Chapter 1 - The Door.
The steel door slammed so hard the sound didn’t just hit Lena’s ears. It hit her chest.
One second she was still trying to turn around in that narrow industrial freezer tunnel, one hand under the weight of her eight-month belly, the other reaching for Victor because she thought this was another one of his cold, punishing games. The next second the door was shut, the bolt screeched across, and the little frosted window in the middle of the steel flashed white with her own breath.
“Victor, please open the door! Please!”
She pounded the glass with both bare hands until pain shot through her fingers. Her face pushed toward the small square window, but the fog from her breath spread fast, turning the glass milky. Outside, Victor’s shape stayed still for half a beat. Then it disappeared.
The cold in that room was the kind that attacked in layers. First her skin. Then her lungs. Then the thinking part of her mind.
“Victor!”
Nothing.
She slammed the door again, harder. The metal barely answered.
Then the red light on the wall-mounted intercom blinked on.
A crackle came through. Static. Then Victor’s voice, calm enough to make her stomach turn.
“The only value you bring to me is the large compensation money from the accident.”
For a second Lena didn’t react at all. Her brain stalled there, as if it had to stop and look at the sentence before it could understand it.
Then the baby shifted hard inside her.
She stumbled back from the door, arms wrapping around her stomach. Her thin pinkish-purple dress was already stiffening at the hem where freezer frost had started to cling. Her cardigan wasn’t doing anything. Her hair was damp with fear and turning brittle with cold.
“Please,” she said again, but now the word came out smaller, broken apart by her breathing.
Another pain ripped through her middle.
She bent forward and grabbed the metal shelving beside her. Her teeth were already knocking together. She tried to force a breath down. Another contraction hit before the first one had fully eased.
“No. No, no, not now.”
Then warm fluid rushed down her legs.
It splashed onto the steel floor and, right in front of her, began to crystalize into jagged ice.
Lena dropped to her knees so fast her kneecaps cracked against frozen metal. She clutched her belly with both hands.
“Don’t,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Baby, don’t do this. Stay with me.”
She looked toward the door again, and the little window stared back like a dead eye.
Then, through the screaming cold, she heard something.
Not Victor.
A second screech. Metal on metal. Harder this time. Violent.
The door jerked.
Air blasted through as the steel swung open.
A large man in a thick black parka with a fur hood burst inside, filling the doorway with snow-smelling air and white mist. Lena recognized him after a stunned second—Mason Reed, the rough, silent operations guy Victor never let near family dinners and Lena had always been told not to trust.
His eyes landed on her, then on the spreading frozen puddle, then on her stomach.
“Oh God.”
He was already moving, already dropping toward her, already reaching out a gloved hand.
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And just before Lena blacked out, she saw what he saw too—
the interior emergency release had been cut clean off the door.
