Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 74379 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 372(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74379 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 372(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
“Are you okay?”
“Those are my babies,” I whispered.
The mother looked sad. Horrified.
“Oh, honey.”
I walked up to the glass and rested my head there, staring at what was happening.
I couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe.
Turning on my heel, I rushed as fast as I could make my body go, ending up in a deserted hallway with only a door leading to the stairs at the end of it.
I pushed through the stairwell door, climbed up a flight of steps, and tried not to cry from both the physical and emotional pain.
“I thought you’d never come.”
I blinked, looked up, and came face-to-face with the woman who had nearly ruined my life.
The woman who was responsible for every awful thing that had happened to me over the last two weeks.
“You.”
Caria smiled.
“Me.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Didn’t know what to do.
Mainly because Caria had a fucking gun pointed at me, and I wanted to reach forward and yank her off the landing above me by her hair.
Then my stupid mouth took off before I could get it under control.
“You stupid, no good whore!” I screeched.
The deep breath I’d had to take made pain in my stomach and back explode, but it didn’t stop me from saying the words.
Mainly because Caria was a stupid whore, and she needed to hear them.
“Touchy,” she said as she cocked the hammer and then leaned forward. “Scream like that again, though, and I’ll have to use this.”
She waved the gun for emphasis.
I clamped my jaw shut and tried not to think about how my legs were starting to shake.
Not because she was scaring me—though she was—but because I still wasn’t at full strength yet.
Which reminded me that my babies were currently fighting for their lives.
“You know,” Caria smiled. “My badge still works. Still gets me into the hospital, and in locked places where I technically ‘shouldn’t’ be.”
Her smile was so fucking smug that I wanted to slap it off of her face.
“And since I worked on the baby floors, they freak out when you take kids out of the hospital.” She laughed. “But, I just took the stupid bracelet off. I don’t understand why they never thought of that. The sensors are good and all, but only if you leave them on their ankles. They’re so easy to take off that it’s almost comical, though.”
I had no clue what she was talking about. None at all.
“Did you know they have a healthy set of twins on the maternity floor?”
I wanted to cunt punch her.
“Unlike you.” Caria grinned, showing a row of perfectly white teeth.
I wanted to see those white teeth scattered on the floor after I slammed her head into the concrete a couple of hundred times.
“Unfortunately, they’d taken the boy of the twin set to go get his wiener skin chopped off—which might I add is a barbaric practice. I hate seeing circumcised men nowadays. So anyway, I had to find another.”
I shouldn’t have said it. I knew it, yet it came out anyway.
“You probably wouldn’t like Reed all that much then,” I told her. “He’s circumcised. It doesn’t affect the feeling in his dick at all, though. I’d say he’s perfectly functional down there.”
Caria screamed an inhuman scream and came down two steps, leaving the bag that’d been at her side on the landing.
Something was off about it.
Was it moving?
Before I could so much as glance at it, though, Caria came down two more steps.
“You think you’re cute, don’t you?” She sneered. “Well, let me tell you something.” She took another step. “You’re not.”
And she swung her right fist at my face.
I ducked, but once I was down, I couldn’t get back up.
***
Reed
I couldn’t wait to stop feeling those twinges that would remind me that I wasn’t in the top shape that I used to be.
I would be one day, though.
And wouldn’t be winded by climbing a simple flight of stairs.
Well, technically, it was two flights. Ten stairs a piece that led to the second level. Twenty total.
There’d been a power surge of some kind that had caused the left bank of elevators that led to the floors above to stop working. That meant that the right bank of elevators was backed up with people waiting to get on it.
Anxious to get to Krisney and the boys, this delay led to me taking the freakin’ stairs when I didn’t really want anything to do with them for the time being.
I used to take these stairs in a flash as I made my way into the hospital and up to the labor and delivery floor. Now I was taking them so slow that I was sure I looked like an old man.
“Oh, man.” I groaned.
The pinch was setting into a prominent twinge, which was what caused me to pause at the top of the first flight of stairs and take a short breather.