PART 3: SURVIVAL AND THE RECKONING
The contractions hit me like a freight train, but I couldn't pass out. Not yet. On my screen, the rats were finally turning on each other in their red-stained cage.
"This was your idea!" Daniel screamed, violently shoving Mara as he desperately bashed a brass bookend against the unbreakable glass. "You said she was stupid!"
"She is bluffing!" Mara shrieked back, her red-dyed face contorted in rage. She hurled a crystal vase at the security camera. "You’re going to die down there, Elise! And your little bastard is going to die with you!"
Panting through the pain, I pressed the intercom button one last time.
"You always ignored the details, Mara. The pacemaker I tapped to trigger the lockdown? It also sent an automated SOS to the police... along with the audio of you threatening to freeze me to death. They’ve been listening for twenty minutes."
Dead silence fell over the study. Daniel turned ghost-white.
Right on cue, the piercing wail of police sirens shattered the night. Red and blue lights flashed wildly through the cracks in the steel shutters.
BOOM! The mansion's front doors were blown open by a SWAT team. Heavy boots thundered up the stairs. The study doors were kicked off their hinges. Dozens of laser sights painted Mara and Daniel's chests.
"Get on the ground! NOW!"
Daniel collapsed, sobbing like a baby. Mara stood frozen, her dignity shattered, looking like a red-stained monster as the cold steel of handcuffs snapped around her wrists.
Ten minutes later, the cellar door swung open. Paramedics rushed into the dark with flashlights, finding me sweating but safe inside my thermal cocoon.
As they wheeled my stretcher through the main foyer, we crossed paths with Mara and Daniel being dragged out by the police. Mara looked up. She opened her mouth to curse me—or maybe to beg. I will never know.
I just smiled, rested my hand on my belly, and looked right past her.
May you like
Later that night, in a bright, warm hospital room surrounded by guards, my daughter was born. Her loud, fierce cry echoed through the halls.
Mara tried to bury me in the ice. But she didn't realize that in the dark, I had forged an empire for my daughter—and left my sister to burn in the ashes of her own greed.
