Chapter 45 - The Mother's Executioner
"Let her go, Catherine!" Khloe screamed, pounding her fists against the ballistic glass until her knuckles bled. "She is my daughter! You have no right to her!"
Catherine Vance smiled—a grotesque, skin-stretching grimace that revealed white porcelain veneers. She didn't flinch at Khloe’s screams. She slowly raised her right hand, which rested on the control console of the wheelchair.
Beneath her thin, blue-veined fingers was a glowing crimson touchpad.
*"You are so tragically bourgeois, Khloe,"* Catherine said through the speakers, her voice smooth, cultured, and utterly chilling. *"You think this is about custody. You think this is about family. Do you know what is currently circulating through your daughter's umbilical catheter? A concentrated peptide wash designed to stimulate rapid stem-cell division in her bone marrow. In precisely three minutes, that incubator will begin the extraction process."*
"Catherine, stop it!" Isabella yelled, stepping up to the glass. "Anthony is dead! He drowned in the lake! It’s over! The police know everything!"
Catherine didn't even blink.
*"Anthony was an expendable genetic carrier, Isabella,"* the old woman said coldly. *"His death was factored into my legal contingency three weeks ago. Why do you think he was at the lake? I sent him there to draw Marcus and the authorities away from Boston while Dr. Weiss moved the primary specimen to Zurich. He served his purpose."*
I raised the 9mm pistol and aimed it directly through the glass at Catherine’s head. "Open that door, or I will empty this entire magazine into this window."
Catherine let out a frail, dry chuckle that ended in a wet cough.
*"Go ahead, Marcus. That glass is three-inch laminated polycarbonate rated for military-grade explosives. You'll only ricochet a bullet into your wife’s skull. But more importantly... you might want to look at the pressure gauge beneath your daughter’s crib."*
I lowered the gun slightly, my eyes dropping to the base of the incubator.
A digital pressure display was flashing in red numbers: *ISOLATION PRESSURE: 1.2 ATM. BIOMETRIC INTERLOCK ACTIVE.*
*"If that glass is breached, or if the atmospheric seal is broken without my personal retina authorization,"* Catherine whispered, leaning forward toward the glass, her pale eyes glittering with madness, *"the chamber depressurizes instantly. Her undeveloped lungs will rupture in less than five seconds."*
Khloe stopped pounding. She slid down the glass onto her knees, clutching Nathan against her chest, her face contorted in an agony no human being was meant to bear.
"What do you want?" Khloe sobbed, her voice breaking into a ragged plea. "What do you want from me, Catherine? Tell me! Just tell me!"
Catherine Vance pointed a long, bony finger directly at baby Nathan.
*"A trade, Khloe,"* Catherine said, her voice dropping to a lethal, clinical whisper. *"The girl has the universal bone marrow, but her cardiac stem-cell volume is insufficient for a complete vascular graft. I need both. Put Nathan in the transfer airlock on your right. Hand him over to Dr. Weiss. Allow me to complete the procedure on both of them... and I will let you and Marcus walk out of this clinic with ten million dollars each and your lives intact."*
"You want me to give you both of my children to be slaughtered?!" Khloe screamed, horror choking her throat.
*"They won't be slaughtered, darling,"* Catherine said calmly. *"They simply won't survive the secondary extraction. A necessary sacrifice so that the Vance name, and our empire, may live for another century. You have sixty seconds to decide, Khloe. If the countdown reaches zero, the automatic extraction on the girl begins anyway... and you will watch her die through that glass while holding only half of what you came for."*
On the wall above the incubator, a digital timer began counting down from 00:59.
00:58.
00:57.
"Marcus..." Khloe turned to me, her eyes completely wild, filled with an unbearable, tearing madness. "Marcus, what do we do?! What do we do?!"
My heart slammed against my ribs. I looked at the three-inch glass. I looked at Weiss, trembling against the wall. I looked at the timer hitting forty-five seconds.
There was no way through the glass. No way to stop the depressurization.
Then, suddenly, the heavy blast doors at the end of the subterranean hallway hissed.
A red emergency strobe light began to flash on the ceiling.
A high-pitched security alarm shrieked through the facility, and an automated German voice echoed through the PA system:
*WARNING: PERIMETER BREACH IN SECTOR 4. LOWER DOCK SUBMERSIBLE DOCKED. UNAUTHORIZED BIOMETRIC ACCESS DETECTED ON ELEVATOR SHAFT.*
Catherine Vance froze. Her eyes darted toward the security monitors on the wall.
On the black-and-white camera feed of the private elevator, a figure was standing.
Drenched in freezing lake water, his face mangled and bloody, his right arm hanging limp at his side, and holding an automatic shotgun in his left hand—stood Anthony Vance.
He wasn't dead.
He had followed us across the Atlantic on Catherine's secondary emergency aircraft, bleeding, broken, and completely consumed by a feral, psychopathic rage.
Through the intercom, Anthony’s ragged, wheezing voice crackled through the speakers:
*"Mother... you left me to die in that freezing water."*
May you like
The elevator doors at the end of the hallway chimed.
And the timer on the incubator hit 00:15.
