“Help——”
“Julius, please—she's trying to stab me!”
Julius turned to the bodyguards outside the door without a second's pause：“Stop her!”
Huge men swarmed me in an instant, pinning me down from every side. I fought like a rabid dog, slamming and thrashing in every direction, screaming over and over,
“Let go of me! Let go!”
“I need to see my daughter, she's waiting for me! She's waiting for me!”
Tears streamed down uncontrollably, but Julius just looked at me with open disgust.
He picked up a syringe of sedative from the instrument tray and walked toward me. I shook my head, desperate.
“No——”
The needle drove into my skin, ice-cold and merciless. The room blurred at the edges.
Before I lost consciousness, I heard Julius's voice, flat and remote：
“My wife has lost her mind. Have her sent to the psychiatric hospital.”
In the haze, I dreamed. A long, long dream.
In the dream I was back to the day I first found out I was pregnant. Julius's whole face lit up—the dazed, helpless joy of a man about to become a father for the first time.
He pulled me tight against him：“Eve, this is wonderful! We're finally having a baby!”
“I promise, from now on I'll protect you both. I won't let anything hurt either of you.”
Ten months later, I gave birth to our daughter, and Julius still had eyes for no one but us.
Every day he came home on time and cooked for us. He cancelled every dinner, every client function, just so he could be the one rocking her to sleep.
Back then, a hangnail on my finger could make him ache. A single whimper from Stella and he'd hover over her for hours……
Then Effie Swanson appeared, and everything changed.
He stopped being the husband who cherished me,
stopped being the father who doted on Stella……
The dream shifted. Stella's voice cut through, raw with pain：
“Mommy, it hurts……save me……please save me……”
I reached for her, frantic, but my hands closed on nothing. I jolted awake. The air reeked of disinfectant.
My head was still thick with fog as I ripped the IV needle from my hand and stumbled toward the ER.
I searched every bed. Stella was nowhere.
I was standing there, lost, not knowing what to do, when I caught the nurses talking among themselves.
“That little girl with the heart condition yesterday—so tragic. Never got a donor in the end, and then they went and stripped skin off her……”
My chest seized. I grabbed the nearest nurse by the arm, shaking：
“What do you mean? The little girl with the heart condition—where is she?”
The nurse flinched, stammering：
“There was……there was a little girl with a heart condition yesterday. She was supposed to get a transplant, but the donor fell through and she died. They couldn't reach her family……”
“She should've been kept in the morgue, but……our hospital director's kid got some skin scraped off, so they cut a graft from her face……then dumped the body on the dirt mound out back……”
Every drop of blood in my body went cold. I ran toward the back hill like a woman possessed.
Stella's smile kept flashing through my mind—all I could do was beg for a miracle……
But when I saw that small, familiar shape lying on the dirt pile, my legs gave out and I dropped straight to my knees.
“Stella——”
I crawled to her and pulled her body tight against my chest,
my trembling hand touching a face so ruined I could no longer tell how much of it had once looked like mine.
I couldn't hold it back any longer.
Blood surged up my throat and spilled from my mouth.
