Chapter 68 - Ghost of the Nursery
"You..." My voice was a blade sharpened on pure hatred. "You were behind this? Richard... the mistress... the starvation... all of it?"
Director Vance let out a low, amused chuckle that sounded like dry leaves scraping over concrete. "Richard was a pathetic, sniveling worm who squandered his family's inheritance on gambling and cheap women. When I offered to wipe his debts in exchange for using your womb to incubate the Chimera vessel, he signed the contract on his knees."
My fingernails dug so hard into my palms that warm blood trickled down my skin. "He was your grand-nephew! Leo carries your own blood!"
"Blood is merely currency, Clara," Vance replied coldly, signaling to his guards. "Your father had the sentimental weakness of morality. That is why I had him eliminated, and that is why you were sent away to Singapore on an engineered corporate assignment. Brooke was instructed to break the boy’s psyche. Trauma accelerates genetic expression. If he had grown up happy, spoiled, and protected, his neural pathways would have rejected the Chimera integration!"
"You made a four-year-old child crawl on broken glass!" I roared, the raw, guttural fury of a mother exploding from my chest.
"And look at the result!" Vance proclaimed, spreading his arms wide. "In less than fifteen minutes, the global transmission will fire. The Sovereign Ledger will unlock, transferring four trillion dollars into my offshore syndicates, and your pathetic little boy will be nothing more than a biological terminal humming in my server banks forever!"
"Julian, now!" I screamed.
Julian didn't hesitate. Instead of shooting at the bulletproof glass, he fired directly into the main cryogenic cooling manifold behind us. Liquid nitrogen ruptured in an explosive, blinding blast of freezing white fog, filling the vault with impenetrable cover.
Gunfire erupted instantly from the catwalk above, bullets ricocheting wildly off the steel walls and floor. Julian grabbed the briefcase containing the neutralizer, thrusting it into my hands. "Clara, run! Get to the extraction sub! I'll hold the bulkhead!"
"We don't leave each other behind!" I shouted over the deafening roar of automatic fire.
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"If you don't inject Leo within twelve minutes, everything we fought for dies!" Julian yelled, slamming an emergency override button that dropped an auxiliary blast barrier between us. "Save our boy! Go!"
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