Chapter 6: Flight to Freedom
The jet’s descent pressed their bodies into the leather seats. Out the window, jagged peaks pierced a blanket of cloud, their snowy tips tinged pink by the rising sun. Switzerland. The name felt heavy and foreign in Catalina’s mind, a word from a geography test, not a life raft.
Her passport—a perfect, expensive fake they’d obtained through a shadowy contact of Dom’s—lay open on the polished wood table between them. It listed her as Catalina O’Connell. His said Dominic O’Connell. A shared fake surname felt like a deeper, more intimate lie than all the ones before.
Mina was a warm, sleeping weight against her chest, having finally succumbed to exhaustion an hour ago. The child’s steady breath was the only calm rhythm in the cabin.
Dominic hadn’t slept. He stared at the document in his hands, the real one, its edges worn from being hidden and handled. Mina’s birth certificate. His name was typed in the field for Father. No blank space, no ‘unknown.’ It was a declaration he’d forged two years ago, a piece of paper that could put him in prison and tear Mina from them forever. He’d never shown it to Catalina before they fled. He’d just done it, another wall in his fortress.
“You kept this,” she said quietly, her voice raw from silence.
“Of course I kept it.” He didn’t look up. His thumb traced the raised seal of the county recorder’s office. “It’s the truth.”
“It’s a confession.”
“It’s her history.” He finally lifted his gaze. The ambient cabin light carved deep shadows under his eyes. “Where we’re going… they don’t have the same laws. The guy who set this up, he says it’s… overlooked. As long as you’re discreet. As long as you don’t flaunt it.” He said the word ‘flaunt’ with disdain, as if the very idea was vulgar.
“Discreet,” she repeated, tasting the word. It sounded like living in a small, soundproofed room. “What does that even mean for us, Dom? Holding hands in the dark? Never touching you in the grocery store?”
“It means we get to live.” His voice was low, final. “It means Mina gets to grow up with two parents who love her. It means the baby…” He glanced at her stomach, a quick, searing look. “It means they’ll be safe. That’s all that matters.”
The plane gave a slight shudder as the wheels deployed. Mina stirred, mumbling something into Catalina’s neck. The reality of landing, of stepping into this new, sanctioned oblivion, tightened around Catalina’s ribs like a vise.
“And if we hate it?” she whispered, her question swallowed by the growing whine of the engines.
“We won’t.” He said it like he could command reality. He folded the birth certificate, placed it back inside his jacket, over his heart. “We’ll make it work.”
The wheels touched down with a shriek of rubber, then a smooth, decelerating rush. They were here. Wherever ‘here’ was.
Outside the small private terminal, the air was so crisp and cold it felt like a slap. It smelled of pine and jet fuel. A black Mercedes SUV idled at the curb, a solemn-looking driver in a dark coat standing beside it. The mountains loomed in the distance, majestic and implacable.
“Mr. and Mrs. O’Connell?” the driver asked, his English accented.
Dominic gave a single, sharp nod, heaving their bags into the back. “Yeah.”
The drive was silent, winding through postcard-perfect countryside. Neat farms, chalets with sloping roofs laden with snow, a river running clear and shockingly blue over stones. It was achingly beautiful and utterly alien.
They turned onto a narrower road, climbing into thick forest, and finally stopped before a heavy wooden gate set into a stone wall. The driver typed a code; the gate swung open silently.
The house was not a house. It was a modern chalet, all dark timber and vast sheets of glass, built into the hillside overlooking a frozen lake. It looked like a magazine spread for invisible wealth.
“Home,” Dominic said, getting out. The word sounded strange in his mouth.
Inside, it was all clean lines and understated luxury. A great room with a cathedral ceiling, a fireplace big enough to stand in, furniture that looked both expensive and uncomfortable. The silence was profound, broken only by the tick of a sleek clock on the wall.
Mina, revived by the cold, wriggled down and began exploring on cautious toddler feet, her shoes squeaking on the polished concrete floor. “Big house,” she announced, her voice echoing.
“It’s temporary,” Dom said, more to Catalina than to the child. “Until we find something… cozier.”
Catalina walked to the wall of glass. The view was breathtaking, a panoramic painting of lake, forest, and mountain. She felt like a specimen under a bell jar. “How did you afford this?”
“I had assets. Sold everything.” He joined her at the window, standing close but not touching. “The garage. The cars. The L.A. property. It’s all gone.”
