at revenge—Luna knew her cellmate too well—Luna had left a trail.

When she was pretending to cry out for help, Luna had slipped a small, metallic object beneath Grace’s mattress: a GPS tracker and a coded burner phone. These items were highly illegal, and finding them would land Grace in solitary confinement, or worse.

More importantly, Luna didn’t just swallow the pill Grace offered; she palmed it.

The agonizing collapse wasn’t caused by Grace’s poison. The lethal dose was still clutched tightly in Luna’s spasming hand, hidden beneath her black funeral dress.

The sudden, violent collapse and seizure? That was caused by a highly concentrated, fast-acting muscle relaxant Luna had prepared for herself—a drug that simulates cardiac distress and seizure activity but leaves no trace after a few minutes, if survived. She needed the collapse to be so convincing, so catastrophic, that the doctors wouldn’t stabilize her inside the prison, but immediately transfer her to an external, unprepared city hospital.

⏳ The Window of Opportunity

The panic worked. The prison doctor, terrified of a high-profile death on his watch, bypassed the prison clinic entirely.

“No time! We need the cardiac unit at St. Jude’s!” he barked into the radio.

Luna was bundled into an ambulance, escorted by two heavily armed guards. Her pulse was erratic, her condition critical.

Inside the ambulance, while the young paramedic desperately tried to fit an oxygen mask over Luna’s face, her eyes fluttered open—just enough for her to see the face of the medic.

The medic wasn’t just a medic. It was Max Spencer—the family black sheep, whom Luna had secretly promised the Spencers’ biggest corporate secret in exchange for his help.

Max glanced at the two armed guards in the front compartment, then down at Luna. He saw the flicker of wicked triumph in her eyes, despite the sweat and foam.

“You’re a maniac, Luna,” he whispered, quickly injecting a neutralizing agent into her IV line—not to save her life from Grace’s poison (which wasn’t there), but to counteract her own powerful muscle relaxant.

Luna managed a tiny, almost invisible smile. She reached her seemingly lifeless hand up, and quickly, silently pressed a hidden panic button sewn into the lining of Max’s paramedic jacket.

This button didn’t call for help. It was a remote EMP trigger designed to temporarily scramble the nearby signal box, disabling the ambulance’s GPS and cell communication for exactly sixty seconds—just long enough for the planned, violent ambush to take place on the deserted overpass ahead.

Luna hadn’t just double-crossed Grace. She had orchestrated a triple-cross. Her ‘ally,’ Grace, was now heading for solitary confinement, thinking she had won. Her ‘savior,’ Max, thought they were merely doing a quick swap at the hospital.

But Luna’s plan was never to be swapped. It was to be liberated. Completely.

The Spencers had abandoned her? Fine. She would make them pay for every minute she spent behind bars. And she was counting on Max’s greed to ensure his loyalty, because Max didn’t know the real plan was about to start right now.

The ambulance sirens wailed into the night. Ahead, the overpass was dark. The sixty-second window had just opened. Luna had gambled everything on a deadly lie, and now, the house of cards was falling down—and she was ready to step out of the wreckage.