Chapter 2 - The Red Line
The fluorescent lights of the corridor blurred into blinding streaks of white as the gurney wheels screamed against the linoleum.
“Blood pressure is dropping—eighty over fifty!” Paige yelled, running alongside me with one hand clamped onto my trembling fingers and the other steadying an IV bag. “Heart tones are tachycardic! Dr. Morris, she’s bleeding out!”
I couldn’t feel my legs. All I felt was the unnatural, vice-like spasm clenching across my abdomen, a tearing agony that felt less like labor and more like something vital being ripped away from my spine.
*Abruptio placentae.* The medical term flashed through my panic-stricken mind. I had seen it dozens of times on this very floor. The placenta detaching from the uterine wall, starving the infant of oxygen while turning the mother’s womb into a cage of internal hemorrhage.
“Owen…” I gasped, choking on the copper taste flooding my mouth from where Grant Wexler’s ring had cut my inner cheek. “Owen, please… not our baby. Don’t let him take her…”
“Hannah, look at me!” Dr. Morris’s voice sliced through the ringing in my ears. He was fifty-eight, a seasoned obstetrician who had never once raised his voice in my presence. Right now, his face was pale, his jaw set in rigid terror. “Keep your eyes on me, Hannah. Don’t close them. Paige, prep OR Four immediately! Tell anesthesia we have a stat crash section. Thirty-three weeks, trauma-induced abruption!”
As they wheeled me past the nurses' station toward the double doors of the surgical suite, I caught a glimpse of Grant Wexler.
He was still standing by Room 614, straightening the silk cuffs of his tailored navy suit. His bodyguard had stepped in front of him, blocking the security guard who looked entirely paralyzed. Wexler didn’t run. He didn't look remorseful. He pulled a pristine linen handkerchief from his breast pocket, slowly wiped a speck of my blood from his knuckles, and brought a gold-cased phone to his ear.
His dark eyes locked onto mine through the swinging glass doors. In those cold, predatory depths, I didn't see regret—I saw calculation. He wasn't thinking about a dying woman or an unborn child. He was calculating the price of silence, figuring out which hospital board member he needed to buy before my shift ended.
“Clear the hallway!” an orderly roared, slamming the crash doors open.
The sterile chill of Operating Room Four hit me like an arctic wave. The sudden shift in temperature made my teeth chatter violently. Hands seized me, shifting my heavy, convulsing body from the gurney to the narrow operating table.
“Hannah, sweetie, can you hear me?” the anesthesiologist’s voice boomed above me as a mask was pressed down over my nose and mouth. The sweet, chemical scent of sevoflurane filled my lungs.
“Is she… is she alive?” I wept, my fingers clawing at the sterile drape. “Check her heart! Please, listen to her heart!”
The Doppler monitor’s frantic, hollow gallop echoed through the room.
*Thump-thump-thump-thump.*
One hundred and ten beats per minute.
Then ninety.
Then seventy.
“Bradycardia!” Paige screamed, her voice cracking. “Fetal distress! Heart rate is plummeting!”
“General anesthesia now!” Dr. Morris shouted, tearing open a pack of scalpel blades. “She can’t wait for a spinal! We have less than three minutes before irreversible brain damage! Betadine on the abdomen, now! Move!”
Darkness began creeping into the edges of my vision, thick and suffocating.
*I’m sorry, Owen,* my heart whispered into the void. *I tried to stand my ground. I tried to be brave like you.*
*“You don’t have to be brave alone, Han,”* a voice echoed in my memory—warm, raspy, smelling of cedarwood and the burnt soot of Station 42. Owen’s rough thumb brushing a tear from my cheek in our unfinished nursery. *“I’ve got the perimeter. You just bring our girl home.”*
“Oxygen saturation falling,” someone called from a million miles away.
“Scalpel to skin,” Dr. Morris commanded.
May you like
And then, the universe went black.
***