She turned to look at him, hearing the unspoken grief in his words. The garage was his kingdom. The cars were his soul. He’d liquidated his entire world for this glass prison with a view. “Dom…”
“Don’t.” He cut her off, his jaw tight. “It was metal and concrete. This is flesh and blood.” He nodded towards Mina, who was now trying to climb onto a low-slung leather sofa. “This is the only thing that matters now.”
The first week was a study in dislocation. The sheer quiet was unnerving. No traffic, no sirens, no neighbors arguing. Just the wind in the pines and the occasional crack of ice on the lake. A woman named Elke came three times a week to clean and stock the kitchen—paid through a management service, her discretion contractually assured. She was polite, efficient, and asked no questions.
Dominic spent days in the heated garage below the house, tuning the single car he’d shipped over—a modified, unassuming Audi wagon, fast and anonymous. It was his therapy. Catalina wandered the rooms, feeling the baby’s presence grow more real with each passing, silent day. She read books she couldn’t remember. She watched Mina play.
The tension between her and Dom was a live wire, buried under sheets of ice. They slept in the same massive bed, a continent apart. The memory of the motel, of the pharmacy parking lot, was a ghost in the room. Their need was a forbidden current, too dangerous to touch now that they were trying to build something stable on this shaky, sinful ground.
It broke on a Tuesday evening. Mina was in the bath, splashing happily. Catalina was drying her hair by the fireplace when she felt a wave of nausea so sudden and intense she barely made it to the kitchen sink.
He was there instantly, his hand on her back, holding her hair. She wretched, emptying nothing but bile and terror. When it passed, she sagged against the counter, trembling. He handed her a glass of water. Their eyes met in the dark reflection of the window over the sink. The fortress walls felt paper-thin.
“We need to see someone,” he said, his voice low. “A doctor. We can’t… we can’t guess.”
She nodded, sipping the water. “How? Elke asks who her doctor is?”
“There’s a clinic in Zurich. Private. Discreet. The guy who arranged the house… he gave me a name.” Dom’s hand was still on her back, a steadying warmth. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
The clinic was in an elegant old townhouse by the lake, brass plaque the only indication it was a medical facility. The interior was all soft carpets and hushed voices. The doctor, a woman in her fifties named Dr. Adler, was brisk but kind, her English flawless. She asked the standard questions, her face professionally neutral.
When she performed the ultrasound, Dominic stood rigidly by Catalina’s head, his hand gripping the bed rail. The room was dark save for the glow of the monitor. A swish-swish-swish, rapid and rhythmic, filled the silence.
“There’s the heartbeat,” Dr. Adler said, moving the transducer. “Strong.”
Catalina stared at the grainy, shifting image on the screen. A tiny, bean-shaped form. A flickering pulse of light. Her throat closed. She felt Dom lean forward, his breath catching.
Then the doctor’s hand paused. She adjusted a dial, leaned in. “Ah,” she said, a soft, unprofessional sound of surprise.
“What?” Dominic’s voice was sharp.
Dr. Adler smiled, a genuine, warm thing that momentarily erased the clinical distance. “Nothing to worry about. Quite the opposite. See here?” She pointed with the cursor on the screen. “One gestational sac… but two distinct heartbeats.”
The words hung in the dark, sterile air. They didn’t compute.
“Two?” Catalina whispered.
“Twins,” Dr. Adler said, turning to look at them. “You’re expecting twins.”
Dominic’s hand slipped from the rail. He took a half-step back, as if physically pushed. His face, in the shadowy light, was utterly blank, stripped of all its usual defiant certainty. He looked, for the first time Catalina could remember, completely blindsided.
The drive back was silent. The Audi moved smoothly through the Zurich streets, then onto the motorway heading back into the mountains. The information sat between them, a dense, incomprehensible fact. Two. Doubling the secret. Doubling the risk. Doubling the love.
He didn’t speak until they were halfway home. His hands were clenched on the wheel, his knuckles white.
“A fortress,” he said, his voice rough. “We need a bigger fortress.”
Catalina looked out at the passing evergreens, a blur of relentless green. She thought of the two flickering lights on the screen, two tiny sparks in the darkness. She thought of Mina asking for a brother named Rex. She placed a hand on her stomach, which suddenly felt like both a cradle and a crucible.
When they walked back into the silent chalet, Mina came running, her small feet slapping on the floor.
