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“I… I don’t know. Whatever you see fit.”
“Ah, but that’s just the thing, my treacherous wife. I aim to take an eye for an eye,” he snarled.
Noelle blinked in confusion, but in her state she was too slow to realize what Sergio had in mind. She never saw the knife in his hand, and by the time he raised it against her son, it was too late.
She was frozen to the spot, forced to watch as he stabbed the knife into the child’s torso, cutting from his chest to his pelvis. Blood poured onto the ground as he split the baby into two.
When the cut was done, he threw the knife aside, using his hand to scoop his heart out of his little body.
Noelle was too horrified to be able to move.
She was in such a deep state of shock that she only realized what he’d done when her child’s blood poured onto her face. Taking the small heart out of his chest, he flung it at Noelle.
Startled, she jumped away, falling onto her back. Her eyes were wide with horror, her entire body shaking as she watched the death of her child.
“Wh—” she stammered, unable to form a coherent sentence.
“An eye for an eye,” Sergio continued. “You took something from me. Now I’m taking the same from you,” he told her, his voice dripping with satisfaction.
He dropped the child to the ground, but just as Noelle reached for him, Sergio brought his booted foot over the baby’s head. The sound of bones breaking echoed in the air.
Tears clung to Noelle’s lashes as she looked and looked, willing everything to be just a nightmare.
Please… Not my baby.
Yet the more she stared, the more she was forced to realize that itwasher baby.
And he was dead. He was… dead.
Laughter rang throughout the temple as Sergio’s associates mocked her pain.
“Someone clean the trash,” Sergio called out, stepping away from the corpse.
Noelle still could not tear her gaze from the body, or from the horror of what had happened. She only snapped out of it when someone tried to move her. As her shock wore off, her adrenaline kicked in and she started struggling, pushing the man away.
Before they could touch her child, she snatched his little body off of the ground—or what was left of him—and she ran out of the temple.
She barely made it back to the house in her condition. Hot liquid poured down her legs, but she didn’t pay it any mind. So what if she was bleeding? How could she think about herself now, when her child lay dead in her arms?
As she reached her room, she slowed down, tentatively stepping towards the small cradle she’d built during her confinement. It had been one of the few activities she’d been allowed to indulge in. Back then, she’d infused all the love she had for the baby in its design, dreaming up the day he would sleep peacefully in the cradle, next to her bed. She’d imagined countless times how he would fit in her arms, and how he would suckle at her breast.
And now? His features were so distorted she couldn’t even make out what he’d looked like.
He was her son, yet she’d never known him.
What type of mother was she? What type of mother let something like this happen to her child?
Carefully, she placed him in the cradle, watching him for a moment and letting the tears fall down her cheeks at last.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her heart breaking in her chest. “It’s all my fault.”
He lay still—so utterly still, and the more she looked at him, the more she felt her chest well up with so much despair it could drown out the world.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, her voice breaking. “I’m sorry you had to be born to a mother like me.”
But she couldn’t send him off like this. So with what little strength she had left, she opened her mouth and started humming a song. It was a mournful melody, but one that came straight from her soul, transposed into sound by the power of her anguish.
She sang to him one last song—what should have been a lullaby was now a mortuary piece.
