Chapter 4 - The Fracture of the LineThe line went dead with a harsh, electronic beep. Vanessa slowly lowered the phone, her hand dropping to her side as if the device had suddenly turned into a hot iron block. She stared at me, her chest heaving, her eyes wide with the raw, feral panic of a cornered animal.
"You did this," she whispered, her voice dropping into a dangerous, unstable register. "You ruined my family. You ruined my boutique. You ruined my life!"
She lunged forward, her fingers clawing toward my face, but another sudden, agonizing contraction ripped through my body, causing me to double over and scream. The sheer force of the sound made her stumble backward, her heel catching on the edge of the wooden crate. The kerosene lamp tilted, crashing onto the dry pine floorboards.
A line of brilliant orange fire immediately erupted across the floor, feeding on the old, dry wood and the dust of a decade.
Vanessa screamed, slapping at the smoke as the flames began to climb the tinder-dry walls of the cabin. She didn't look at me. She didn't try to help me up. True to her selfish, cowardly nature, she grabbed her designer purse from the table and ran toward the front door, slamming it shut behind her to keep the draft from spreading the fire—or perhaps to ensure that the only witness to her crime was silenced forever by the smoke.
"Vanessa!" I screamed, my voice swallowed by the roaring crackle of the flames.
The heat was instantaneous, a suffocating wall that began to eat the oxygen in the small room. Thick, black smoke began to curl along the ceiling, dropping lower with every passing second. I couldn't move my legs; the trauma of the physical assault had caused a severe placental abruption, and every movement felt like a hot iron blade turning in my pelvis.
I have to save them, I thought, my mind screaming as I looked down at my swollen stomach. Daniel, please. Someone, please.
I rolled off the iron bed frame, crashing hard onto the dirty floorboards just inches away from where the line of fire was advancing. The pain made me black out for a fraction of a second, but the stinging heat against my bare arms dragged me back to reality. I began to crawl, using only my elbows and my palms, dragging the heavy, unresponsive weight of my lower body across the rough pine.
The smoke was blinding now, stinging my eyes and burning my throat with every desperate breath. I made it to the boarded-up window beneath the slatted ribbons of light. I reached up, my fingers bleeding as I clawed at the old, rusted nails holding the wooden planks in place. They wouldn't budge.
I collapsed against the wall, my strength completely spent, the roar of the fire turning into a deafening, white noise in my ears. I pulled the utility blanket over my head, tucking my knees up as close to my chest as the twin pregnancy would allow, shielding my babies with my own flesh as the ceiling above us began to crack and rain down sparks.
Then, through the roar of the flames, I heard a sound that didn't belong to the woods. The deep, guttural roar of a high-performance SUV engine, followed by the violent screech of brakes turning hard onto the gravel outside.
The front door didn't just open—it shattered inward, the heavy oak frame splintering under a massive, desperate impact. Through the wall of orange fire, a silhouette broke into the room, covered in a wet leather jacket, his face pale with a terror I had never seen on him before.
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"Judith!"
Daniel.
