Wellbeing
Feb 24, 2026

While you bleed out from my lover’s kicks, remember that history will only remember me as the genius who cured the incurable, not the husband who sacrificed his pregnant wife.”

Part 1

The cold of the sterilized linoleum tiles seeps through my thin cotton hospital gown, a clinical, chemical, and ruthless cold that chills me to my shattered bones. The pungent smell of industrial bleach, bitter iodine, and stale desperation saturates every shallow breath I manage to take in the semi-darkness. I am curled up on the freezing floor of the VIP maternity ward’s service hallway, my trembling, bruised hands protecting my eight-month swollen belly. A sharp, burning, and piercing pain radiates from the left side of my ribs, right at the exact point where Victoria’s sharp stiletto heel has just impacted with brutal physical force. The metallic taste of blood floods my mouth, thick and nauseating, after violently biting my tongue when falling to my knees.

Through my vision, blurred and distorted by involuntary tears, I see the polished Italian designer shoes of my husband, Richard. He makes absolutely no move to help me up. He adjusts the gold cufflinks of his silk shirt with a terrifying, methodical calm. “It’s simple moral arithmetic, Clara,” he murmurs in that deep, velvety voice I once loved madly. “If a runaway trolley is heading to kill five of my main international investors, whose lives sustain thousands of jobs in my medical company, and I can divert that trolley by sacrificing a single person who is already weak… the choice is intellectually obvious.” Victoria laughs softly, delivering another ruthless kick, this time directly to my thigh. “You are just a statistical variable in his utility equation,” she whispers, her breath smelling of expensive mint, black coffee, and distilled cruelty.

   

Richard believes himself to be a modern utilitarian god, a twisted and fanatical follower of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy, totally convinced that my death—carefully faked as a tragic and inevitable childbirth complication—and the subsequent secret harvesting of our unborn child’s rare stem cells to cure his wealthy business partners, will maximize the overall happiness and economic stability of his vast empire. They treat me exactly like the unfortunate cabin boy in the infamous legal case of Queen v. Dudley and Stephens: a useless victim who must be mercilessly devoured to ensure the survival of those who consider themselves “superior.” The agonizing physical pain pales in comparison to the emotional hypothermia currently freezing my soul. I suffocate in the darkness of their ambition. Richard leans over me. “The well-being of the majority demands your small sacrifice,” he decrees coldly, leaving me at Victoria’s mercy. I close my eyes, waiting for the lethal impact, unaware that the black glass eye in the upper corner of the ceiling has been blinking with a steady red light.


 

Part 2

You, Richard, pace back and forth through the immaculate and deserted hallways of the city’s General Hospital with the untouchable arrogance of an absolute monarch of modern medicine. Your tailored suit, cut with surgical precision, billows like a royal cape as Victoria clings to your arm, displaying the smile of a satisfied predator after having beaten my sister. You feel like the undisputed master of the universe, a philosopher king who has managed to transcend the vulgar, sentimental, and weak morality of the ignorant masses. In your perverse and mathematically cold mind, the premeditated murder of your pregnant wife is not a reprehensible crime, but a bold triumph of consequentialism taken to its extreme. You justify yourself over and over using the distorted logic of the classic trolley problem that you so loved to debate at your gala dinners with other billionaires. You visualize yourself standing proudly atop the bridge, watching five essential workers—your sick corporate partners—about to be run over by the train of debt and death. And, without your hand trembling, you have decided to push the fat man—in this macabre scenario, your defenseless wife and your own innocent unborn child—directly onto the bloody tracks to stop the imminent financial and institutional catastrophe. You have turned your own family into mere objects, into disposable biological tools for a lucrative end, firmly believing without a hint of skepticism that the ends always justify the means, regardless of the brutality of the pain inflicted on a person who trusted you blindly.

What you profoundly and catastrophically ignore, wrapped and blinded in your narcissistic pride that makes you believe you are untouchable, is that I, Dr. Alexander Vance, the Chief Medical Director of this immense hospital and, in absolute secrecy, Clara’s older half-brother whom you never bothered to meet, have been watching and documenting your every miserable step. From the impenetrable safety of the main security control room, hidden in the underground basement of the building, my gaze is fixed like daggers on the dozen high-resolution monitors blinking with the live feed from the hidden cameras. You have bribed and bought the silence of a couple of corrupt doctors on call, yes, but you never knew or investigated that the complex digital and surveillance infrastructure of this hospital answers solely and exclusively to my biometric command. My hands fly frantically over the illuminated keyboard, isolating the audio frequencies from the VIP hallway, digitally recording the crystal-clear and irrefutable confession of your Machiavellian plot. The disgusting sound of Victoria’s blows against Clara’s fragile body echoes in my headphones and makes my knuckles turn white with suppressed homicidal rage, but my analytical mind, exhaustively trained in the rigorous school of categorical moral reasoning outlined by Immanuel Kant, remains ice-cold, perfectly focused on the ultimate goal.

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