Chapter 38 - The Scar on the Ultrasound
Forty miles south of the lake, tucked behind an abandoned textile mill outside Manchester, New Hampshire, I pulled the Defender into an empty storage bay and cut the engine.
The vehicle’s heater was blasting at maximum, filling the cabin with dry, sweltering heat that smelled of wet wool and engine oil. Nathan was finally sleeping, his tiny chest rising and falling evenly beneath the layers of thermal blankets Khloe had found in the Defender’s cargo trunk.
Khloe was sitting in the rear passenger seat, her eyes wide, staring at a stack of manila folders she had pulled from a hidden locked compartment beneath the Land Rover’s front passenger seat. Anthony hadn't just used this vehicle to kidnap her; it was a mobile operations hub.
"Look at this," Khloe whispered, her voice dead and flat.
I turned around in the driver's seat. She held up an ultrasound printout dated four months ago—the twentieth week of her pregnancy.
"I remember this appointment," Khloe said, her hand trembling so violently the paper fluttered like a dry leaf. "Marcus, you were in Chicago for that architectural bid. Isabella drove me to the clinic on Commonwealth Avenue. Dr. Bradley did the scan. He told me the baby was perfectly healthy, right on the fiftieth percentile."
She flipped the transparency under the interior dome light.
Beneath the primary dark oval of the amniotic sac, where Nathan’s tiny, curved spine was clearly outlined in grainy gray and white, there was another shadow. A secondary, fainter crescent, partially obscured by a black digital mask applied directly over the printout.
"He scrubbed it," Isabella said from the corner of the backseat, her voice hoarse with shame. She was pressing a bottle of cold water to her split lip. "Bradley used a real-time signal delay on the monitor during your appointments. Whenever the transducer picked up the second sac, he toggled the display to a split-screen loop of the primary fetus. You were looking at Nathan twice."
I stared at Isabella, my knuckles whitening against the steering wheel. "And you knew?"
"I didn't know about the second baby, Marcus! I swear to God on my life, I didn't!" Isabella broke down, tears cutting tracks through the grime on her face. "Anthony told me Catherine wanted Khloe's child because of the inheritance clause in the Vance estate! He told me that if Khloe had a child with his genetic material, the trust would disburse forty percent to him and twenty percent to me as the biological aunt! I thought it was about money! I thought they were just going to sue you for custody!"
"You sold my womb for twenty percent of a trust fund?!" Khloe screamed, lunging across the console, her hands clawing at Isabella’s face.
"Stop it! Both of you, stop!" I barked, grabbing Khloe’s wrists and forcing her back into the seat. "Fighting her doesn't get our daughter back! Look at the documents!"
Khloe pulled back, breathing heavily, her chest heaving as she fought back another wave of nausea.
I reached over and grabbed the second document from the folder. It wasn't an ultrasound. It was a surgical manifest from the private surgical suite at St. Jude’s in Boston, dated the exact morning Khloe was rushed to the emergency floor—the morning I had found her lying unconscious on the cold tiles.
*PROCEDURE: EMERGENCY C-SECTION / SELECTIVE EXTRACTION.*
*PATIENT: KHLOE VANCE-REED.*
*FETUS A: MALE, 6 LBS 2 OZ. DELIVERED 03:14 AM. STABLE. RETAINED FOR MATERNAL RECOVERY.*
*FETUS B: FEMALE, 5 LBS 8 OZ. DELIVERED 03:22 AM. STABLE. TRANSFERRED IMMEDIATELY TO DR. H. WEISS (ZURICH CELLULAR RESEARCH GROUP).*
My eyes locked onto the time stamps.
Eight minutes.
They took Nathan out, wrapped him up, and while Khloe was drowning in anesthetic, they pulled our daughter from her body, wheeled her down a private service elevator into an unmarked ambulance, and drove her straight to a private runway in Bedford.
"Dr. Weiss," I muttered, my heart pounding against my ribs like a battering ram. "Who is Dr. Weiss?"
May you like
"Catherine’s personal physician," Isabella whispered, her voice hollow. "He runs the Clinique des Alpes outside Zurich. It’s not a hospital, Marcus. It’s an ultra-exclusive longevity retreat for the global elite. They specialize in autologous stem cell rejuvenation and telomere replacement therapy. They don't just treat patients. They rebuild them."
"They're going to harvest her," Khloe said. The words didn't sound human. They sounded like they were dragged out of the deepest pit of hell. "They're going to strip my baby girl for spare parts."
