Chapter 8 - The Price of a Secret
“Shut your mouth, Elena!” Vance snarled, shoving the muzzle harder against the back of her neck. He kept his cold, calculated eyes fixed on me. “Genevieve was brilliant, Mercer, I’ll give her that. She took government black-budget funding to engineer a universal cellular regeneration agent. But when she realized what the Pentagon intended to do with it—turning children into biological incubators for battlefield pathogens—she faked her own death, stole the master data core, and hid it inside her own children’s genetic code.”
The world seemed to tilt on its axis.
The rain, the wind, the low rumble of the lake beneath our boots—it all faded into a roaring vacuum.
“My children...” I whispered, the words catching like broken glass in my throat. “You’re telling me Genevieve didn't die in a car crash?”
“She didn't die on any highway,” Vance smiled, a cruel, predatory curve of his lips. “We staged the wreck because she refused to hand over the children for extraction. We’ve been watching you for two years, waiting for the antibodies in Jonah and Blythe to mature to the exact threshold where we could harvest the active strain. And tonight, the countdown reaches zero.”
Elena let out a choked sob. “He’s lying, Lawson! He killed her! On the night of the supposed crash, she tried to escape with the data, and Vance’s clean-up crew intercepted her car on the bridge! I was her lab assistant—I watched them run her off the road!”
My vision turned a deep, burning crimson. Every drop of blood in my body rushed to my ears. For two years, I had mourned a ghost, blaming myself, building walls, trusting numbers while the man responsible stood smiling in the rain.
“Prescott,” I murmured so softly only my lapel mic could catch it.
“Ready, boss,” Prescott’s voice came back instantly, cold and steady.
“Take the shot. Right shoulder on Vance. Don't hit the girl.”
Before Vance could tighten his finger on the trigger, a suppressed supersonic round cracked through the air. The impact spun Vance sideways, the assault rifle flying from his grip as he shrieked in agony, clutching his shattered shoulder.
Elena dropped to the concrete, rolling clear just as Prescott and two of our lead operators swarmed the car, tackling Vance and slamming cuffs onto his wrists with brutal efficiency.
I rushed forward, dropping to my knees beside Elena, pulling her up by her arms. “Are you alright?”
She nodded frantically, gasping for air, pointing her trembling hand toward the rusted steel hatch of the research facility set into the concrete deck. “The bypass code... Vance’s backup team is already inside the lower level. If they initialize the thermal purge before we enter the core chamber, the kids' remote life-support sync will shut down permanently in ninety seconds.”
I stood up, pulling my Sig from its holster and racking a fresh round into the chamber.
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“Then we don't have ninety seconds,” I said, looking at Prescott. “Blow the secondary intake hatch. We’re going down.”
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