When they walked back into the silent chalet, Mina came running, her small feet slapping on the floor. “You were gone forever,” she accused, wrapping her arms around Catalina’s legs. The normalcy of the demand was an anchor.
Dominic closed the heavy door behind them, sealing out the crisp Alpine air. The click of the lock was disproportionately loud in the vault-like quiet. He stood there for a moment, his forehead leaning against the dark wood.
“Daddy’s tired,” Catalina said, smoothing Mina’s hair. She felt unsteady, the ultrasound gel still cold on her skin beneath her clothes.
“Why?” Mina asked, looking up at Dominic’s rigid back.
“Just am.” He pushed off the door and turned around. His face was carefully rearranged into something calm, a mask for their daughter. “How about a snack?”
He moved to the kitchen, a study in controlled motion. He pulled bread from the cabinet, jam from the fridge, his movements precise and unhurried. Catalina watched him from the great room, recognizing the telltale focus he used when tuning an engine. It was how he handled overwhelm.
Mina climbed onto a stool at the kitchen island. “What’s in your tummy?” she asked Catalina, her mouth already full of crust.
The question, so innocent and direct, froze them both. Dominic’s knife stilled on the bread. Catalina felt the weight of the secret, now doubled, pressing down on her tongue. She saw Dom’s shoulders tense, waiting for her answer.
“A… surprise,” Catalina finally said, sitting beside Mina. Her voice was softer than she intended. “A big one.”
“A puppy?” Mina’s eyes widened with hope.
Dominic let out a sound that was half cough, half choked laugh. He put the knife down. “No, mija. Not a puppy.”
“Then what kind of surprise?” Mina pressed, jam staining her fingers.
Catalina looked at Dom. His dark eyes met hers, and in them she saw the same terrified wonder she felt. There was no script for this. No guidebook for explaining a family like theirs. He gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. Permission. Or maybe a shared leap.
“Two surprises,” Catalina said, taking one of Mina’s sticky hands in hers. “Two little babies. Growing together.”
Mina’s mouth formed a perfect ‘O.’ She looked from Catalina’s face to her stomach, then to Dominic. “Two?” Her whisper was full of awe. “Like two dinosaurs?”
“Like two of anything you want,” Dominic said, his voice rough. He came around the island and knelt beside Mina’s stool, bringing himself to her level. “But it’s our secret, okay? A special family secret. For now.”
“Why a secret?” Mina asked, her brow furrowing.
“Because…” Catalina searched for a truth a three-year-old could hold. “Because some people wouldn’t understand how special our family is. So we keep it close. Just us.”
Mina considered this, her little face serious. “Okay,” she agreed, with the simple gravity of a pact. “Can I tell them a story when they come out?”
“You can tell them all the stories,” Dominic said, pressing a kiss to her forehead. The gesture was so tender it made Catalina’s chest ache.
Later, with Mina asleep in her new room under a duvet covered in embroidered edelweiss, the silence returned. It was thicker now, charged with the unsaid. Dominic stood at the wall of glass, a silhouette against the star-dusted night. The frozen lake below reflected a sliver of moon.
“Twins,” he said to the darkness. The word was a stone dropped into a still pond.
Catalina joined him, not touching. She could feel the heat of his body, could see the tight cord of muscle in his jaw. “I read something once,” she began, her voice barely above a murmur. “Back when I was… trying to understand us. Trying to find some reason in it.”
He didn’t look at her. “What did you read?”
“That it isn’t so unusual. If the parents are twins.” She swallowed, the clinical words feeling strange on her tongue. “The chance that the mother will get pregnant with twins is something like 99%. It’s in the genetics. A double echo.”
He turned his head slowly. In the reflection on the glass, their eyes met—two sets of identical features, a mirror fracturing. “A double echo,” he repeated. It wasn’t a question. It was an absorption of a fact that made their situation feel less like a freak accident and more like a fatalistic design.
“So it was always going to be this,” she whispered. “Even if we’d… even if we’d stopped. If we’d run. This was waiting in us.”
Dominic finally faced her. The mask was gone, stripped raw by the night and the revelation. Fear and a fierce, terrifying pride warred in his expression. “They’re mine,” he said, the words a vow and a curse. “Ours. Two more. Jesus.”
He reached out, his hand hovering over her abdomen. He didn’t touch her. He just held his palm there, as if feeling the heat of two new suns. “How do we do this, Cat? A fortress for four?”
