Suddenly, Xavier pauses and stares at a singular page in his hands, and I look over his shoulder to read along to whatever is on the paper.
“It’s Sunny.”
Atreus grabs the paper too, but doesn’t steal it back, as we’re all too fixated on the words inked onto the pages. It’s an operative report with a date and an exact description of what was done.
SURGEON:Carlo Ferreira
ANESTHESIOLOGIST: Mike Smith
PRE-OPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Fetal Gestation, 9thweek
POST-OPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Post-Abortion Hemorrhage
PROCEDURE PERFORMED: Medical Abortion
CHAPTER 43
Xavier
I can barely holdthe paper in my hand.
“Gestation? What does that …” Orion mumbles.
“A child,” Atreus says, sucking in a breath. “That is what Samuel Garcia was trying to hide.”
But all I can focus on is the wordabortion.
Sunny … was pregnant?
No, that can’t be. She never once acted anything but her normal self, and she didn’t have a visible belly, no other symptoms that I noticed, or anything else that I noticed was off.
Suddenly, the images of her in the hospital come flooding back into my brain like a tsunami. The pain in her eyes when she first saw her family. Her inability to talk to them. The doctor wanting to speak to her in private.
Something grave happened to her body that changed her forever.
She had an abortion.
She was pregnant.
And those fuckers who did it to her walked free, so she killed them all.
An ocean of hurt washes over me because she suffered alone, and I wasn’t there to help her. I drop down onto hands and knees with the paper beneath me, as tears begin to flow.
The pain they forced her to endure.
No medication after the operation.
Dropped off at a random location.
They were getting rid of her.
Shewas the evidence of their crime.
“So that’s what she was hiding,” Orion mutters. “She lost her child here. Maybe even in this room.”
All the men on her list that she killed are lined up in my mind.
Perry, the drug seller who probably sold the meds to this “hospital.” Paul, the nurse, Mike and Carlo, the duo who operated on her. Jimmy, the driver who probably dropped her off somewhere after the ordeal.
