Chapter 24 - Betrayal at St. Jude's
The sub-basement of the former St. Jude’s Asylum smelled of decades of lye, dead rats, and rot. Long iron tables where autopsies had once been performed sat rusting beneath single flickering emergency bulbs powered by an auxiliary backup line Mara had spliced years ago.
Mara carried Clara through the threshold, laying her gently onto a gurney draped in sterile field tarps from Cruz’s pack. Clara was delirious with agony, her fingernails digging deep into Mara's forearm.
"Mara... don't let them take it," Clara wept, sweat matting her dark hair across her cheeks. "If it’s a monster... if they made it a monster..."
"Listen to me, Clara," Mara said, grabbing her sister’s face, forcing their eyes to lock. "It is *your* baby. It has your blood, your heart, and your soul. Nothing Eleanor Voss did can take that away. Do you hear me? I will kill every last one of them before they touch this child."
Cruz was already hooking up an IV line of saline to Clara’s left arm, his hands moving with surgical precision. "I can suppress the crowning for maybe thirty minutes with terbutaline, but she’s losing blood. The placenta is beginning to detach."
Mara stepped back toward the reinforced double doors of the room, racking the slide on an assault rifle she had liberated from a dead Voss guard at the pier. "Thirty minutes is all you have. Deliver that child."
She walked to the iron door, peering through the four-inch observation slit. The tunnel outside was dead silent, but the water on the floor was vibrating in tiny, concentric rings.
Footsteps. Heavy, measured, professional.
Then, from Cruz’s pocket, a tiny electronic chirp sounded.
Mara spun around instantly.
Cruz froze, the syringe of terbutaline hovering half an inch above Clara’s IV port. In his breast pocket, a burner phone was flashing with an encrypted message alert. The screen illuminated the distinct, embossed gold crest of the Voss Corporation.
The silence in the room became suffocating.
"Cruz," Mara said, her voice dropping into a deadly, flat whisper. "Take your hand away from that line."
Cruz didn't move. A slow, bitter smile crept across his lips. "You really thought Julian sent me, Captain? Julian’s body has been floating in the Chicago River since midnight."
Clara gasped from the gurney, trying to pull the IV line from her arm, but her muscles betrayed her as another brutal contraction tore through her abdomen. "Mara...!"
"The Board doesn't hire amateurs, Bennett," Cruz said calmly, sliding his thumb toward a tiny red switch concealed on the side of the syringe. "The child in her womb is worth four hundred million dollars to the European consortium. Mrs. Voss was just a distributor who got sloppy and let her personal grudges cloud her judgment. Once the child is extracted, your sister is surplus inventory."
"You made one mistake," Mara said.
Cruz frowned slightly. "And what was that?"
"You assumed I wouldn't shoot through my own family's medicine."
Mara fired a single round. The bullet tore through the syringe in Cruz’s fingers, shattering the plastic barrel into dust and lodging deep into his right shoulder. Cruz screamed, stumbling back against the instrument tray with a deafening crash of stainless steel.
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Before he could draw the backup pistol hidden at his ankle, Mara closed the distance in a blur, driving her steel-toed combat boot straight into his jaw. Cruz’s head slammed against the concrete floor, knocking him instantly unconscious.
Outside, the heavy thud of breaching charges attached to the asylum doors signaled that the rest of the Board’s strike team had arrived.
