Chapter 4 - The Ticking Clock
Sirens wailed in the distance, cutting through the heavy Manhattan downpour. Someone—one of the caterers or a terrified bridesmaid—had ignored Julian Sterling’s orders and called emergency services.
"Grace, look at me! Look at my eyes!" I slapped her cold cheeks gently, my own tears dripping onto her pale skin.
Her eyelids fluttered, barely opening, revealing dull, unseeing pupils. Her pulse beneath my fingers was erratic, faint, fluttering like a dying moth. She was hemorrhaging internally. The white silk of my tuxedo jacket, wrapped around her waist, was rapidly darkening with a bloom of dark red blood.
"Lucas..." she whispered, her voice bubbling with fluid. "I couldn't... let you marry her. Not today."
"Why today, Grace?" I choked out, cradling her head against my chest, desperately trying to keep her warm. "Why did you run today? Why didn't you go to the police?"
"Because today... was the deadline," she whispered, her bloody fingers clutching a piece of paper she had hidden inside her bra, pulling it out with the last ounce of her strength.
It was a crumpled legal notice. A medical authorization form with Julian Sterling’s personal attorney’s stamp on the header.
"They brought a doctor... to the cottage... yesterday morning," Grace gasped, her breath coming in ragged, hitching sobs. "Brooke came with him. They had papers... declaring me mentally unfit. Incompetent. Brooke... she had a surrogate adoption form already signed with a forged signature."
My blood ran colder than the rain outside. "What are you saying?"
"They were going to induce me, Lucas," she cried, her voice cracking into pure, primal horror. "Tomorrow morning. They were going to induce the birth in an unlicensed private clinic in the Catskills. Brooke... she told me the baby would be declared an abandoned orphan. She was going to legally adopt him... as her own child with you. And me..."
Grace choked, a fresh wave of blood escaping the corner of her lips.
"And you what, Grace? What were they going to do to you?"
"They had a commitment order for an asylum in Pennsylvania," Grace whispered, looking straight into my eyes with sheer terror. "Long-term psychiatric lockup under a false name. She looked me in the eye... Brooke looked me in the eye while touching my stomach, and said: *'You will never see the sun again, Grace. Lucas will raise our son with me, and he will never even know your name.'*"
A suffocating silence fell over the small circle at the altar.
I turned slowly to look at Brooke Sterling.
She wasn't denying it. She was standing there in her two-hundred-thousand-dollar wedding gown, her jaw tight, her eyes gleaming with a terrifying, psychopathic pride.
"It was a brilliant plan," Brooke murmured, not a single trace of shame in her voice. "You wanted a family, Lucas. You wanted a son. She couldn't give him the life he deserved. But I could. He would have had trust funds, private planes, Harvard, the Sterling name. I was going to raise him to be just like you. I was saving him!"
"You're a monster," I said, the words feeling heavy and poisonous in my mouth.
"I did it for love!" she screamed, her voice ricocheting off the church walls, alarming the two NYPD officers who suddenly burst through the side doors, their service weapons unholstered.
"NYPD! Nobody move! Step back from the victim!" the lead officer shouted.
Behind them, four EMTs sprinted down the aisle pushing a collapsible gurney, their orange trauma kits swinging.
"Over here!" I yelled, waving my arm frantically. "She’s thirty-four weeks pregnant! Internal bleeding, multiple blunt trauma injuries, and in active labor!"
Julian Sterling stepped toward the police officers, holding out his gold-crested business card. "Officers, stand down. I am Julian Sterling. This is a private family dispute, an unstable former employee trespassing on a private ceremony—"
"Get the hell out of the way!" the lead paramedic, a burly woman with a fierce glare, shoved past Julian without breaking stride. She dropped beside Grace, immediately placing an oxygen mask over her face and slicing open the sleeve of her coat to start an IV.
"Vitals are crashing!" the paramedic yelled to her partner. "Blood pressure is 70 over 40! Heart rate 145 and thready! We have severe placental abruption! We need to move NOW! Prep for immediate surgical delivery at Bellevue Trauma!"
They lifted Grace onto the gurney. As they did, her hand slipped from mine.
"Ava..." Grace mumbled into the plastic mask, her eyes rolling toward the little girl who was screaming hysterically beside the pews. "Ava..."
"I have her, Grace," I promised, lunging forward and picking Ava up, hoisting the sobbing five-year-old into my arms, pressing her face into my neck. "I have her. I will never let anyone hurt her again. I swear on my life."
The paramedics turned and began sprinting down the aisle with the gurney.
I moved to follow them, but a heavy hand clamped onto my shoulder.
May you like
"You take one step out of this church, Vance, and your life is over," Julian Sterling hissed into my ear, his fingers digging like steel talons into my collarbone. "You sign the non-disclosure agreements right now, or I will destroy your firm before the market opens on Monday. I will tie you up in lawsuits until you don't have a dollar left to buy a sandwich. You walk away from that woman, or you are dead to this city."
***
