I felt a tightness in my chest. A wave of intense, blinding heat washed over me, followed by the sensation of a liquid pooling under the sheets. The pain returned, ten times worse than before, like a red-hot knife twisting in my abdomen.
“Dad!” I screamed, clutching my stomach as the monitors went haywire. “Something’s wrong! It hurts! It hurts so much!”
The door burst open. Dr. Evans rushed in, followed by four nurses.
"She's hemorrhaging!" a nurse shouted, roughly pulling back the blanket. The pristine white sheets were rapidly turning a deep, terrifying crimson red.
"Get her to the operating room right now!" Dr. Evans ordered, her voice filled with panic. "The placenta has completely detached! We're losing the fetal heartbeat! Call the NICU team!"
My father was pulled away as the nurses opened my bed and rushed me out into the hallway. The overhead lights flashed like strobe lights. I was choking in pain, the sound of alarms blaring in my ears, my father's desperate voice fading into the distance as he screamed for the doctors to save his daughter.
We burst through the double doors of the operating room. The metallic, bright glare of the surgical lights blinded me.
“Get her ready for general anesthesia! We don’t have time for an epidural!” Dr. Evans shouted as a plastic mask was thrust toward my face. “Count down from ten, Anna. Hang in there, your baby will come.”
“Ten… nine…” I whispered, as darkness crept stealthily around the edges of my vision.
Just as darkness was about to envelop me, the heavy wooden doors of the operating room burst open. A man in a blood-spattered surgical gown stormed in, shoving a nurse aside. But it wasn't the specialist from Johns Hopkins.
I saw the man's face through the haze of the anesthesia. My heart stopped.
It was David's uncle, Arthur Vance, senior partner at the most corrupt law firm in the state. He wasn't a doctor. He wore a surgical mask hastily tied over his face, his eyes wild, and he held a silver medical syringe hidden under a stolen hospital gown.
Our eyes met as he lunged towards my IV line.
