Chapter 3 - The Race Against Time
The sound of shattering glass tore through the darkness of my mind.
I didn't know how much time had passed. Minutes? Hours? My skin felt like ice, my clothing soaked through with fluid and blood. My body was shivering violently, an involuntary physical response to massive blood loss and hypothermia.
"Clara! Oh God, Clara!"
A hands-on, frantic voice boomed through the hallway. Heavy combat boots sprinted across the hardwood floor.
It wasn't Ryan.
Through my swollen, heavy eyelids, I saw a tall figure in a wet leather jacket drop to his knees beside me. It was Marcus Sterling—Ryan’s best friend since high school and a former paramedic who ran a private security firm in town.
"Marcus..." I managed to whisper, my lips cracked and blue.
"Don't talk! Don't move!" Marcus shouted, his fingers instantly flying to my neck to check my thready pulse. His hands were shaking—a rare sight for a man who had worked trauma rooms for a decade. "I got the cloud alert! The motion sensor on your security system flagged an emergency biometric failure on Ryan's trust account, and then the camera dropped a high-stress impact notification to my emergency portal!"
He threw off his heavy jacket and wrapped it around my freezing upper body. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his radio, and screamed into it.
"Dispatch! This is Sterling! Code Red at 142 Elm Street! I have a twenty-six-year-old female, eight months pregnant with twins! Severe blunt force trauma to the abdomen, massive fluid loss, active premature labor! I need an Advanced Life Support unit and a pediatric trauma team on scene IMMEDIATELY!"
"Marcus..." I gripped his sleeve with every ounce of strength I had left. "Brianna... Patricia... they did this..."
Marcus froze, looking into my bloodshot eyes. "What did you say?"
"They struck me... they tried to take the money... they left me to die..."
Marcus’s jaw clenched so hard I heard his teeth grind together. His eyes darted to the hidden camera above the pantry, then to the blood smeared across the floorboards.
"I have the footage," Marcus said, his voice dropping into an icy, dangerous register. "The moment the alert hit my phone, the cloud auto-synced the video to my off-site server. I saw what they did, Clara. Every single second of it."
The blare of sirens echoed in the distance, growing louder, cutting through the roaring mountain storm outside.
Two paramedics burst through the broken front door carrying a trauma stretcher and medical bags. Within seconds, my quiet kitchen was invaded by bright tactical lights, plastic wrappings being torn open, and urgent medical commands.
"BP is sixty over forty!" a paramedic yelled. "Fetal heart rates are dropping! We need to move her NOW!"
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As they lifted me onto the gurney, a wave of horrific pain rendered me unconscious again, but not before I heard Marcus speaking into his phone, his tone colder than the blizzard outside.
"Ryan," Marcus said to the person on the line. "Get on a private jet right now. Your sister and your mother just tried to murder your wife and your children."
