Chapter 14 - The Lie Inside the Lie
“No.”
The word came from me.
Not Adrian.
Not Victor.
Me.
Charles enjoyed that.
“DNA doesn’t care what you want.”
Michael stepped forward.
“You’re lying.”
Charles smiled.
“Am I?”
He projected a chart.
Names.
Numbers.
Genetic markers.
It looked official.
That meant nothing anymore.
Adrian stared at it.
His face had emptied.
Victor said, “The donor file was destroyed.”
Charles looked at him.
“You saw what I wanted you to see.”
I felt sick.
Not from the sedative.
Not from pregnancy.
From the idea that the man I loved might share blood with me.
Michael looked at the chart.
Then at Charles.
“This is wrong.”
Charles raised an eyebrow.
“How do you know?”
“Because I built the original matching model.”
That wiped the smile from Charles’s face.
Michael walked closer to the screen.
“You changed one identifier.”
He pointed.
“Marker set seventeen.”
Charles said nothing.
Michael looked at me.
“He wants you to panic.”
I could breathe again.
Barely.
“He’s using a partial match from a common ancestry cluster.”
Adrian stared at him.
“English.”
“You and Emily are not related.”
Charles’s men shifted.
That was all the warning we got.
Victor’s security team moved at the same time.
Someone shouted.
A gun hit the floor.
Cassandra ducked behind a press machine.
Federal agents flooded through two side doors.
Charles ran.
Adrian went after him.
I grabbed Adrian’s jacket.
“No.”
“He’s getting away.”
“He wants you separated.”
Adrian stopped.
That saved him.
A second later, a metal beam crashed where he would have been running.
Charles had rigged the release.
He disappeared through a rear corridor.
Agents pursued.
The kidnapped investigator collapsed beside us.
Alive.
She was crying.
Quietly.
“My father just tried to kill all of us.”
She wiped her face.
She looked toward the corridor.
Victor recognized it.
Charles had trusted his daughter enough to give her access.
Back at the command vehicle, Cassandra used the token to unlock a remote storage account.
Blackmail files.
And one scheduled instruction.
“What package?”
It showed me in a hospital room.
A man entered.
Victor whispered his name.
“Dr. Samuel Kent.”
Adrian said, “Who is he?”
May you like
Victor’s answer made Cassandra close her eyes.
“He delivered you.”
