Chapter 5 - Blood and Wood
“I told you, Natalie,” Gloria’s voice echoed through the trees, eerily calm. “You have no idea what you unraveled.”
Ramirez shoved Ian and me back inside the cabin just as the first shot shattered the wooden doorframe.
“Get down!” Ramirez shouted, returning fire with his service weapon.
The sound was deafening. Splinters of wood rained down on us. I dragged Ian behind an old cast-iron stove, my heart hammering against my ribs so hard I thought it would break them.
“Give me Ian, and you can go home to your family, Natalie,” my mother called out from the darkness. “He’s a junkie. No one will miss him. I’ll tell the judge he attacked us.”
“You’re a psychopath!” I screamed back.
“I am a pragmatist,” she replied coldly. “I provide a service. The world is full of broken children. I just put them where they are useful.”
“Like Clara?!” I yelled.
There was a brief pause. “Clara was a mistake. But Lizzy… Lizzy is beautiful. She’ll fetch a very high price.”
Bile rose in my throat. She was planning to sell her own granddaughter.
“They’re flanking us,” Ramirez whispered, ejecting his magazine and slamming a new one in. “I’ve got two rounds left. When I lay down cover fire, you and Ian run out the back window. Don’t stop until you hit the highway.”
“We aren't leaving you!” I cried.
“Go!” Ramirez roared.
He stood up and fired through the window. I grabbed Ian’s belt, hauling him up. We smashed through the brittle glass of the back window, tumbling into the freezing mud behind the cabin.
We ran. Branches whipped our faces. Ian stumbled, gasping in agony, but I pulled him forward. Behind us, the gunfire abruptly stopped. A horrible, heavy silence fell over the woods.
“Ramirez…” Ian choked out.
“Keep moving!” I sobbed.
We breached the tree line and tumbled down an embankment, landing on the asphalt of a deserted county road. I pulled out my phone. No signal.
Suddenly, a pair of headlights swept over us. A battered pickup truck slammed on its brakes. I stepped in front of it, waving my arms frantically.
The window rolled down. An older woman with sharp, weathered features looked at us. She took in Ian’s bloody head and my desperate face.
“Get in,” she said gruffly.
We scrambled into the back of the cab. “Please, drive,” I begged. “They’re trying to kill us.”
The woman slammed her foot on the gas. As we sped away, she looked at me in the rearview mirror.
“You’re Natalie Mercer, aren’t you?” she asked.
I froze. “How do you know my name?”
The woman pulled up her sleeve, revealing a jagged, old scar circling her wrist. The kind of scar a heavy metal latch leaves on a desperate child.
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“My name isn't Sarah, like it says on my driver's license,” the woman said softly. “My name is Clara. And I’ve been waiting twenty years to take your mother down.”
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