Chapter 63 - The Dead Man's Living Will
"I loved you because you survived," I replied, meeting her gaze without flinching. "I loved you because when every person in your life treated you like a commodity, you chose to sleep in a homeless shelter rather than sell your soul to the Vances. And I would burn the entire world to ash before I let them touch you or Grace again."
Khloe stared at me for a long, agonizing moment.
She stood up, walked across the cold clinic floor, and stopped two inches from my chest. She looked down at the Glock in my hand.
Then, slowly, deliberately, she reached out, took the weapon from my grip, and racked the slide, chambering a fresh round.
"Then help me finish them," she said, her voice dropping into a register of icy, terrifying clarity. "All of them. Catherine. Anthony. The entire Vance line. They will never stop hunting us, Marcus. We don't get to live in a quiet house in Ohio. We don't get a white picket fence. The only peace my children will ever have is six feet of dirt over Anthony Vance’s grave."
She walked back to the exam table, pulled the encrypted flash drive from her pocket, and plugged it into an ancient desktop monitor mounted above the veterinary pharmacy counter.
The screen flickered to life. The decryption software I had initiated in Zurich had finally completed its cycle.
A massive directory of documents unfolded across the screen: bank manifests, genetic patents, wire transfers, and video logs labeled: *PROJECT RESURGENCE — Catherine & Anthony Vance.*
Khloe clicked on the earliest video file, dated four months ago.
The video snapped open.
It was not recorded in a clinic. It was recorded in Catherine Vance’s private study in Boston.
Catherine sat in her high-backed leather chair, looking pristine, elegant, and entirely composed. But opposite her, sitting in a wheelchair with oxygen tubes running into his nose, was Anthony Vance.
*"The boy's genetic markers are complete,"* Catherine was saying on the recording, her voice clinical and detached. *"Khloe’s biological material proved far more resilient than Isabella’s. The child carried by the surrogate in Zurich carries the pure homozygous sequence. His bone marrow will provide the stem-cell harvest necessary to reverse your cellular degradation, Anthony."*
Khloe froze. Her hand on the mouse trembled violently.
*"And Khloe?"* Anthony’s voice rasped on the recording. *"What happens to her once she delivers the girl?"*
Catherine leaned forward, resting her chin on her steepled fingers.
*"The girl is irrelevant to the inheritance. We only need the male heir to satisfy the Vance grandfather trust. Once Khloe gives birth, Isabella will stage her suicide in the hospital room. A massive postpartum pulmonary embolism. The body will be cremated within twenty-four hours. No autopsy. No questions."*
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Khloe stepped back from the monitor, her breath catching in her throat, her face draining of every drop of color.
"The surrogate in Zurich," Khloe gasped, turning to me with wild, horrified eyes. "Marcus... the surrogate in Zurich didn't just carry an embryo. The boy... my son... he's already been born."
