Chapter 6 - The Confession Tape
I stepped out of the Volvo into the pouring rain. The cold water immediately soaked my hair, plastering it against my forehead, running down my neck like ice. I pulled the blanket tighter over Leo, shielding his face from the downpour.
Ryan stopped six paces away from me. He didn't look at me. His eyes were locked entirely on the bundle in my arms.
"Is he breathing?" Ryan’s voice was hoarse, cracking around the edges. "Mariana, answer me. Did the second phase discharge?"
"You disgust me," I said, my words cutting through the rain like a razor.
Ryan took an involuntary step forward, but Marcus stepped out of the driver's side, his Glock held at low ready, tracking the two armed guards standing behind Ryan. The guards shifted their weight, their hands tensing beneath their coats.
"Stand down!" Ryan screamed at his men without turning his head. "Nobody draws a weapon! If the child is injured, we all hang! Back off!"
The guards hesitated, then slowly took two steps backward into the shadows of the Escalades.
Ryan looked back at me, his handsome face twisting into a grotesque mask of desperate pleading. "Mariana, you don't understand the science. You don't understand what was at stake."
"You sold our son," I said, stepping closer to him, letting him see the fury burning in my eyes. "You and Beatrice. For eight million dollars to an offshore front company. You turned your own flesh and blood into an incubator for an unapproved patent."
"It’s not just a patent!" Ryan shouted, his composure shattering, his hands flailing into the rain. "It’s the cure, Mariana! Vance-Kovac was six weeks away from total insolvency! The investors were pulling the bridge loans! The hedge funds were going to liquidate our labs, take my life’s work, and throw Beatrice and me into federal prison for misappropriation of SEC funds! We had seventy-two hours to prove that the Chimera vector could achieve stable genetic expression in a human subject!"
"So you chose Leo?!" I screamed, the sound tearing from my lungs with such force that Ryan visibly flinched. "You chose your own one-year-old child?!"
"Who else could I trust?!" Ryan cried, tears mingling with the rain on his cheeks. "He has my blood! His HLA-typing was an identical match for my delivery vector! We weren't going to hurt him! Dr. Sterling calculated the dosage down to the microgram! We were going to extract thirty milliliters of bone marrow, isolate the antibody yield, satisfy the Aegis contract, and pay off the debt! He would have had a sore hip for three days, Mariana! Three days! And in exchange, he would have grown up as the sole heir to a five-hundred-million-dollar empire!"
"He’s not an empire, Ryan!" I sobbed with raw, incandescent hatred. "He’s a baby! He’s *your* baby!"
"And he’s mine!" a cold, sharp voice rang out from the rear of the Maybach.
The tinted passenger window of the limousine slid down smoothly.
Beatrice Vance sat in the back seat, wrapped in a pristine mink coat, her platinum hair unblemished by the weather. She was holding a champagne glass filled with sparkling water, looking at me as if I were a squatter who had wandered onto her manicured lawn.
"Don't flatter yourself, Mariana," Beatrice said, her voice amplified slightly by the car’s interior intercom system. "You were never an equal in this family. You were an incubator with an acceptable pedigree. Arthur Delgado’s bloodlines provided the structural vitality and immune resilience that the Vance lineage lacked after three generations of inbreeding. We needed strong peasant stock to host the Chimera vector. You served your purpose."
My jaw clenched so hard I felt an enamel molar crack.
"Where is my father, Beatrice?" I asked, my voice deadly quiet.
Beatrice smiled—a thin, reptilian slit of red lipstick. "Arthur was always an arrogant policeman. He thought a thirty-year-old service rifle could stop a private military contractor with satellite orbital targeting. He held the culvert for four minutes. Quite impressive for an old man with an enlarged prostate. Last I heard, they were pulling his remains out of the storm drain."
A wave of black nausea crashed over my head.
*Dad.*
No. Not Arthur Delgado. He had survived the crack wars of the eighties, cartels, internal affairs, and corrupt politicians. He couldn't be dead. He couldn't leave me alone in this nightmare.
"Bring me the child, Mariana," Beatrice said, her tone shifting into absolute, uncompromising authority. "You have nowhere to run. Marcus’s family in Pasadena is currently being visited by four of our corporate associates. If he lifts that weapon again, his daughters will not make it to school tomorrow morning."
Marcus froze beside me. His face drained of all color, the Glock in his hand trembling as his knuckles turned bone-white.
"Hand Leo to Ryan," Beatrice commanded. "Sign the full custody relinquishment papers already waiting on the Maybach’s console, and we will wire three million dollars to any offshore account of your choosing. You can start a new life. Have more children. Better ones. But this child belongs to the corporation."
Ryan stepped forward, extending his trembling hands toward Leo. "Please, Mariana. Let him come to me. We have the neutralization antigen in the car. If we don't administer it within the hour, the vector will cause irreversible hepatic necrosis. You can't save him. Only we have the cure."
I looked down at Leo’s sleeping face. Then I looked into the eyes of the man I had loved for four years.
"You really think you won, Ryan?" I whispered.
Ryan blinked, confused by the lack of fear in my voice. "What?"
I reached into the pocket of my coat. I didn't pull out a gun.
I pulled out my father’s secondary burner phone.
The screen was lit up. The active call timer read: *14 minutes, 22 seconds.*
May you like
And on the other end of the line was a number Arthur Delgado had dialed before we ever left the meat-packing warehouse: *The United States Department of Justice, Public Corruption and National Security Division.*
***
