Chapter 9 - The Final Desperate Strike
Three days later, the hospital prepared to discharge Grace and Leo. The morning sun was bright, shining through the large bay windows of the fourth-floor maternity recovery ward. Ethan was downstairs in the lobby, signing the final release paperwork and coordinating with the pharmacy for Grace’s pain medications.
In the private room, Grace stood in front of the mirror, adjusting a soft cardigan over her bruised ribs. Leo was sleeping peacefully in his car seat next to the hospital bed.
The door to the room clicked open.
"Ethan, did you get the—" Grace turned around, and the words died in her throat.
Standing in the doorway was not Ethan.
It was a woman wearing gray hospital scrubs, a surgical mask, and a nurse’s cap. But the eyes—those cold, manic, predatory blue eyes—were unmistakable.
Eleanor.
Grace’s breath froze in her chest. Her heart seized with paralyzing terror.
"Did you really think a set of rusty iron bars could keep a Campbell from her blood?" Eleanor whispered, pulling down the surgical mask to reveal a twisted, manic grin.
During her transport from the county jail to the courthouse for a psychiatric evaluation that morning, Eleanor had faked a massive heart attack in the transport van. When the lone guard opened the partition to administer CPR, she had brutally stabbed him in the neck with a sharpened plastic comb she had concealed in her sleeve. She had slipped into the hospital through the ambulance bay, stealing scrubs from the basement laundry.
She wasn't trying to escape the country.
She had come for the baby.
"Get away from him!" Grace screamed, her voice echoing down the corridor.
Grace didn't hesitate. Despite the agonizing pain in her fractured ribs, despite the exhaustion dragging down her limbs, the instinct of a mother took over. She threw herself between Eleanor and the car seat, her hands up, claws out.
"He is MINE!" Eleanor shrieked, lunging forward with a stolen surgical scalpel gleaming in her hand.
The steel blade slashed through the air. Grace blocked it with her forearm, crying out in pain as the sharp edge sliced open her skin. But Grace didn't fall back. She tackled Eleanor with the entirety of her body weight, slamming the older woman against the metal bed frame.
*CLANG!*
"You will never touch my son again!" Grace roared, slamming Eleanor’s wrist against the iron rail until the scalpel clattered to the floor.
Eleanor shrieked like a banshee, gouging her fingers into Grace’s face, pulling her hair, clawing at her broken ribs with vicious savagery. "He has my blood! You are nothing! A parasite! I will gut you like a fish!"
The door crashed open.
Ethan rushed into the room, his eyes widening in horror at the blood and the struggle.
"GET OFF HER!" Ethan bellowed.
He didn't treat Eleanor like his mother. He treated her like the rabid, homicidal threat she was. He grabbed Eleanor by the collar of her scrubs, yanked her off Grace with immense force, and threw her across the room. Eleanor crashed heavily into the wall, sliding down to the floor, dazed.
Hospital security guards and Detective Vance, who had been downstairs following up on the transport escape, flooded into the room with weapons drawn.
"DON'T MOVE! ON THE GROUND! NOW!"
Eleanor Campbell lay on the linoleum floor, bleeding from her temple, staring up at Ethan with eyes of pure, unadulterated madness.
"Ethan..." she whimpered, spitting blood. "I did it for you... for the family..."
Ethan stepped between her and his family, wrapping his arm around Grace, who was clutching a screaming Leo to her chest.
Ethan looked down at the woman who had given him life, feeling nothing but total, absolute disgust.
"You are dead to us, Eleanor," Ethan said, his voice ringing with finality. "Rot in hell."
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Vance stepped forward, planting his heavy boot on Eleanor’s back, snapping steel cuffs onto her wrists with enough force to bruise. "You're going to a maximum-security psychiatric prison, Eleanor. You will never see a courtroom, a grandson, or the light of day ever again."
***
