Chapter 4 - CHAPTER 3: RESCUE IN THE STORM
The heavy iron wrench struck Marcos across the wrist with a sharp crack. He screamed in pain, dropping his weapon onto the wet asphalt. Before he could react, I hit him again across the shoulder, sending him stumbling backward into the highway barrier.
I didn’t recognize myself. The terrified woman who had cowered inside a medical waste box hours ago was gone, replaced by a fierce instinct to survive and protect the girl inside that car.
I yanked open the rear door of the black sedan. Renata was sitting in the back seat, her eyes wide with terror, her hands bound with plastic zip-ties.
“Valeria?!” she gasped, looking at my short black hair and rain-soaked, mud-spattered clothes. “Is that you? What is going on?!”
“Get out! Now!” I pulled a small folding knife from Lucía’s duffel bag, sliced through her wrist ties, and dragged her toward our car.
Marcos groaned on the ground, struggling to get back up while reaching for his fallen phone. Lucía kicked the phone deep into the highway drainage ditch, slammed our sedan into reverse, and pulled around the stalled vehicle.
Renata scrambled into the back seat of Lucía’s car as we tore away into the dark night, leaving Marcos stranded at the toll plaza.
“Valeria, you’re bleeding!” Renata cried, pointing to a gash on my palm from the container back at the hospital. “Mom said you went crazy! She said you refused to save Rodrigo and attacked a nurse!”
“Listen to me very carefully, Renata,” I said, turning in my seat to face her directly. “Your brother is not dying of kidney failure. He owes millions to an illegal organ syndicate. Dr. Beltrán fabricated his test results. I was never going to donate a kidney tonight—they were going to harvest my heart and declare me dead from surgical complications.”
Renata shook her head in violent denial. “No... no! Mom loves you! Rodrigo loves you! They wouldn't—”
“Look at this,” Lucía interrupted, holding up her phone while maintaining control of the steering wheel. She opened the digitized file we had extracted from the hospital server. “This is your medical profile, Renata. It was updated three days ago by Dr. Beltrán. Look at the status label.”
Renata leaned forward, her eyes scanning the official document. At the bottom, marked in red letters under the header Secondary Harvesting Contingency, was her name, her exact blood parameters, and a match rating for a wealthy private client in Europe.
“They marked you as a back-up,” I said softly, my voice breaking. “If I escaped or died before they could harvest my heart, you were next. Elvira signed as your legal guarantor under an emergency power-of-attorney clause she snuck into your university financial aid papers.”
Renata collapsed into the back seat, pulling her knees to her chest as sob after sob wracked her body. The illusion of her loving, protective family shattered into dust in a single second.
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“Why?” she sobbed. “Why would Mom do this to us?”
“Because Elvira isn’t just Rodrigo’s mother,” Lucía said quietly, looking into the rearview mirror. “She’s the one who built his gambling debts in the first place. Elvira is a senior broker for El Enclave.”
