Chapter 12 #2
"You can. I'll stay with you."
"I can't!" It came out louder than it should have. My voice struck the walls, and the sound of it made me shake harder.
"I've already been there, do you understand? In the dark, down below, not knowing which way is up. Don't put me there again."
Graham rolled toward us. His face changed. It did not soften, exactly, but the hardness turned another side toward me.
"Leave the door open. Turn on the corridor lights. Put a camera feed on a monitor for her. Let her see the way out."
Irene nodded. Shame washed over me. So much shame that I wanted to hide my face.
I had just defied Adrian, yet now I was trembling over a windowless room.
But Graham did not say a word about fear.
He did not finish me off. Did not call it hysteria.
Once again, that set him apart from everyone who had ever found a weak place in me and pressed down.
"Fear after the water is nothing to be ashamed of," he said quietly, as if he had read my thoughts after all. "Pretending it isn't there and drowning a second time is."
I raised my eyes.
"How do you know?"
He held my gaze for a second, then answered:
"Everyone has their own water."
I could not argue anymore. They settled me on the exam table in the medical room, left the door open, and positioned a monitor so I could see the corridor and one of the security feeds.
The gates, dock, and garden were divided into separate squares.
In one, Adrian was speaking to the commander.
In another, the two dark vehicles from the old dock rolled slowly toward the service fence.
In a third, Andrew and two of Graham's men melted into the trees.
Everything happened almost silently, which made it even more frightening.
In movies, music plays at moments like this.
In real life, you hear the medicine dripping and the faint chatter of your own teeth.
A few minutes later, movement began at the gates.
The commander showed someone a document.
Graham's guard did not open the gates. Adrian took out his phone.
The communications monitor lit up with a new message.
Graham read it aloud because I demanded that he hide nothing from me: "We have an order for the medical examination of Lana Mercer as a person who poses a danger to herself and her fetus.
" I closed my eyes. There it was, the route.
Fast. Almost elegant. Even the threat to my child had already become official concern for the fetus.
"The fetus," I whispered.
"How convenient. While it's a fetus, it has no mother, only a medical risk."
Irene pressed her lips together.
"Legally, that order is flimsy."
Graham answered dryly:
"Legally, they aren't counting on the paper. They're counting on someone at the gates getting scared enough to open them."
He switched on the intercom.
"Commander, you can keep that order as a souvenir. It has no judge's seal, relies on a report from a doctor with a conflict of interest, and was clearly drafted on the family attorney's knee. These gates are staying closed."
Vivian stepped toward the camera.
"Are you willing to take responsibility for the life of an unborn child?"
I flinched. There it was. Not a mother. Not Lana. Not a woman. An unborn child. They were already separating my baby from me with words, the way a surgeon separates tissue. Graham answered before I had time to choke on my breath.
"No, Vivian. The child's mother already took responsibility for that life when she refused to let you decide who was allowed to live. I'm merely keeping away the people who confuse concern with abduction."
She went pale but did not retreat.
"You'll regret this."
"I have regrets scheduled for Thursday. Make an appointment with my assistant."
Under other circumstances, even Irene might have smiled.
But no one found it funny now. On the feed from the dock, one of the vehicles with its lights off stopped beside the service fence.
A door opened. Three men got out. One of them carried a tool.
Not a weapon, apparently. Bolt cutters. They were not going to argue at the gates.
They were going to come in through the back, exactly as Graham had predicted.
"They've crossed the line," a voice said over the radio.
Graham pressed the button.
"Take them."
On the monitor, it all happened quickly and without any elegance.
Lawson's men emerged from the darkness. One intruder lunged backward, the second was knocked to the ground, and the third raised his hands.
No heroics, no impressive fight, no unnecessary noise.
Just professional work. I watched without breathing.
Adrian seemed to receive an alert at the gates, because he turned sharply toward one of his guards.
His face changed. For the first time all evening, his polish cracked.
Not much, but enough for me to see that his plan had fractured.
"He's angry," I said.
"He thought he was still on his own territory," Graham replied.
"And this is yours?"
"No. This is territory where the woman he drowned is still breathing."
I looked at him, and for one second, something inside me grew quieter. Not safe. Safety was still far away. But quieter.
The radio came alive again. "Mr. Lawson, we have a problem. One of the men says their orders weren't to take Lana. They were told to find a medical sample. Blood, hair, anything."
Irene straightened sharply.
"DNA."
Everything inside me dropped away.
They had not come to take me. Not yet. Not openly.
They had come to take proof of my child.
To obtain a sample, confirm or deny Adrian's paternity, and then build another document around it: if the baby was his, use the heir for control; if they falsified the result, brand me a liar and finish me off.
They had come for my blood. For a strand of hair.
For something they could seal in a bag, label, send to a lab, and call the truth without me.
"Those goddamn..."
Andrew's voice over the radio trailed off.
I finished for him in a whisper.
"Practical people."
I began to shake. Irene immediately leaned over me, but I pushed her hand away.
"No. I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"Then write this down: not fine, but conscious."
Graham turned to the radio.
"Search every one of them. Seize everything. Keep the cameras on them. Tight shots of their faces. Let them explain later why they came for biological samples from a missing woman."
At the gates, Adrian took another call. He listened, and I watched his face change.
It was the look of a man not when he had lost, but when he had realized an opponent existed at all.
Until then, he had probably thought he was fighting my hysteria, Lawson, an inconvenience.
Now, for the first time, he saw that I had a move of my own.
The intercom at the gates came on again. Adrian did not look at the camera. He stared past it into the darkness and spoke slowly.
"Mr. Lawson, you're crossing a line."
"You're the one who sent men with bolt cutters to my fence. Geography isn't on your side."
"You're interfering in a family matter."
I could not bear it. I pushed myself up on my elbows, ignoring Irene's hiss.
"A family matter?" I said into the microphone, which Graham had switched on despite the warning look he gave me.
"Adrian, men who come for a pregnant woman's blood in the middle of the night are not called family.
And it isn't called concern. Even in your house, there should be another word for it. "
At last, he looked into the camera.
"You don't understand. If the baby is mine, I have a right to know."