“We just do,” she said, covering his hand with hers, finally pressing it to the firm curve below her navel. “Same as we did for one. Lie better. Hide in plain sight. Love them more than the world can hate us.”
He moved then, pulling her into an embrace so tight it stole her breath. His face buried in her neck, his arms a locked cage around her. She felt the shudder that went through him, a seismic release of tension. He wasn’t crying, but he was shaking.
“I’m scared,” he admitted into her skin, the confession wrenched from him.
“I know.” She held him, her fingers tangling in the short hair at the base of his skull. “Me too.”
They stood like that for a long time, clinging to each other in the dark expanse of the room, two shadows against the vast, indifferent mountains. The future was a set of twin heartbeats, a relentless countdown. He finally loosened his grip, pulling back just enough to look at her.
“We need a bigger house,” he stated, the planner in him reasserting control. “This place is a showpiece. We need land. Privacy. A workshop. A real home.”
“A home,” she echoed, testing the word. It felt dangerous. Permanent.
“I’ll start looking tomorrow.” He released her, turning back to the window, his gaze scanning the black horizon as if already assessing properties. “Somewhere with a high wall.”
The high walls found them two weeks later, surrounding a weathered stone farmhouse buried in a valley an hour from Interlaken. It wasn’t elegant. It was sturdy, with a sloping roof and a massive attached barn Dom’s eyes had lit up seeing. The realtor, a discreet man with a silver watch, called it “secluded.” Dominic called it defensible.
The move was a blur of unmarked boxes and muted conversations with the moving crew. Their possessions, once vibrant with L.A. grit, looked sparse and out of place against the ancient wood beams. Catalina watched from a deep-set window as Dominic walked the perimeter of the property line, his boots crunching on the frost-hardened grass, his gaze scanning the tree line. He was measuring sightlines, not views.
“Daddy’s checking the fences,” Mina said, joining her at the window. She’d started saying it constantly.
“He is,” Catalina sighed, resting a hand on her swelling stomach. The twins were making their presence known, a constant low-pressure system inside her.
Later, in the cavernous barn that still smelled of old hay and diesel, Dominic was already at work. The Audi wagon was up on blocks. He’d ordered parts—a reinforced suspension, a more responsive engine control unit. “It needs to handle better if we ever need to move fast through these passes,” he explained, wiping grease onto his jeans.
“Move fast from what, Dom?” She leaned against a workbench, the cold seeping through her sweater. “The Swiss milkman?”
He didn’t smile. He slid out from under the car, his eyes shadowed. “From anything. From anyone. The clinic in Zurich, that Dr. Adler… she knows. The pilot who flew us. The guy who sold me the passports.” He ticked them off on his grease-blackened fingers. “Secrets are commodities. We’re a vault. I’m just reinforcing the door.”
“We’re people, not a vault.” She pushed off the bench, a flare of frustration cutting through her fatigue. “Mina needs a preschool. I need to talk to another human being who isn’t you or a three-year-old. We can’t live like ghosts.”
He stood up, facing her across the hood of the car. The space between them crackled. “We can. We have to. You think I like this? Skulking around, paying cash for everything, lying about my own name?” He threw a wrench into his toolbox; the metallic crash echoed. “I sold my life for this. Everything I built. So yeah, we’re a vault. And you’re carrying the most valuable things inside it.”
His words weren’t cruel. They were desperate. She saw the strain in the set of his shoulders, the new lines around his eyes. The weight of them all was bending him, and his only solution was to build stronger beams. She walked around the car to him.
“I’m not a thing in your vault, Dom.” She took his dirty hand, pressed it against her belly. A tiny foot, or maybe an elbow, kicked against his palm. His breath hitched. “Feel that? That’s a person. Two people. They’re going to need more than walls and a fast car.”
His hardened expression faltered. His thumb moved gently over the spot where the kick had landed. A surrender. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to go into town tomorrow. The little one, down the valley. I want to buy groceries myself. I want Mina to see other kids.” She held his gaze. “Just for an hour.”
He was silent for a long moment, his hand still on her. The conflict played out in his eyes: the instinct to lock the gate versus the need to give her this small piece of sky. “One hour,” he conceded, his voice rough. “I drive. We don’t separate. For any reason.”
The town was a cluster of storybook buildings along a rushing river. It was postcard-perfect and utterly real. Catalina pushed a cart through the small Coop, her senses overwhelmed by the ordinary.