Tears streamed down Katja's face. "The baby can't come now. They'll kill her if she comes now," she sobbed. "Oh God, I can't lose my daughter. She's all I've got left now!"

"There's nothing we can do," Chavi replied sadly. "Now that she's decided to come, nothing's going to stop her."

"No, no, no!" Katja shook her head in denial. "She can't come now! I won't let her!"

"She's going to come whether you want her to or not," Chavi reminded her gently.

Katja's tears had awoken their captors. "What the hell is going on?" Garridan asked groggily. He sat up slowly and rubbed his eyes before his gaze settled upon the two women. He leaped to his feet. "What the hell are you doing?!" he shouted.

Chavi jumped in front of the German girl to protect her. "She needs a doctor or a midwife! She's going into labor!"

"What?" he asked, rubbing his eyes.

"Her baby's coming!" Chavi cried. "She needs help!"

The brother's exchanged glances. "Well," Cato said with a shrug, "You did say it would be an easily solvable problem. Well it looks like it's solving itself."

"Did you not hear me the first two times?" Chavi demanded. "I said: she needs help!"

Garridan pulled the knife from his belt and cut the rope from Chavi's wrists and threw her on the floor before Katja. "Well I suppose you'll have to do."

"Wait! I can't…I don't know how to…" Chavi sputtered. "She needs a professional!"

"Well that isn't happening," Garridan snarled. "You should consider yourselves lucky I'm being this generous. I wouldn't want to risk making me mad if I were you."

The gypsy girl glanced down at Katja, who was beginning to cry out from the pain. She finally nodded and knelt down beside her and moved to undo the rope around the German girl's wrists. "What do you think you're doing?" Garridan demanded.

Chavi stared at him. "Untying her."

"Hell no!"

"The least we can do is make her slightly more comfortable," Chavi protested.

Garridan raised his hand as if he were going to hit her. "The least you can do is shut your mouth!"

Before Chavi could continue to argue, Katja let out a scream. Chavi helped the German girl lie backwards in an attempt to help her feel somewhat more comfortable, even though her hands were still bound. "It'll be okay," Chavi whispered, in an attempt to comfort Katja. "Everything will be okay." Katja seemed to be in too much pain already to do more than nod.

Erik stared out the window at the swirling snow. His hands were unconsciously twitching with impatience. No, impatience wasn't the proper word, but nor was anxiety. Erik was far more desperate than that. He had to get out there. He had to rescue Katja. He would never ever forgive himself if anything happened to her or the baby.

The rest of the family had urged him to get some rest, but Erik couldn't sleep. Not when he knew that his wife was being held hostage by those, those animals! Besides, he had technically slept when he was unconscious. Unlike him, however, Katja's family hadn't. Fredrick was dozing on a chair in the kitchen, Dieter and Brigitte were asleep on the couch, and Tanja was nestled up in the corner.

He began pacing back and forth. Erik had never felt this helpless before in his life. If only it weren't snowing, he would have saved her by now. Although Erik had never been religious, he found himself praying. Praying for the snow to end, praying that Katja was still alive, praying that he could get to her in time.

As the sunrise appeared over the horizon, Erik realized that the storm was finally subsiding. He could finally leave the house. Without bothering to wake anyone and tell them that he was going, Erik pulled on his cloak and headed for the door.

Before he had even gotten it open, he heard footsteps behind him. Turning, Erik saw Fredrick and Dieter standing there, side-by-side, arms crossed. "Going somewhere?" Fredrick asked.

"Yes," Erik snapped. "I'm going to go find Katja!"

"All on your own?" Dieter questioned. "After a snowstorm, while you have a fever?"

Erik glared at them. "I told you earlier, I'm not going to sit here, I'm going to go find Katja! The only reason I stayed was to wait for the storm to pass. And I'll be damned if you try to stop me now that it has."

"Neither of us said we would," Fredrick replied. "But as my father pointed out, it would be stupid to go out on your own."

Realizing what they were saying, Erik turned and headed out to the stable where Cesar was housed. Opening the door, he found several horses. When the weather turned bad, Fredrick and Dieter must have put their own in here to be sheltered from the blizzard. He turned and saw the German men had followed him out here. "Just keep up," he growled.

Within minutes, Erik had Cesar saddled and was already going as fast as the horse could go in the deep snow, Fredrick and Dieter not far behind. They soon arrived in the village, which was empty because of the weather.

"What are we doing out here?" Fredrick asked. "Tanja said she saw them out in the woods!"

"I'm guessing they didn't just stumble upon our house," Erik replied coldly. "Someone had to have seen some strangers."

"It's a border town," Dieter countered. "We have strangers coming in and out all the time when they cross between countries."

"Well, it's better than nothing!" Erik looked around wildly, searching for something, for anything. Finally a lone man, heavily bundled against the cold, exited a nearby house. He seemed to be in a rush, clearly not wanting to risk getting caught in anymore bad weather, but he stopped when he saw Erik.

