Feeling my child's life slip away, I screamed with everything I had. "Bernard Farley! My baby is dead! You killed him with your own hands! When I get out of here, my brother will slaughter every last one of you! You all deserve to die!"
The color drained from Bernard's face.
In the silence, he walked to the small window, as though he needed to see my condition for himself.
When he saw me drenched in blood, not a single patch of intact skin left, his pupils contracted.
He opened his mouth to order someone to bring the key, but Ivy stepped forward and caught his hand.
"How could you say something like that?" Ivy's voice was soft, wounded. "You know how much your brother put him through. All those years of being undermined and humiliated. Your brother's been dead for ages, and you're still using his name to threaten him. How could you twist the knife like that?"
She turned to Bernard, her voice soft and gentle.
"Bernard, I know how much you suffered back then. Please don't be upset. I'll always be on your side. As for your wife, you should probably let her out. She's saying whatever comes to mind, even threatening to kill us. If this goes on, who knows what she might do. She could turn out just like that brother of hers..."
Ivy's words dragged up every bitter, suffocating memory Bernard had buried, and his fury erupted in an instant. He slammed his fist into the iron wall.
"Raise the temperature another nine degrees. Let's see how long she keeps running her mouth."
The men behind him saw his rage and didn't dare push back. They went and raised the temperature nine degrees without a word.
The heat hit all at once, boring through my body from below. I felt like a slab of meat pressed flat against a griddle.
My organs were cooking. Every inch of me was being boiled alive from the inside out.
I couldn't hold on. I collapsed sideways.
The instant my belly touched the iron plate, blood surged from my lower abdomen.
It ran along the metal and seeped out through the gap beneath the door. Even outside, it was still steaming.
When I understood that my child was gone, truly gone, the sound that tore out of me was barely human.
People outside cried out. "Someone's going to die in there!"
Bernard had still been seething, but the shout made him turn. The blood pooling under the door drained the color from his face.
He grabbed the nearest person, shaking them. "The key! Go get the key, NOW!"