If you ever touch my wife again, I will make sure you vanish from every medical registry in North America before sunrise.
The heavy door to Arthur’s private office creaked open, swallowed by the profound darkness within. Lightning flashed outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, briefly illuminating the room in stark, flickering detail: his oversized desk, the sterile whiteboards covered in complex formulas, the anatomical models. Then, darkness again.
Arthur stood silhouetted against the fleeting light, his posture rigid. He hadn’t heard me over the storm, or perhaps he was simply waiting.
“Nora,” he said, his voice calm, chillingly so. “You’re out of your room.”
“I know everything, Arthur,” I said, my voice steady despite the tremor in my hands. Maya was behind me, tucked just out of sight.
He turned, the lightning illuminating his face for a split second – a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes.
“Do you?” he asked, a faint smile playing on his lips. “Do you truly understand what’s happening?”
“You engineered our marriage,” I accused, the words a raw wound in the dark. “My rare blood enzymes. All of it, a calculation to host your cure.”
Arthur let out a soft, humorless laugh, the sound swallowed by the storm. “My family carries a fatal genetic illness, Nora. One that would erase generations of our legacy, everything I’ve built. You, my dear, were the only viable host. The only path to salvation. Yes, I engineered it. And I would do it again.”
His confession, delivered with such cold, clinical pride, stripped away the last vestiges of love I had for the man. My hands fumbled in the dark, pulling out the crumpled printout of the forgotten contract.
“Clause 14-B,” I spat, holding it aloft as a flash of lightning illuminated the damning words. “Your trial rights expired six months ago. Every dose you gave me was illegal. You have no authority over me, Arthur. No authority over our child.”
Arthur paused, a beat of silence filled only by the roaring wind. Another soft laugh, this one colder, more resigned.
“Ah, the fine print,” he mused. “Always the fine print.” He stepped closer, his shadow looming. “You believe you’ve won, don’t you? That you’ve freed yourself.”
The air crackled with a malevolent energy, mirroring the storm outside.
“The gene therapy, Nora,” Arthur continued, his voice dropping to a whisper that still cut through the thunder. “The illegal gene therapy… it’s the only thing holding your fetus’s malformed heart together. Without it, without those daily doses you so abhor, your baby cannot survive to full term.”
My world tilted. The air left my lungs. The victory, the freedom I had just claimed, tasted like ash. I had just won my complete moral freedom, yes. I had destroyed Arthur’s insidious control. But in doing so, I had guaranteed that my unborn baby could not survive.
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