Chapter 13
The muddy water of the Pantanal was no longer just a threat from outside; it already covered my ankles inside the small room. Cold, thick, and heavy with the smell of rotting plants and death.
Two days had dragged by since the blue flash of the short circuit swallowed the hallway light and let Célia reach the canoe at the back of the kitchen.
For two days and two nights, I stayed locked in that room, counting the pounding of the rain, the footsteps of the henchmen, and each new stair step swallowed by the rising water.
Nicanor had kept the generator running in fits and starts and postponed my death because he wanted the river to rise high enough to carry the body away without leaving a trace.
Heavy footsteps.
The sound of water splashing violently on the wooden stairs told me someone was coming up.
Not with the caution of someone there to fix a generator, but with the furious haste of a predator who’d just lost patience.
Nicanor wasn’t going to wait for the flood to finish the job.
Confirmation of Célia’s escape had made him paranoid.
The foreman was coming to finish it himself.
I retreated until my back hit the damp plank wall.
Panic tried to freeze my blood, but the instant fear threatened to suffocate me, a wave of instinctive, savage heat radiated from deep in my belly.
I was carrying a child. My child and the child of the man who dominated my thoughts even when I hated him most.
I pressed both hands to my belly, closing my eyes for a split second.
“You’re not going to die today,” I whispered into the darkness, my voice trembling but filled with a fierce promise. “Mommy won’t let him touch you.”
The civilized woman and the veterinarian in a clean lab coat disappeared. What remained in that flooded room was pure maternal survival instinct.
I groped blindly across the floor. The dirty water hid the debris, but my hands found the hole under the bed.
I ripped up one of the loose floorboards with all the strength my exhausted arms could muster.
The rotten wood gave way with a crack. At the end of the board, a long, rusty nail jutted out like a steel claw. It was my only weapon.
I gripped the board with both hands, positioning myself behind the door, feeling the icy water rise to my shins.
“You devil doctor!” Nicanor’s roar came from the other side of the hallway, thick with fury and the sour smell of cheap cacha?a seeping through the cracks. “What did you do?! The old woman’s gone!”
The metal doorknob rattled as he forced it. The latch held, but Nicanor had no intention of using keys.
A brutal kick shook the entire wall. The old lock cracked. The second kick tore the wood around the frame, and the door flew open with a violent jolt, nearly crushing my shoulder against the wall.
The beam of white light from a powerful flashlight cut through the darkness, sweeping over the empty bed and the murky water on the floor.
Nicanor stood in the doorway, his dark rain cape glistening, a long, sharp hunting knife reflecting the light in his right hand.
He wasn’t holding a firearm; Jurandir had been clear: my death needed to look like an accidental drowning or a disappearance in the flood.
Bullets left holes for forensics to find.
“Thought you’d escape in the dark, you wretch?” he spat, advancing into the room.
I didn’t wait for him to find me with the flashlight.
With a scream I didn’t recognize as my own, I leaped from the shadows. I raised the board with both hands and brought it down with all the violence my adrenaline allowed, aiming straight at the face illuminated by the flashlight’s edge.
The rusty nail tore through the foreman’s cheek, and the impact of the wood against his shoulder threw him off balance.
Nicanor let out an animalistic roar of pain. The flashlight flew from his left hand, falling into the water with a splash and illuminating the mud from below in a ghostly glow.
But my strength was nothing against the brutality of that man.
Before I could pull back to strike again, Nicanor spun with frightening speed. His heavy hand grabbed the front of my shirt and yanked me a few inches off the floor.
Panic exploded in my throat.
“Bitch!” he bellowed, blood running down his face, teeth clenched with hatred.
Nicanor hurled me backward. My body flew through the darkness, slamming into the damp mattress and rusty springs of the old bed.
The impact knocked the air from my lungs in a choked gasp, but my first and only instinctive reaction was to curl my legs, turn on my side, and cross both arms tightly over my belly.
Everything in my body screamed to protect my womb. The blow couldn’t reach my baby.
“The boss said to let you sink slowly, but I’ll do you the favor of cutting your throat right here and throwing the carcass out the window!” Nicanor advanced through the water, the knife gleaming faintly in the submerged light from the flashlight on the floor.
I was panting, pain throbbing in my back. The muddy water soaked my hair where it spread across the mattress. But the lioness wasn’t dead.
I remembered the years dealing with wild cattle and untamed horses. Fear doesn’t dictate the rules when you’re in the corral; instinct does.
When Nicanor leaned over the bed, raising the knife, I didn’t try to block the blade with my bare hands. I twisted my hips and, using my bent knees against the mattress as a spring, drove both boots with all the force I had straight into his left kneecap.
The sound of bone cracking under the heavy rubber of my boot was drowned out by the foreman’s piercing scream.
His leg buckled backward at a grotesque angle. Nicanor lost his balance and toppled to the right, falling face-first into the room’s muddy water with a heavy splash. The knife flew from his hand, sliding beneath the flooded furniture.
I didn’t hesitate for a second.
I dragged myself off the bed, slipping in the mud and the dark. My whole body trembled, my nails clawing at the wooden floor as I searched for any weapon. I found the board with the nail—the one I’d dropped during the first struggle.
Gripping the wood as if it were my salvation, I retreated to the farthest corner of the room, the water already lapping at my knees.
I pressed my back against the damp wall, my breath escaping in cold vapor from my open mouth.
My heart pounded so fast and so loud it seemed to echo through the water.
One hand held the board raised at chest height, ready to pierce anything that approached in the gloom. The other, trembling and soaked, stayed pressed to my belly like an impenetrable shield of maternal warmth.
Nicanor thrashed in the water, coughing and howling in pain, desperately trying to put weight on his injured leg, cursing every generation of my family.
He was still alive. Still lethal. And I was cornered on the upper floor of a sinking prison, surrounded by the storm and the darkness of the Pantanal.
Yet as I stared at the giant shadow of that man struggling to rise from the mud, the certainty burning in my blood wasn’t death.
I had drawn first blood. I had protected my child.
Jo?o Bento had cowered at the auction to spare my life, but in the relentless darkness of those waters, the only person who would decide who survived that night was me—and I was willing to die fighting before I let Jurandir Falc?o’s empire erase our existence.