"Herr Destler!" the man cried. Erik instantly recognized the voice as belonging to Bauer, the owner of the theater where he worked. "Rehearsals have been cancelled until the weather clears up. We would've told you if we could, but there was no way to get to you. You better get home quickly."

Erik shook his head. "I'm out here for another reason. I'm looking for…"

Before he could finish his sentence, Bauer interrupted. "Did they not find you?"

"Who?" Erik asked as he leapt from Cesar's back to stand before the theater owner.

"Yesterday afternoon two men asked me where they could find you."

"Did they ask for me by name?" Erik demanded.

Bauer shook his head. "No, but they described you to a tee. One said they knew you from the Populaire. He said that they were stagehands the same time you were there. Brothers by the looks of them. Actually, they almost looked like gypsies, really."

His heart skipped a beat. Katja had told him of the gypsy brothers that had found her in the very same forest, who had nearly raped her then, who led Javert straight to her. And somehow, some way, they had followed her to the Populaire, and then, here.

But how had they known about him? When he was in Paris, Erik had been so careful to never let his face show. There was no way they could have known what he looked like. Until he remembered that Nadir said his old lair had been ransacked. Ice water ran through his veins. They had gotten inside. Erik tried to think how. He had always made sure that they weren't being followed, that no one besides him and Nadir ever knew how to open any of the secret passages.

Erik had mounted Cesar again and taken off with lightning speed, leaving three bewildered Germans in the dust. He was soon back home and heading in the woods in the direction that Tanja had indicated. When the road forked, and Erik paused to think, Katja's family caught up to him. "What the hell?" Fredrick shouted.

"They found us in Paris!" Erik roared. "They found us somehow! They could've taken her then! It's a miracle they didn't! They found us there and followed us here! I have to find her before it's too late!"

Katja let out another scream. The pain was unbearable. Blood soaked the skirts of her dress, as well as coating her wrists under the rope. She was constantly pulling on it, trying to free her hands, trying to do something, anything to end the pain to the point where the rope was cutting deeply into her skin.

"You can't keep fighting this," Chavi told her. "You can't stop the baby from coming."

"I have to try," Katja panted. She leaned back, with her eyes closed, trying to catch her breath in the few moments between pains.

"The effort will kill you!" Chavi protested. "And the baby!"

"So be it!" Another scream ripped itself from her throat. When Katja could speak again, she continued with, "I can't let them hurt my baby!"

Over on the other side of the room, Garridan was pacing, clearly on edge. When Katja screamed yet again, he pulled the knife from his belt. "I'm not going to listen to this anymore!" he roared. "This has been going on for hours!"

As he stormed closer, he raised the knife. Chavi tried to protect her, but he flung the gypsy girl aside. Katja realized all her nightmares were going to come true. He was going to kill her and the baby. "No!" she screamed as he stabbed downwards. "No! Oh God no!"

The blade was only inches away from her stomach when it froze midair. Cato had his hand tight around his brother's wrist, barely stopping him. "What the hell are you doing?" Garridan snarled.

"You do that, and you'll kill her," Cato replied just as viciously. "And if you kill her now, this will all have been nothing but a waste of time. And I don't like having my time wasted."

"And I'm sick of the screaming."

"Then go outside!" Cato ordered. "You're the one who decided to kidnap a pregnant girl. You knew what you were getting into. And if you didn't, well that's your fault. It's been long enough now it can't be too much longer. It's not snowing anymore."

The two brothers glared at each other for a long while before Garridan stormed out of the building. Cato glanced down at Katja before settling back down on the other side of the room and building a small fire in the fireplace to warm the frigid space. Katja let out a soft sigh of relief. But she swore that when he had looked at her, she could see pity in his eyes.

"I can see her head," Chavi announced after yet another scream, nearly an hour later. Katja was sobbing, completely unable to control herself. Her whole body was rebelling against her, and now even she had to admit that there was nothing stopping the baby's arrival. "Here she comes."

The cry of a newborn filled the room. Katja lay on the floor, trying to catch her breath. The door burst open as Garridan came back inside. He pulled his knife out and severed the cord that attached mother to child. With the last of her strength, Katja pushed herself into a sitting position, to hold, to touch, to see her daughter.

Garridan, however, had other ideas. He seized Chavi's arm and hauled her to her feet, as the baby wailed in her arms, then shoved the gypsy girl at Cato. "Kill them both," he ordered.

"NO!" Katja screamed with all the desperation of a mother losing her child. She hadn't even seen her baby yet. Tears streamed down her face as she sobbed. "Please, not my baby!"

Cato dragged Chavi and the baby out the door, ignoring Katja's pleas for her child. Katja tried to stand to attempt to follow them, but was too weak from the exertion she had just gone through. She was absolutely hysterical as the door closed behind them. Garridan watched her with an amused expression as Katja wept. Her baby, her daughter, her only connection left to Erik was gone forever, and Katja hadn't even seen her.