The morning after the scream, Lina woke with a name branded into her memory: Ana Petrescu. The spreadsheet had listed her as "Archived," but the scream had been real, visceral, and human. She sat up in bed, the moonlight still clinging to the corners of the room, and made a decision. She would not wait for the others to act. She would force them to act.
By the time the breakfast bell chimed, Lina had already sketched a rough map of the villa complex on the back of the stolen spreadsheet. She had memorised the guard rotations—two men, alternating shifts, with a fifteen-minute overlap at 6am and 6pm. She had noted the camera positions from Ingrid's observations. And she had calculated that the laundry room's blind spot gave them a window of exactly eleven minutes before the next sweep.
The other women gathered on the terrace, their faces hollow from another sleepless night. Maya's fingers were raw from picking at her cuticles. Sasha had a fresh bruise on her knuckle—she had punched the wall after the scream. Priya had stopped crying; she now wore a mask of numb compliance that was somehow more disturbing than her tears. Ingrid sat with a notebook, her social worker's instinct for documentation shining through her fear.
"I need everyone to listen," Lina said, her voice low but steady. "Last night, I heard a woman begging for her baby. That was not a termination. That was a theft. And I am not going to let that happen to any of us."
Maya shook her head. "What can we do? We're unarmed, isolated, and monitored. If we try to fight, they'll just sedate us and put us in that room with the mask."
"Then we don't fight—we record. We document. We find a way to get evidence out." Lina unfolded the map. "Ingrid has identified a blind spot in the laundry room's camera coverage. From there, there's a service corridor that leads to the clinic's basement. That's where they keep the old records—the ones they think they've destroyed. I want to see the full database. Not just the spreadsheet. The contracts, the payment histories, the intended parent identities. That's our leverage."
Sasha cracked her neck, a gesture of grim determination. "And how do we get past the guards?"
"We don't. We go at night, during the 2am shift change. The guard on duty is a man named Dimitri—he's old, he smokes, and he takes a ten-minute break behind the generator shed every night at 2:10. That's our window."
Ingrid raised a pencil-thin eyebrow. "You've been watching him?"
"I've been watching everything," Lina said. "Because I have a son at home, and I will not let him grow up without a mother who at least tried to fight."
The plan came together in hushed whispers over cold toast and bitter coffee. Maya would pick the lock on the service corridor door—she had learned the trick from a hospital orderly during her nursing days. Ingrid would stand watch near the laundry room, using a hand mirror to signal any approaching guards. Sasha would create a distraction in the main building—pretending to have a panic attack, loud enough to draw Eleni's attention. Priya would stay in the villa, ready to claim she was sick and needed a nurse, just in case anyone came looking.
And Lina would go down into the basement.
The hours crawled past with the weight of wet cement. Lunch was a silent affair, each woman pushing food around her plate while Eleni watched from the doorway like a hawk. Dr. Vasilis appeared briefly to announce that the first implantation would take place in forty-eight hours, and that "candidate one" had been selected. He did not name the candidate, but his eyes flicked to Lina for just a fraction of a second. She felt her stomach drop.
At 2am, the villa was dark and still. Lina crept out of her room in bare feet, wearing black leggings and a dark sweater—the closest thing to camouflage she owned. Maya met her at the end of the corridor, a hairpin and a small torch in her hand. They slipped through the kitchen, past the silent refrigerators, and into the laundry room.
The blind spot was exactly where Ingrid had described it—a narrow alcove behind a massive water tank, out of view of the single camera mounted near the ceiling. Maya worked the service door's lock with the hairpin, her tongue between her teeth, her breath shallow. After sixty seconds that felt like a lifetime, the lock clicked open.
The corridor beyond was narrow, damp, and lit by a single red emergency bulb. It smelled of bleach and something else—something metallic, like old blood. Lina's heart hammered as she followed Maya down the steep concrete stairs into the basement.
The room at the bottom was a forgotten archive: metal shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, each labelled with a date and a code. Lina pulled down the box marked "Archived – 2023" and began to rifle through it. Inside were manila folders, each containing a photograph of a woman—young, smiling, hopeful—and a thick sheaf of documents.
She found Ana Petrescu's file. The photo showed a round-faced woman with dark curly hair and a gap-toothed smile. The medical records were detailed: implantation date, hormone levels, foetal heart rates, delivery date. But the final page was a "Client Transfer Certificate," signed by Julian Cross himself, authorising the "release" of the infant to a couple in Dubai. The fee was listed as $250,000. A separate sheet noted that Ana had been "retained for post-partum observation" for an indefinite period. There was no discharge date.
Lina photographed every page with Maya's phone—the only device they had managed to keep hidden, powered off and wrapped in tinfoil to avoid detection. She was about to put the box back when she noticed a thinner folder tucked behind it, marked "Special Cases – Confidential."
