Chapter 20 - The Birth Pangs
|
Agents swarmed Matthias, forcing him brutally into the snow and clicking heavy steel handcuffs onto his wrists. He shouted threats, promising to destroy me with his family’s lawyers, but his words were swallowed by the roar of the helicopter above.
Daniel and Mara ran out from their hiding spot, rushing to my side just as the most violent, agonizing contraction I had ever felt tore through my entire body.
My knees buckled. I collapsed into the snow, crying out as a warm rush of fluid soaked through my dress. My water had broken.
“Get an ambulance!” Daniel screamed at the nearby agents, dropping to the ground beside me. “She’s in labor!”
The pain was blinding, a terrifying, all-consuming fire. I gripped Daniel’s hand so tightly I thought I might break his fingers. Mara knelt on my other side, speaking softly, trying to keep my breathing steady.
Through the haze of agony, I saw Matthias being dragged toward a police cruiser. He stopped struggling for a moment, turning his head to look back at me writhing in the snow.
He wasn't looking at me with defeat. He was smiling.
“You think this ends with me?” Matthias shouted over the sirens, his voice carrying a chilling, prophetic certainty. “The deed doesn't just hold toxic soil, Evelyn! Check the basement of the south silo! My father didn't buy that land for development!”
An agent shoved his head down, forcing him into the back of the car, slamming the door shut.
My vision blurred as the paramedics finally arrived, loading me onto a stretcher. The flashing red lights painted the toxic wasteland in a rhythmic, bloody pulse.
May you like
As they lifted me into the back of the ambulance, I looked toward the crumbling, rusted structure of the south silo looming in the darkness. My husband was going to prison, and my daughter was about to be born prematurely into a shattered world.
But as another contraction hit, dragging me into the darkness, Matthias’s final words echoed in my mind. The nightmare of the affair and the environmental fraud was over, but the true horror of my grandfather’s hidden legacy was still waiting in the dark.
