Chapter 61 - The Venomous Cradle
The hum of the vault’s auxiliary power hummed like a low, predatory growl beneath my boots. Thirty feet beneath the bedrock, cut off from sunlight and air, the scent of antiseptic, liquid nitrogen, and ozone clogged my throat. In my left arm, Noah felt burning hot against my tactical vest, his shallow breaths rattling through his tiny chest. In my right hand, the grip of my custom sidearm was slick with sweat.
Across the cavernous floor, standing on the elevated catwalk with Eleanor Vance beside him, Julian watched me with cold amusement. The man I had once loved, the man who had pretended to be an insecure, faltering father five months ago, was an illusion. The sunburn he had worn upon returning from his supposed "business trip" hadn't been from lounging by a pool in Cabo; it had been radiation scarring from an experimental synthesizer lab in the Mojave.
"You're shaking, Clara," Julian observed, his voice amplified by the room’s communication speakers. "That’s not the fierce matriarch who tore through my offshore networks. That’s just a cornered animal realizing her cub is out of time."
"He isn't your cub," I spat, my voice lethal, slicing through the mechanical drone of the cryogenic units. "You used my womb as an incubator for your family’s sick bio-genetic harvest. You never saw him as a son."
Eleanor stepped forward, resting a manicured, withered hand on the railing. Her diamond rings glinted under the harsh LED strips. "Don't flatter yourself with moral outrage, girl. Noah represents forty-two years of Vance enterprise research. His telomerase structure is self-repairing. His blood holds the key to cellular immortality that our foreign investors have already paid billions to secure. You were simply a genetically compatible vessel whose lineage bridged the cellular gap. Julian did his duty to the family. Now do yours to the child. Give him to us, and we administer the enzyme."
"You administer it, and then what?" I demanded, my gaze flicking across the room. I calculated distances, bullet trajectories, and the exact blast radius of the C4 charge Julian had strapped beneath the infant cradle holding the glowing amber vial. "You put him in a glass cage for the rest of his life and dissect him sample by sample?"
Julian's thumb pressed slightly against the trigger toggle of the remote detonator. "A living prisoner is still breathing, Clara. If you refuse, he suffocates in your arms within six minutes. Three... two..."
"Wait!" I shouted, lowering the muzzle of my rifle just an inch. My tactical scanner in my ear gave a faint chime—an encrypted override signal sent by Marcus from the outside relay. "Take me instead. Take both of us."
Julian smiled, a wolf baring fangs. "Step into the center circle, Clara. Drop the rifle. Kick it toward the drainage trench."
I knelt slowly, maintaining Noah's angle, pretending to submit. But as my fingers unclipped the rifle sling, my left thumb surreptitiously activated a high-frequency acoustic pulse emitter concealed inside the breastplate of my vest.
"You always thought you were smarter than everyone in the room, Julian," I whispered.
May you like
"I survived, didn't I?" he sneered.
"Not for long," I whispered, and triggered the pulse.