Inside was a single sheet of paper with a list of five names. Each name was followed by a date and a single word: "Discontinued." The dates were all within the past eight months. And the names—Lina recognised one of them. Maria Santos. The same name that had appeared on the spreadsheet with "Termination" beside it.
But this sheet had a different note: "Subject refused sedation. Physical containment implemented. Status: ongoing."
Containment. Not termination. Containment meant they were still alive, somewhere on this island, being held against their will. The scream from last night—it had come from one of them.
Lina's hands trembled as she tucked the sheet into her waistband. She turned to Maya, who was frantically photographing another box, when they heard footsteps above. Heavy, deliberate, booted.
"Someone's coming," Maya whispered. "We have to go."
They scrambled back up the stairs, but the service corridor door was already opening. A beam of white light cut through the darkness, and a voice—not Dimitri's, but younger, sharper—called out in Greek-accented English. "I know you're there. Come out slowly, hands visible."
Lina froze. Maya grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the alcove behind the water tank. The blind spot. They pressed themselves against the cold metal, barely breathing, as the guard's torch swept the laundry room. He was young, early twenties, with a buzz cut and an earpiece. He scanned the room, grunted, and then walked towards the service door.
For a terrible moment, Lina thought he would see them. But the torch beam passed over the water tank, missing the alcove by inches. The guard leaned into the corridor, peered down, and then shrugged. "Must have been a rat," he muttered into his earpiece. "No, false alarm. I'll check the perimeter again."
He walked away, and the door clicked shut. Lina and Maya waited a full two minutes before they dared to breathe.
They crept back to the villa, hearts pounding, their treasure of photographs burning a hole in Maya's phone. Sasha's distraction had worked—she had screamed and thrown a vase, drawing Eleni and two nurses to the main hall. By the time they returned, Sasha was sitting meekly, apologising for her "panic episode."
The five women gathered in Priya's room again. Lina spread out the documents—the photographs, the notes, the "Special Cases" list. She pointed to the five names.
"There are five women being held in that basement. They are not dead. They are prisoners. And they are probably still pregnant, or recently delivered, being kept as backup stock in case a client demands a late-term adjustment."
Ingrid's face went white. "That's slavery. That's human trafficking."
"Call it what you want," Lina said. "But we are going to free them. All of them."
Priya's voice quavered. "How? We don't even know where the cells are. We don't have weapons. We don't have a boat."
"We have something better," Lina said, holding up Maya's phone. "We have evidence. And I know a journalist. A real one. I worked as a cleaner in his building for two years. He's an investigative reporter for the Guardian—or he was, before he got blacklisted. But he still has contacts. If I can get a message to him, he'll publish."
"But there's no signal," Maya said. "And the satellite phone is locked in Eleni's office."
"Then we get the satellite phone." Lina's eyes were hard, blazing with a fury she had not known she possessed. "Tomorrow night, we break into Eleni's office. We take the phone. We send the photos. We call for help."
Sasha laughed—a bitter, hollow laugh. "And if we get caught?"
"Then we go to that basement too. But at least we'll have tried. At least we'll have done something."
A long silence stretched between them, filled with the whisper of the sea and the distant hum of the clinic's generators. One by one, they nodded.
But just as they were about to disperse, Priya let out a small gasp. She was staring at the window, her face pale as milk. Outside, in the darkness, a figure stood motionless—a woman in a white gown, her hair matted, her eyes wide and unblinking. It was Ana Petrescu, or what was left of her. She pressed her palm against the glass, leaving a smeared print, and then she was gone, swallowed by the shadows.
Lina rushed to the window, but there was nothing. Only the moonlit garden, the silent olive trees, and the eternal murmur of the sea.
"She got out," Lina whispered. "She escaped. Which means there's a way out of that basement."
Maya grabbed her arm, her fingers digging into the flesh. "Or it means they let her out as a warning. To show us what happens."
Lina turned from the window, her heart racing, her mind already planning the next move. She looked at the women—her unlikely sisters in this nightmare—and spoke the words that would seal their fate.
"We don't have until tomorrow. We go tonight. Now."
The clock on the nightstand read 2:47am. The guard would be making his next round in twenty-three minutes. They had a window. And they had a choice—stay as prisoners, or become fugitives.
Outside, the wind carried a faint sound, almost like singing. It was Ana's voice, thin and cracked, calling from the darkness: "Help us… before they take the babies…"
The women moved as one, grabbing shoes, stealing breath, and stepping into the cold Mediterranean night. Behind them, the villa glittered with false elegance. Ahead, the island's secrets waited—and with them, the only chance they would ever have to reclaim their lives.
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